ICANN 40 San Francisco Meeting - Friday 18 March

The morning meeting started with a sombre mood knowing that this the last meeting of all of us together. After initial presentations by Merlin Cayde from Business Consitituency and Nominating Committee Members, each of us shared our experience. It ended up with lots of hugs and tears. Janice our fellowship coordinator was given a full bow by all of us for her excellent mentorship, care and understanding.

Now a bit of shopping was necessary to keep the temperatures cool back home wherein simultaneously the board was discussing vital issues and were about to take decisions. So with the start of lunch hour, went out , took a cab to visit Golden Gate bridge with an Indian friend Mr. Ajwani and post return witnessed a historical decision by board.

.XXX was approved by the board and is now a reality.

ICANN 40 San Francisco Meeting - Thursday 17 March

After the fellowship meeting, went to observe the board and the GAC. It was amazing to see Consultation between the GAC and the Board in an open hall with other ICANN members allowed to be there as observers. As the meeting was schduled for full day, went out to another room to particiapte in the Review Team meeting on SSR.

IN view of the so many developments happening in Internet , it is imperative that there remains a concrete focus on the basic DNS system which keeps the Internet running. As such the Security, Stability and Resiliency of the DNS Review Team (SSR RT) commenced its activities in October 2010 and held its first face-to-face meeting and interaction with the community session in Cartagena last December. The first face to face meeting was happening in San Francisco. The team has identified few areas and comments can be given till Apr-6, 2011. The areas can be majorly categorised as follows:

1. ICANN's responsibility
2. Role of ICANN in attacks/ incidents
3. Risk Analysis of DNS, Contingency and BCP.
4. Solutions Proposals required on Root Server Governance, ccTLD and other stakeholders

The details can be found at http://icann.org/en/reviews/affirmation/ssr-rt-set-of-issues-21feb11-en.pdf

At 4 o clock, the public forum started wherein any stakeholder is allowed to ask question directly to the board to which either board responds or seeks time to respond back. The issues which primarily surfaced were:

1. HIgh attrition of ICANN staff resulting in voluntary committees loosing momentum.
2. Recommendation of Accountability, Transperancy and Review TEam to implemented in letter and spirit.
3. Members of Adult content industry vehmently opposed the introduction of .XXX as a top level domain.

4. Other Issues.

The people identified themselves as the owner of companies producing adult content, counsel or directors. Never before I saw such an open Freedom of Expression. Let add here there was a protest in front of the hotel during the day by cast & crew of the adult content industry against the introduction of .XXX

The day was about to end when received an email that fellowhip members are going out for a dinner and happily I came back to hotel room to get ready  for the dinner at 39th Floor of Hotel Merlin. It was a fantastic view and environment up there.

ICANN 40 San Francisco Meeting - Wednesday 16 March

The focus of the day was to attend all the relevant workshops and discussion on IDNs and then branch out to have a feel of the other tracks which were being discussed.

In the IDN session, the issue of variant was discussed in detail. The challenges of the Arabic Script were shown , the Indian position on the issue was also discussed and the issues which were primarily identified are as follows

• Perso Arabic and Brahmi are being followed in India and with 450+ living languages and 22 constitution languages, India deployment of IDN will make a perfect case.
• The policy to consider homograph variants and not homophone variants has resulted in reduction of the complexity of the problem.
• There are issues of rendering the unicde in different browsers.
• The width or the space of address bar in the browser needs to be broadened to accomodate the various words which have commas and fullstops or matras on the top.

Also attended the Registrars Training Program wherein Training Program on Uniform Dispute Resolution mandatory for all registrars was announced. ICC is coordinating on this issue so that the process can be uniformly applied across countries.

The session on WHO IS primarily discussed the trust in accessing the who is data base. The question wherein there can be misuse of the WHOIS database and it has to be designed in the context of the privacy laws of the land in the overall framework of international policies and ICANN guidelines is really a job which needs more work on it.

The final session of the day which was attended was the on Number Resource Policy Development Activities whrein the key takeaways are :

• focus on resource certification implementaiton coordination (RPKI) - single RPKI trust anchor which ensures the routing tables are correct.
• RIR have ipv6 allocation policies
• Support both versions of protocol and when duone thru a single device it is called dual stack approach
• Tunnel services for customers will see an increase.
• There are lot of Ipv6 content on NRO website
• There needs to be a global policy of IPv4 allocation post exhaustion and int he context of IPv4 lready gone from IANA, an important task in hand needs to be addressed at the earliest.

The highlight of the day was the address of former President of USA, Mr. Bill Clinton addressing the gathering. He spoke primarily about how INternet is important in the context of human development and stressed that Multistakeholder approach of Internet development and consensus based policy development process needs to be maintained. Inspite of the fact that we are stumbling in it, he assured that the group is stumbling in the right direction.

ICANN 40 San Francisco Meeting - Tuesday 15 March

Tuesday was the day of contituency. All the constituencies were meeting on the day and I focussed on ccNSO and Business Constituency.

