On ICANN
The 30th meeting of ICANN is being held this week at the Hilton Hotel at Los Angeles International Airport, and today UNITE HIRE! Local 11 is picketing this particular Hilton property -- the Hilton LAX -- for unfair labor practices. I spoke with Kristin Winn, one of the organizers, before crossing the picket line, and I was surprised to learn that ICANN's president had already agreed not to continue to use the Hilton LAX for future meetings until the labor dispute is resolved. Basically, hotel workers are more likely (48%) to be injured than the average for the service sector, and injuries have gone up 210% for housekeepers, and 38% for all workers, at the Hilton LAX, since the beginning of 2003. Good for Paul Twomey (who's parents are sitting next to me, which may explain why he's being good).
I picked the photo because so much of ICANN's public policy problem space is about the laws (or their lack) for national namespaces (ccTLDs), a not inconsiderable number of which are either run on shoestrings, and sometimes quite creative shoestrings, e.g., Namibia (.na), or are run by commercial operators who's primary public policy goal is contract renewal and monopoly profit extraction (NeuStar and .us, Verisign and .tv, etc.). Why is this like this year's best and brightest of port-a-potties? Consider the policy around the WHOIS service? In how many national jurisdictions can personal privacy be reduced to input for mechanically harvested addresses for the purposes of SPAM targeting? The corollation between WHOIS and SPAM is beyond debate but ... trademark and law enforcement's best-and-brightest are concerned that anyone may be a trademark terrorist (a happy collision of their core claims), so everyone must surrender their contact information.
Potty policy.
The real issues before ICANN are structural change, the use of scripts other than ROMAN (actually a restricted set of US-ASCII) in the root and in the existing second-level namespaces, e.g., .com, .net, .org, .de, .fr, the 3rd round of new gTLDs (reminder, the 1st round was .biz, .info, .name, .coop, .aero, .museum, the 2nd round was .cat, .jobs, .travel, .mobi) and changes to the process of evaluating new gTLD applications and its budget and planing processes.
The enduring organizational tensions are between US governmental control (the annual agreement renewal) and multi-governmental control, between governmental control and other sources of authority for the formation of policy, between Verisign and not-Verisign, and between IP claims on the namespace and any other use of the namespaces. Its likely that you are "other".
The 31st meeting will be held in New Dehli in February, the 32nd in Paris in June.
How many scripts are used by governments in India? How many scripts are used by Indian governments in the Americas?
