Cybersurf

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window on the web. I am Steven Lang –still somewhat exhausted from hectic week in Luxembourg where I attended the 23rd international meeting of ICANN – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

At the risk of oversimplifying matters – ICANN is essentially the body that administers, or manages the internet. It has meetings three times a year in different parts of the world in an effort to encourage global participation in the running of the internet.

Last December such a meeting was held in Cape Town, and in April it was the turn of Mar del Plata in Argentina. The final meeting for 2005 will be in Vancouver, Canada some time in November.

The really cool thing about these international meetings is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can participate. You can walk in off the street, get your badge at the front desk, and wait your turn to make representations to the ICANN board.

If you can’t get to these exotic locations – no problem – you can still participate online. Many of the public sessions in Luxembourg were web cast and simultaneously transcribed. This means you could hear participants asking questions or making proposals and then you could hear the Board members struggling to find appropriate answers. Full transcriptions of the public sessions are already available on the ICANN web site which you will find at icann.org – that is icann – I.C.A.N.N dot org – remember there are two ens in ICANN and it is a dot org.

The Luxembourg meeting notched up several achievements including the running of several training courses, it passed the budget and signed a contract with a consortium to create a new domain.

The consortium, known as mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd has an interesting mix of shareholders including: Microsoft, GSM Association, Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia and Vodafone. An ICANN press release says the consortium was formed with the specific purpose of “…creating a registry service to the .mobi domain. This will serve as a reliable and recognisable mechanism for internet content and services that are specifically tailored to a mobile experience”.

What all this means is that from now on, anyone in the mobile phone business will be able to purchase a web site address that ends in dot mobi. So in addition to their existing dot com, and dot co dot za addresses, we will probably be seeing sites for mtn dot mobi and vodacom dot mobi.

ICANN had other successes too – it is already preparing a strategic plan for 2006 to 2009 – but there are some uncertainties too.

No-one is sure how the World Summit on the Information Society, set for November this year, will deal with the question of Internet Governance – an issue that could have profound consequences for ICANN.

Other uncertainties stem from a recent decision by the Bush Administration to go back on its promise to relinquish control of the 13 root servers that hold the critical root folder at the very core of the internet.

The decision seriously undermined US claims that it was going to hand over control of the internet to an independent – international body. That body everyone presumed was going to be a reborn ICANN having finally cut its umbilical chord to the US department of commerce.

These are clearly very tricky issues – but ones that will have profound consequences for the management of the internet. To find out more about this, and related issues, please click along to the Cybersurf blog where I will put up this script, some relevantlinks and additional explanations of ICANN activities.

And to find the Cybersurf blog you will need to go to Cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time now: - Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com.

Thanks for listening, and please join me again next Monday morning for more Cybersurff