[ga] India calls for International Body to replace ICANN

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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."

It is precisely to counter the demands of politicians and governments for
more control over the DNS - and their legitimate charge that ICANN lacks a
sufficient mandate - that ICANN should make the constituency of internet
users worldwide its central mandate, and should restore the At Large
Directors to the ICANN Board.

Yrs,

Richard Henderson