[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."