Among directions for ICANN to expand its mission, only one is leg...

Exec. Dir. Steve DelBianco said the group wants a “firewall” to keep inappropriate tasks from being forced on ICANN by dictatorial regimes, economic- justice activists and companies. NetChoice includes AOL, VeriSign, Yahoo, Oracle and eBay. The IGF grew out of international ire at the leading U.S. role in ICANN and congressional support of that role, he said. Govts. have legitimate reasons to want to build Internet “capacity” -- give developing nations their own ccTLDs, enact consumer protection measures to stop spam and protect intellectual property and ensure Internet integrity by fighting phishing and ensuring sites are authentic, DelBianco said. But those goals aren’t ICANN’s business; it should be focusing on DNS security and stability, he added. According to DelBianco, especially bad ideas for new ICANN jurisdiction include: (1) Subsidizing infrastructure in poor countries via a version of the Universal Service Fund, based on DNS fees, emerging from the voluntary Digital Solidarity Fund (WID Feb 28/05 p1). The South Centre and Assn. for Progressive Communications urge a “parallel” agenda at IGF to focus on funding for developing nations. (2) Foisting open-source software and the Open Document Format on registries, registrars and others touching core Internet functions, a Sun proposal that is “transparently self serving” and would “corrupt” the IGF. (3) Closing the Whois database, pushed by the Internet Governance Project, to guard registrant privacy. The FTC has said that would cut off a primary investigative tool for agency consumer-protection cases, DelBianco said. (4) The least justifiable goal for ICANN is thinly veiled censorship, pushed by China, Iran and Zimbabwe, whose Pres. Robert Mugabe has said an open Internet promotes “nihilistic” viewpoints, DelBianco said. Those countries would ask a newly empowered ICANN to revoke domain names for websites considered offensive, he said. Groups pushing for those additions to ICANN’s jurisdiction are “putting their own agendas at risk” by “wasting time” and scarce resources lobbying a forum that surely will spurn them, he said. “Even if ICANN means to say no, it takes several years” due to its decision-making means, DelBianco said. The firewall NetChoice wants isn’t a “brick wall,” he added. UNESCO and the Native Language Internet Consortium seek internationalized domain names (IDNs), which have their own program at ICANN that “needs to move faster,” he said. Generic TLDs must use ASCII characters to work, a “significant inconvenience” for many foreign users. NetChoice belongs to the ICANN Business Constituency, which gives IDNs higher priority than new gTLDs (WID Aug 22 p2). ICANN “will never satisfy many of the groups” meeting in Athens, but its jurisdiction must remain limited to preserve the IGF’s goals of freedom of expression, consumer protection and interoperability, he said.