1. In ccNSO, there was a joint review with the IDN working group and I followed it quite closely. There are total 34 applications which have bee received under the IDN Fast Track Process and 27 of them have been approved consisting of 17 countries / territories. There were issues here as the application for Bulgaria and Greece have been rejected on the advise of the confusion which their characters can create and it came to notice that there is no appeal process which has been setup as part of the Fast Track Program.

2. In the second half focussed on Business Constituency and the main points which were discussed are as follows:

-->Using Brand Name as a String - brand being a trademark, it was urged to participate in the first round of applications and was also discussed in the context of IDNs. Big organizations having diverse business interest can use it for brand promotion. There are indications that cannon and deloitte might be going ahead with the gTLD.
-->Discussion about WHOIS Studies and Future Improvements in WHOIS
-->Security Stability and Resilience Challenges in the context of Business Constituency. The discussion saw Jeff Brueggeman, SSR Review Team; Adam Palmer,Symantec; Scott McCormick; Patrick Jones, ICANN; Greg Rattray,FS Round.
-->GNSO Council Agenda Review wherein Members Views And Priorities regarding GTLDs and updates were provided by Steve DelBianco, VC, Policy Coordination/Zahid Jamil John Berard, BC Councilors

The evening was quite a chilly one as it was raining but a musical night with great numbers being played by the particiapnts on th eKaroke made for it. It's nothing better to be with music and wine and dance in Union Square of Sanfrancisco.

ICANN 40 San Francisco Meeting - Monday 14 March

The day started with the Fellowship Meeting at 7AM wherein an overview of gNSO (generic Names Supporting Organization) was provided alonside presentation from fellow Alumni on the experience in ICANN.

Following it was the opening ceremony which saw VInt Cerf (Father of the Internet) as speaker. It was a life time achievement for me to listen to Vint Cerf in person. In context to ICANN he focussed on the following issues among many others:

• Transperancy in the ICANN decion making process
• GAC to contribute more on public policy
• The relation between ICANN and Dept of Commerce is of Procurement Contract which can be changed to MOU
• There can be multiple ways of doing things so decide on one of the way and follow it.

The cermony also saw Asst Secretary of State - Dept of Commercce, USA. He mentioned that "The Obama Administration has made it a priority to develop policies to ensure that we continue to have an Internet environment that encourages innovation and creativity and fosters trust with its users"  He said that within the Department of Commerce, they are focussing on four issues of internet

• Enhancing Internet privacy;
• Ensuring cyber security;
• Protecting online copyright
• Ensuring the global free flow of information.

 He also mentioned about they are guided by two principles :on which the issues needs to be resolved.

• Idea of trust. 
• preserve and enhance a multistakeholder model  

It also saw Andrew McLaughlin who served as the deputy chief technology officer at the White House from 2009 until earlier this year. His thoughts were really radical likewhere in last few years he said that Humans have changed from information consumers or passive consumers to active creators. His comparision of Human Development Index of World Bank witht he growth of Internet presented an extra ordinary reflection of the situation. His comment "well informed public is the corner stone of a representative government" is defnitely a clincher.

One of the prominent speakers was IRA MAGAZINER who was the founder of ICANN. His speech took us in History where he gave a glimse that in 1995 there were three technologies which were upcoming like The Internet, the sequencing of the human genome, and advances in renewable energy. The Clinton administration choose to focus on INternet and here we are today. His tribute to Job Postel was also overwhelming. He finished by suggesting the following:

•  ICANN always needs to work hard to be more international and, in particular, to include more people in its leadership and management from developing countries around the world.  
• Number two, ICANN must take great pains to operate in an efficient manner.

I attended other meetings round the day primarily on IDNs. Post lunch there was a good discussion with Dr. Mahesh Kulkarni from CDAC Pune who is also a speaker here in ICANN on IDN. I could understant the readiness of India on IDNs and the basic building blocks. I could understand his views on blocking the variants in IDNs and not considering the homophones as part of language table.

There was a coffee talk with particiapnts of South Asia Pacific countries wherein it was decided that volntary organization in this part of the world should join hands to work on some of the INternet related issues.

ICANN 40 San Francisco Meeting - Sunday 13 March

First time attending an ICANN meeting and the word is overwhelming. The meeting is being held in WestIn Hotel right in front of Union Square, San Francisco and with roughly around 1600+ delegates, it's a sea of particiapants. It's a long meeting and you can find the meeting schedule in the following link. http://svsf40.icann.org/full-schedule.

As an ICANN Fellow, the day started with introduction of other fellows from various countries, overview of ICANN, ways and means of remote particiaption , policy update workshop and New gTLD basics, ccNSO finance working groups workshop, for some time was in the GAC meeting, at the cocktail sposored by Neustar and finally ISOC San Francisco Chapter hosted meeting and ISOC Chapters Meeting. The time by which I could rech my hotel room was past 9PM.

There are many acronyms in the ICANN world and I am still getting used to it however, there are few which have a rock solid work going on inside them.

Watch this space for a daily update on the meeting and also I will be posting on the various topics which are being discussed at the international level.