ICANN 35, 21–26 June 2009, Sydney

I am writing this blog from my Mac (of course) while in the ICANN meeting in Sydney. Important topics for this meeting are iDNs (Internationalised Domain Names), DNSSEC (Secure DNS) and IPv6. I do have IPv6 connectivity here, as the ICANN network is IPv6 enabled. It is an excellent IPv6 connection and access to Google via IPv6 seems to work faster than via IPv4.

It is somewhat silly: travelling across half the globe to meet in rooms without windows with people who for the larger part are not Australian. Unfortunately it still is necessary to meet F2F if you are dealing with politically sensitive topics and multiple stakeholders. In such circumstances it is nearly impossible to achieve consensus with purely online communication tools (fortunate for the airline industry). At ICANN there are present Domain name registries, Registrars, operators, ISPs, telecoms, lots of lawyers, economists, users and government representatives. The governments of various countries have sent representatives in order to have at least some sort of say into the way the Internet develops. Combined with all the lawyers this gives me the impression that most of the work I do here is damage control.

A sensitive topic up for discussion here is the separation between registrar (commercial entity taking care of your domain name registration) and registry (like .nl or .eu). Up to now that separation is required. A registry may not be a registrar, or be an owner of a registrar. Registrars in particular want to get rid of that requirement when ICANN issues new Top Level Domains (TLD). I personally am firmly in favour of keeping the requirement for separation as the default. Exceptions may be defined in strictly defined cases. With .ORG we clearly reasoned why we think this is the best policy.

Let me end this posting by saying that I am really proud that .ORG is the first large and open TLD that has made DNSSEC operational based on the new NSEC3 standard.

Of course .ORG and .NL (the two registries for which I am on the board) are operationally fully IPv6 compliant.

Erik Huizer (chairman of the Dutch IPv6 Task force and scientific director at TNO)