http://at-large.blogspot.com/2005/02/india-our-thoughts-on-icann.html
Still At Large -- the last outpost for ICANN's unrepresented masses
Thursday, February 10, 2005
India: Our Thoughts on ICANN
.
The government of India is the first government thus far to submit formal
comments to the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) which is
preparing a report for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
India had this to say about ICANN:
"Presently ICANN is a private organization, working under MoU with US
government. We understand that the MoU is to expire in September 2006.
ICANN's incorporation in the USA implicitly means it will always be
subject to USA law. It is believed that this shall introduce an asymmetric
role of the USA Government vis a vis other governments. Today ICANN is the
only visible body which exercises any kind of oversight in relation to the
internet with a few supporting organisation being responsible for some of
its critical components - such as voluntary root servers, regional
Internet Address Registries , the Domain Name registries. Most of them
have contractual relations with ICANN. At the international level, there
is no single international( Inter-government or private ) organisation
that coordinates all the issues related to the Internet and IP based
Services.
In essence Internet Governance includes collective rules, policies,
standards, procedures that are consistent with the sovereign rights of the
states . At present there is little or no role of governments in these
multifarious decision processes and Governments of developing countries
are effectively marginalised. India among the Developing countries is not
at ease with the limited influence of Governments of various countries in
ICANN and in particular with the purely advisory role of GAC.
Governments have a clear interest in ensuring that internet evolves in a
direction that protects and advances the public interest. In addition to
the management resources( IP Addresses, DNS, Root Servers, Protocols, IDN
etc ) there are number of questions in which technology and policy issues
are interlinked. Based on the understanding of the issues as discussed
above, we are of the opinion that internet should be governed by an
inter-governmental, multilateral, multi-stakeholder international body."