Actualizing sustainable Internet society (1)

Comment:

The Internet is always growing. It has become a vast, global ecosystem embracing stakeholders from all sectors — the public, industry and business, academia, governments and civil society. It lies in the hands of a remarkable confederation of parties. All of these stakeholders own portions of the Internet — from individual devices to huge, complex infrastructure systems.

Some players own physical communication resources such as optical fiber, satellite, cable systems and wireless networks and others provide software and network-based applications.

Still others provide services that promote and support electronic commerce, social networking, electronic messaging of all kinds, content distribution and delivery, education, and many, many more online applications. All these owners of the Internet represent one of the most diverse groupings of entities in the history of telecommunications.

What gets us up in the morning — and often keeps us up at night — are the innovations and technological advances that are about to become part of that ecosystem. They represent the greatest change in the Internet since its beginnings nearly 40 years ago. They are opening the way for the next billion users to enjoy all that the global Internet has to offer.

Right now, there are about 20 generic top-level domains and 252 country-code TLDs supporting more than 153 million registered names in the domain name space.

Internet users are demanding more. When the global Internet community talks about the next billion users coming on line, they are talking about Asia and the Middle East region. Japan, with its population of 127 million, leads in Internet penetration at 68.7 per cent. And Korea’s population of 34 million has a penetration of 47.6 per cent.

But China is booming. Its population of 1.3 billion has a penetration of 12.3 per cent. India has a population of 1.13 billion and penetration of 5.3 per cent. The Middle East shows similar numbers. Compare that with Europe and Australia, each with around 70 per cent penetration.

So, the Asian countries and the Middle East will be the new face of the Internet — the next generation of Internet users.

I find that prospect very exciting. But at the same time I realize that as the Internet grows in functionality, it also presents more challenges — to the diverse stakeholder communities and to the sustainability of the Internet itself.

For the ICANN community, sustainability means implementing these innovations and technologies — all of which are intended to improve openness, accessibility, diversity, and security — without placing the Internet’s security, stability and interoperability at risk.

So I had like to talk to you about a sustainable Internet society in terms of —
• Multi-stakeholder participation through ICANN’s bottom-up consensus-building model in creating and maintaining the technologies and policies that ensure a single, globally interoperable Internet; and
• How the business community could enhance their business models — and at the same time strengthen the Internet’s sustainability —by implementing Internet Protocol version Six (IPv6).

ICANN’s mission and operating principles
First, let me remind you of ICANN’s mission, which is —• To coordinate, overall, the global Internet’s system of unique identifiers, and to ensure stable and secure operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems. In particular, ICANN coordinates:

1. Allocation and assignment of the three sets of unique identifiers for the Internet:
• Domain names (a system called the DNS)
• Internet protocol (IP) addresses and autonomous system (AS) numbers
• Protocol port and parameter numbers;
2. Operation and evolution of the DNS root name server system; and
3. Policy development reasonably and appropriately related to these technical functions;
In fulfilling its mission, ICANN is guided by four founding principles. They are to —
1. Contribute to stability and security of the Internet
2. Promote competition and choice for registrants and other users;
3. Forum for multi-stakeholder, consensus-based bottom-up development of related policy, and
4. Ensure an opportunity for participation by all interested parties on a global basis
It is within this framework that I talk to you.

ICANN’s multi-stakeholder model
Although only ten years old, ICANN is the flagship for multi-stakeholderism. The ICANN model represents the insight that a truly global resource like the Internet’s addressing system cannot and should not be influenced by one country or region alone, or by one organization or individual. This multi-stakeholder consensus-building model enables the ICANN community and the global Internet community to develop policies that influence the way the Internet and the domain name system work.

Participation by the entire Internet community — by governments, the business community, the academic community, the technology community, the private sector, and civil society alike — is essential to ensuring that the continuing progress and achievements of the global Internet community benefit us all.

How to participate in ICANN:
The ICANN community’s process for multi-stakeholder decision-making is very open. Debate is a crucial a feature. Often there are divergent positions that take time to work through. There are complex technical and legal issues behind most of the discussions about the creation of policies. We have seen this in the many policy issues ICANN has coordinated.

ICANN’s work and its processes are also transparent. The entire process is available online so individuals can review policy as it is developed and comment on it as they feel necessary. All substantive work is put out to public comment and those comments that are relevant are incorporated into the decision-making process. Your informed comments are one way in which you can participate in policy-making.

You can also join one of ICANN’s Supporting Organizations or Advisory Committees, a more formal route into ICANN’s policy-making processes. One of the main policy-making bodies of ICANN is the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which is made up of a number of constituencies:

• Commercial and Business
• gTLD Registries
• Internet Service and Connection Providers
• Non-Commercial users
• Registrars
• Intellectual Property experts


ITREALMS Online ... delivering news for ICT4D