[governance] WG: Twomey interview on ICANN

["Kleinwächter, Wolfgang"]

FYI
 
San Francisco Chronicle

World will change ICANN's future, CEO says


Sunday, May 10, 2009


Almost from the first day it was created in 1998, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been at the heart of a worldwide controversy over who should control the Internet. 

Set up as a nonprofit in California to coordinate the Internet's address system and parts of the Internet's plumbing, ICANN is pushed and pulled more than ever as more people around the world go online. 

Just last week, a commissioner for the European Union, Viviane Reding, called on President Obama to sever ICANN's ties with the U.S. Department of Commerce when the joint agreement between the two organizations expires on Sept. 30. She wants ICANN to be made accountable to an international body - a "G12 for Internet governance."

ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey, a genial Australian whose job is to balance all of ICANN's opposing factions, called Reding's stance "personal" and said the G12 is not necessary. But he also said the agreement with the United States should be allowed to expire because ICANN is ready to stand on its own. 

Twomey plans to step down from ICANN this year after more than six years of being in charge. He stopped by The Chronicle to talk about how the Internet will continue to change as ICANN opens it to millions of new users outside the United States - a job that he said is like going through "a 15-story building that had red brick columns, and changing all those red bricks to multicolored bricks, and doing it in a way that makes certain the door is still open and the windows still work." 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: When can we expect to have international top-level domain names in different languages?

A: I'm thinking first quarter of next year. There's a series of countries - the northeast Asians, the Arabs, the Indians, the Arabic-speaking Farsi, south Asia if you like, and then the Bulgarians and the Greeks and the Russians - have all expressed interest in fast-tracking this process. And this has got very high attention.

In Russia, it is an agenda item for both the president and the prime minister. Similarly, we've had lots of good conversations with the Chinese - it's going to the top of ministries and to state councils. 

It's also a very high priority for India. The Indians are putting fiber into 600,000 villages across India. Around 150 million people in India speak English. The next billion don't. 

So the policy is to bring the Internet to the next 300 to 400 million people in India. To do that they have to have a keyboard that's in the character set of the village. There are 22 official languages and 11 scripts. 

Q: What implications does this have for balkanizing the Internet? We as English speakers are spoiled because the entire Internet has been open to us, pretty much. Will that no longer be the case?

A: Let's be clear about what we mean when we say "the Internet."

The Internet has three layers. There is a transit layer - the pipes and the radio signals. There is the protocol layer, which is the stuff we're worried about - the mechanisms whereby every device on the Internet talks to every other device, where 250,000 private networks operate as one single, global, interoperable Internet. 

And then sitting on top of those is the application layer. The reality is that the application layer is increasingly localizing, and as a consequence we're going to see the Internet reflect the world - the local and the global. 

Think how many businesses down in the Valley are all about local - you've got to be local, right? Well, we're going to be local in Shenzhen and we're going to be local in Hyderabad, not just local in Boise, Idaho.

What we've been very concerned about is to ensure it's done in a way that's fully integrated across the entire global Internet. 

So, to give you an example, there were various proprietary voices in the Middle East promoting plug-in mechanisms for Arabic that had to be put in at the ISP level for people to have a fully Arabic experience. The difficulty with that is that if you went to Switzerland on holidays, it wouldn't work. 

What we're concerned about is having a mechanism that no matter where you are, from Norway to New Zealand, it's going to work. There is only one single global technology. The TCP/IP protocol doesn't recognize geographic boundaries, it's a topological network. This is one of the geniuses of the Internet, why it's grown so quickly. We're very committed to promoting that. 

Q: If I had a domain name that was in, for example, Chinese characters, and I didn't have my (Chinese keyboard) with me, how would I type it?

A: Let me give an Australian example. I've got six or seven domain names from some of the businesses I've had. We had domain names that were "dot com" because we wanted to say we were global, particularly focused on North America, and we had "dot biz" for similar reasons. But we had "dot au" and "dot hk" because we wanted to say we're Australian or we're Hong Kong Chinese, or whatever.

