ICANN Starts Third Public Meeting Today.

By Nick Patience Today is the first day of three days of meetings in Berlin, hosted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - the non-profit organization established last year to take over the administration of the internet's domain name and numbering system from the US government and its various agencies. The nine-member interim ICANN board will meet behind closed doors on Thursday, May 27, but there will be a series of meetings today and tomorrow, which should be largely open to anybody with an interest in the future of the DNS.

The day will start with three separate threads. Two of ICANN's advisory committees, the membership and the governmental advisory committee will meet in private session throughout the day, although the government committee will hold a one-hour public forum at the end of the day's proceedings. The government committee advises the ICANN board on its activities as they relate to national governments and treaty organizations. The membership committee is helping the board devise a membership scheme, which will help fund ICANN in the future and maybe, directly, or indirectly, elect some of its officials.

The third thread in the morning is the potentially volatile series of meetings to try and organize the seven constituency groups that will make up the domain name supporting organization (DNSO), one of the three policy-making SOs that will serve the ICANN board, as well as supply nine of its eventual 19 members. The other two SOs will advise on IP addressing and protocol policy.

ICANN has named seven constituencies it wants to see formed under the aegis of the DNSO: country-code registries; commercial and business entities; generic domain registries; ISPs; non- commercial domain holders; registrars; and trademark intellectual property and anti-counterfeiting interests. All the meetings will be held concurrently this morning. Each constituency will eventually nominate three members of the names council - the steering committee of the DNSO - and that will be the body that picks the three ICANN board members representing the DNSO. Under ICANN's bylaws, there is no limitation on the number of constituencies in which an entity can participate, but no more than one employee of each entity will be permitted to serve on the names council at any one time. There have also been calls for additional constituencies, including one representing individuals, but ICANN has said that it will only consider additional groups once these seven have been established.

Perhaps the most contentious constituency meeting is likely to be the one concerning the non- commercial domain name holders constituency (NCDNHC), which is the only one representing non- commercial interests. There are three main proposals to organized the NCDNHC; one from an organization called the International Congress of Independent Internet Users (ICIIU), one from the Internet Society (ISOC) and a compromise between the two from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

The main difference between the first two is that ISOC believes any entity can be a member of the NCDNHC if it is incorporated as a non-profit organization - like ISOC itself - while the ICIIU position calls for the denial of membership to entities if a "significant percentage of their funding comes from commercial sources," as such entities can be adequately represented within one or more of the other six constituencies.

The ACM proposal recognizes that the non-commercial constituency will be home for many organizations that cannot fit into any of the other constituencies. The ACM proposal says it would be inappropriate for a non-commercial constituency to include those organizations that "primarily or largely serve the interests of another constituency, even if the organizations are not-for- profit in structure and are themselves engaged in non-commercial speech on the internet." It could be quite a showdown at the meeting.

Tomorrow afternoon will be taken up with the inaugural meeting of the DNSO's General Assembly, which anybody can attend provided they pay DM 95 to cover the costs of holding and webcasting the meeting. ICANN held its first set of public meetings in November 1998 in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its second in March in Singapore and the fourth set is scheduled for Santiago, Chile on August 24-26. The DNSO general assembly meeting will be webcast, details at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/berlin/.