[Telecentres] India and ICANN...

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

> Here is a statement by the Indian Government on ICANN. I received it 
> through a mailing list.
>
> Arun
>
>
>> http://at-large.blogspot.com/2005/02/india-our-thoughts-on-icann.html
>>
>> Still At Large -- the last outpost for ICANN's unrepresented masses
>>
>>
>> Thursday, February 10, 2005
>> India: Our Thoughts on ICANN
>>
>> .
>> 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."
>