ICANN's GAC Looks to Future in Hyderabad Meeting
ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee convened Friday in Hyderabad, India, to plan its future role in the organization amid ongoing changes related to the recently completed Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition. The full ICANN meeting in Hyderabad is expected to be dominated by internal community and domain name policy issues that had been put on the back burner amid the IANA oversight handoff, which occurred Oct. 1 (see 1610030042 and 1611020057). The Hyderabad meeting is to run through Wednesday.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
ICANN convened Thursday as delegates at the ITU's World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly meeting in Yasmine Hammamet, Tunisia, jettisoned controversial proposals to make the Digital Object Architecture (DOA) technology the universal standard for assigning unique identifiers for connected devices. Delegations affiliated with the Russian Communications Commonwealth, Arab States Administrations and the African Telecommunication Union pushed DOA over competing technologies as a way to address cybersecurity issues, including preventing distributed denial of service attacks and the emergence of counterfeit IoT devices (see 1610250054).
GAC members said Friday the committee has moved past lingering misgivings about the changes to ICANN's accountability mechanisms that the organization implemented before the IANA switchover. GAC didn't endorse the accountability changes before ICANN board approval in March of transition-related plans amid objections from some members but didn't outright object to them either (see 1603090059). GAC hasn't decided whether it will remain a purely advisory committee or take on a more active role in the greater ICANN empowered community.
China had “reservations” with aspects of the accountability changes that affect GAC's status but now welcomes the handoff's completion and believes it had a positive impact on global internet governance, said China GAC member Pei Wei. Iran GAC member Kavouss Arasteh said the GAC-related accountability changes granted the committee only minimal governance powers rather than the major influence that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and other transition skeptics in Congress asserted before the handoff (see 1607070059).
GAC liaisons to the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) said they're optimistic about the group's work on a second set of accountability changes. CCWG-Accountability will convene during the Hyderabad meeting on its work, which includes ICANN board transparency, staff accountability and the organization's jurisdiction. CCWG-Accountability's work on the second accountability changes proposal started slowly but should progress faster now, said Denmark GAC member Julia Wolman. Brazil GAC member Benedicto Fonseca Filho said CCWG-Accountability's work on ICANN jurisdiction hasn't made a final decision on whether to reconsider keeping the organization incorporated in Los Angeles.
GAC also began its expected debate on the dispute over protections for intergovernmental organizations' (IGOs) acronyms in generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The Generic Names Supporting Organization's IGO Curative Rights Process Working Group is nearing completion of a set of policy recommendations aimed at resolving the dispute. Some GAC members suggested before the Hyderabad meeting that their governments could move on to the ITU or other institutions to address the dispute.
There needs to eventually be a permanent solution on IGO name protection, said GAC Chairman Thomas Schneider. World Intellectual Property Organization Arbitration and Mediation Center Head-Internet Dispute Resolution Section Brian Beckham told GAC the IGOs continue to believe it's vital to protect their names and acronyms in the domain name system. GAC members from the European Commission, France and Germany supported a proposal for reconciling GAC advice and GNSO policy recommendations on IGO name protections.