Even in ASCII, people use domain names as a form of identity. I think that will be even more so around international domain name country codes. 

If you're in China, people will use the Chinese. And if they want to deal with Wal-Mart as a buyer of their manufactured goods, they can have a "dot com" or a "dot biz" or something in Roman characters, and both Web sites will probably resolve to a hosted site that has English and Chinese on it. 

And if people have only an Urdu domain name, then they are probably saying that they don't identify people who speak English or whatever. 

I do think also that innovation will come in here and people will do all sorts of translation.

Q: What are some of the new domain names that are coming online?

A: I'm hesitating because we leave it to potential applicants to go public rather than us outing the field. But I will give an example.

There's clearly a series of geographic-specific ones. There's a series of cities coming out - "dot berlin," "dot paris," "dot london." There are some people who want to apply for "dot galicia" in Spain.

Q: "Dot nyc"?

A: "Dot nyc."

Q: "Dot sanfrancisco"?

A: Not yet that I know of ...

Q: We'd better get right on it.

A: So those are taking off, and at the same time our governmental advisory committee is quite concerned about geopolitical terms, geographical terms. We're putting in place a series of objections and processes around geopolitical terms, which are quite an issueQ: Just a silly question. Who has the right to apply for "dot sanfrancisco"?

A: Excellent question. It's likely that you would need to have the support of the relevant public authority. And we will probably leave it up somewhat to the local community to define what the relevant public authority is.

We've also got regional communities. We're fully expecting applications for indigenous groups - some from Europe, some from the South Pacific. Certainly there's been talk about a "dot Maori" at some stage. 

Q: Why not have unlimited top-level domains, just have people create their own? Or is that part of the plan?

A: That's the plan. The BBC described it as "dot almost anything goes." I like to think of it as "dot almost anything goes, but not with complete chaos." There are going to be some rules around it. There are going to be places for objections.

For a top-level domain, you can object on intellectual property grounds. We've got a lot of experience from what we call the uniform dispute resolution process. Something like 36,000 cases of these have already been resolved in the last 10 years. 

There are (dispute) mechanisms if you apply for a top-level domain. I'm the Coke and Coal Association of the world and you're a certain well-known beverage manufacturer in Atlanta. Who can get "dot coke," right? 

Or if you apply for "dot kom," "dot con" or something like that. It's obviously a variation on a top-level domain. Also if you put forward a string purporting to represent a community, but you don't really. You put forward "dot maui," but you're really just a shoe manufacturer with a new (Hawaiian-like) brand. There was period of time in Silicon Valley when everything was in the Hawaiian language - people were searching through languages for stuff like that. 

And the last area is potentially morality and public order. The community view was that there may well be applications or strings put forward that are so controversial that they could actually run against morality and public order. 

That's a difficult issue, so the proposal would be for a senior appellate judge of international arbitration and there would be quite a narrow mandate for what could be taken to that judge. There's still a lot of discussion going on in the community - we'll go through several rounds of discussion on the implementation.

Q: What's the makeup of registered domains now?

A: There are about 170 million domain names in the world at the moment, of which just over half are country codes. "Dot com" I think is just short of 80 million, which is by far the major number for the generic top-level domains.

Well over 70 percent of the registrations are in North America, so in some respects, "dot com" is the de facto country code for the United States. 

>From what I'm seeing so far, it looks like we will potentially get four categories of applications. 

The first is for a series of generic names. There will be more than one application for "dot web" and things like "dot shop," that sort of stuff. 

There's also a group of people who are applying for community-based, top-level domains like the geographical or ethnic communities or associations. For instance, "dot coop" is a top-level domain with about 8,000 registrations that have been in place for eight or nine years, and I understand they're quite pumped. They don't need to have 8 million, only 8,000. 

There are people who are going to apply for brand-related top-level domains. We've been surprised by how much people are interested in those. 

I've had some of the funniest experiences of having intellectual property people from "Mega Corp." complain to me on Monday about how the world's falling in, and on Wednesday having the product people ring me to say, "Can we have the first (domain)? Because we have a new product out and we'd like to launch with it."

