Intellectual Property Law

ICANN Monday

By Susan Crawford

The public participation page is here: http://par.icann.org

It’s clear to me that Kieren McCarthy and Paul Levins are doing all they can to make it easy for people to follow what’s going on - including, on Wednesday, making the scribes’ feed (the scrolling text of what’s being said) available.

This morning Eric Besson, a French Minister responsible for Forward Planning, Assessment of Public Policies, and Development of the Digital Economy, spoke to a large crowd. He’s particularly focused on the IPv4-v6 transition, the development of multilingual top-level-domains, the initiation of new generic TLDs, and ICANN’s institutional future. Viviane Reding made a short speech via video, noting the importance of neutral internet access as well as the importance of government involvement in policymaking for TLDs.

For me, the big issues this week are the structural questions surrounding new IDNs associated with the ISO-3166 list, the planned improvements to the GNSO, and the GNSO’s recommendations about how to select new gTLDs. We have a substantial agenda. Today’s workshop about the new IDN TLDs suggested a number of technical and policy questions - the policy development is moving quite quickly (this draft is under review), and we’ll see if all of this can be resolved this week. It’s useful that the names being chosen have to meaningfully represent the name of the territory.  It looks as if UNESCO or a similar body will decide whether the name is in fact meaningful in this respect.  What obligations will the manager have? That’s still a subject to be discussed.

On the new gTLD front, the Recommendation that has me stumped is famous in ICANN circles:

Strings must not be contrary to generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law.

All comments welcome.  More tomorrow.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on June 23, 2008 (boomark / email).