[discuss] Options for root zone

[Dr. Ben Fuller]

All,

In other words ICANN has been doing Internet Governance for many years. Responding the the needs and requests of national governments and stakeholders. The requests for IDN were made, analysed and acted upon. Relevant stakeholders were consulted. A solution that goes beyond a single country to positively impact hundreds of millions of current and potential Internet users was implemented. 

Someone at ICANN should write this up. Probably a good idea to do the same for the new gTLDs. 

As one who has been following ICANN for over a decade, I acknowledge that there have been issues and problems, but at the same time there has been a great deal of growth in ICANN. We must keep in mind that ICANN represented a new kind of institution. New structures for governance always have teething problems. But, the point is that ICANN has developed the ability to change and modify itself to answer criticisms. This is a process that will go on for some time. 

Ben

On Jan 19, 2014, at 5:29 PM, Veni Markovski <veni at veni.com> wrote:

> Patrick, 
> Thank you for the points. 
> As someone, who has been involved in the whole process since the beginning of this case (it started on June 18, 2008, with a letter of the Bulgarian minister to Paul Twomey), and commenting in my personal capacity, as my signature below states, I'd like to bring some light to this question, as it seems to continue to be discussed, and with more and more interpretations, which go farther and farther from the facts.
> 
> Louis, 
> Other people also quote the Tunis Agenda, and make references to it, as if it is an international treaty, and therefore it can be violated. It is not. No country was involved in the decision about .bg (IDN), and therefore article 63 was not even touched in any distant way.  
> 
> Thanks to the multistakeholder model, the IDN fast track was changed recently, and in the case that was quoted, it allows the Bulgarian government to continue with its efforts to get the .bg IDN. 
> The Bulgarian government spent quite a lot of time discussing the issue with the broader internet community in Bugaria, and with ICANN, and nobody would reject the fact that these and other discussions, and also contributions from the ICANN community, and many other involved people and organizations, contributed to the change of the Fast Track policy.  
> 
> The Tunis Agenda addresses the need for multilingual domain names (not ccTLDs), and today this need is largely satisfied - via the Fast Track, but also via the new gTLD program. 
> 
> So, instead of seeing this as a "violation" of para 63, I see the changes in the program, as a successful attempt by the global Internet community (including governments, AND including the Bulgarian government in particular) to make sure that the interests of all concerned internet users are being addressed. 
> 
> 
> 
> On 01/19/14 00:48, Patrik Fältström wrote:
>> On 19 jan 2014, at 04:23, Louis Pouzin (well) <pouzin at well.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Whether or not бг is standardized by ISO is not the point. The Tunis agenda is strict: 
>>> 
>>> « 63. Countries should not be involved in decisions regarding another country’s country-code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD). Their legitimate interests, as expressed and defined by each country, in diverse ways, regarding decisions affecting their ccTLDs, need to be respected, upheld and addressed via a flexible and improved framework and mechanisms. »
>> 
>> There is a difference between ccTLDs and IDN-ccTLDs, where the policy for the latter is developed by the PDP hosted by the ccNSO in ICANN.
>> 
>>> I don't get it. Obviously бг and other non ascii ccTLD are IDN and potential sources of confusing similarities. This results from ICANN's policy in constraining IDN specifications so that it would not be possible to introduce non ascii scripts.
>> 
>> If you believe a policy development process within ICANN has developed the wrong policy, then the place where that should be changed is within that very same policy development process.
>> 
>>> The chinese team who developed IDN was smart enough to overcome the constraints.
>> 
>> IDN was developed by a working group in the IETF, not by a team in China. Individuals from China was part of the core group of developers in the IETF.
>> 
>>> It is normal for users to view ccTLD's from their national context, regardless of the local scripts they use. As ICANN was unable to change its US-ASCII centric fixation the design was botched. 
>> 
>> The issue is not so much an ICANN issue as a Unicode issue where unification was done for some scripts but not for others. Because of that, different scripts will get different treatment.
>> 
>> Once again, this should be brought up in the ccNSO hosted PDP and not here.
>> 
>>> E.g. MORPHO could be a perfectly regular new gTLD. Can anyone tell if the string is ascii or cyrillic ? 
>> 
>> The policy separates the policy for 2-character IDN-ccTLDS from other possible IDN strings, so I do not understand what this example have to do with the issue you originally has brought up in this thread.
>> 
>>> We need a new linguistically customized internet.
>> 
>> Please keep complaints on the result of an open policy development process separated from other interests.
>> 
>>    Patrik
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> 
> Best, 
> Veni Markovski
> 
> http://www.veni.com
> https://www.facebook.com/venimarkovski
> https://twitter.com/veni
> 
> 
> The opinions expressed above are those of the 
> author, not of any organizations, associated 
> with or related to him in any given way. 
> 
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____________________
Dr. Ben Fuller, Dean
Faculty of Humanities, HIV and AIDS and Sustainable Development
International University of Managment
Windhoek, Namibia
bfuller at ium.edu.na, ben at fuller.na
http://www.ium.edu.na, http://www.fuller.na
skype: drbenfuller