I'm hesitating to use any examples, but you could have "dot car manufacturer," and before that you would have "Brand A dot car manufacturer" and "Brand B dot car manufacturer." 

Some people seem to be interested in these mostly for e-mail. They will basically shift their e-mail, again using e-mail as a form of branding, to being Fred at Mega Corp., and they might have a few second-level domains sitting behind the top-level domain. 

And then the other one is going to be the internationalized domain names, particularly the country code level, but also potentially for generics. 

Q: ICANN has had a sort of love/hate relationship with VeriSign over the years. (VeriSign's legal challenge to ICANN's authority was settled in 2006.) What's the relationship now?

A: I think it's a very constructive relationship now. Also, the present leadership of VeriSign has been very constructive.

While people are very vigorous in defending their positions within the contexts of ICANN and its frameworks, I think in the attempts to try to break up ICANN, to destroy ICANN, people don't realize that the only real alternative to an ICANN-type model is a series of national regulations. 

You would go from the present marketplace to something which is nationally licensed all around the world. That's a big change, and I think most of the players are saying, "No, we don't want to be in that space."

Q: Has there been pressure to take any of this away from ICANN, to take some authority away?

A: Yes. There are about 20,000 people in our community who are involved on a somewhat regular basis with the issues we deal with. It's probably getting bigger.

I'm increasingly surprised at meetings I'm asked to, where I find out the people in the room know a lot about ICANN. I'm thinking, "Why would you?" But they do. 

We have a staff of about 120 people now. We have a board of 21, and we've got around 2,000 regularly attending volunteers distributed all around the world. 

The consequence is that running ICANN is like running a business or a political party. It's got a lot of similarities of different groups coming together, of having factions talk to factions, working through processes, people coming to common policy, and running a diplomatic service because we deal with every country in the world. 

The element you point out is this voice of American imperialism. It's certainly something I've had to deal with a lot over the last 10 years, and I think one of the things we have shown and continue to show in ICANN is look - you can't wish away history. There's an origin of where this all came from. 

But on the other side is ICANN - ICANN got stronger and more people (from different places) have participated, and the more ICANN has engaged in issues that address the rest of the world, the more there's been a sense that ICANN is not the cat's paw of the United States.

You remember what happened here in the 1990s when there was the Bellheads and the Netheads debate (engineers who grew up in the telephone industry versus the engineers who knew the Internet)? A lot of countries had the same thing going on. 

You've had the security forces, broadly defined, who don't like what's going on because they naturally like command and control, and they're gradually getting used to things changing. 

In India only four years ago, I can still remember being in conversation with ministers who were part of the department that was very anti-Internet, and the other (department) was pro-information technology. That's all gone. It's all changed in a relatively short period of time.

Our links with the United States government, which is the Joint Project Agreement with the Department of Commerce and the procurement contract for the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) functions, are still there. People still raise them. 

But I think we've got a pathway forward to show progress, although we're going to continue to have a close link with United States. We don't dispute that. So it's a balancing trick. 

I do suspect that for a couple of years in some parts of the world we became a bit of a proxy for U.S. foreign policy - and that has been noticeably different since the election. 

Q: The big story this year has been the global economic downturn. How has that affected ICANN, or has it?

A: We take a pretty conservative approach to potential downturns and revenue streams, so that's part of the reason why our expenditures are not over our revenues, even though we're nonprofit.

There was an expectation that the top-level domain space would go flat and the country codes would keep increasing. From what I've heard, generic top-level domains have not gone flat, at least not so far this year. They continue to grow. 

I did hear yesterday that at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, traffic from June to December last year increased by about 50 percent, which might mean that even in periods of downturn people turn to the Internet. 

I could put a hypothesis to you - if people are losing their jobs, they may decide they want to set up home businesses, and if you set up a home business, one of the things you do is get yourself a domain name. 

Participating in this interview were staff writers Deborah Gage, Benny Evangelista and Verne Kopytoff, and columnist Andrew S. Ross.

This article appeared on page K - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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