Amongst theseveral important issues that came in for
discussion during the latest ICANN meeting in Shanghai was the administration
of ccTLDs.
Now that ICANN has abandoned its status as a democratic
organization with direct public participation, several national Governments who
manage the local domain name space through ccTLD registries are demanding more
autonomy.
There are more than 240 ccTLD registries and each of them
are already adopting there own policies for registration even though they work
under ICANN for all technical standards.
In the recent ICANN meeting, UK and Japan administrators
made a demand for more freedom particularly in the distribution of IP
addresses. The New Zealand representative seems to have warned that the ccTLD
administrators may breakout of ICANN fold and work for an alternative.
While
some observers have dismissed this as a storm in the tea cup, given the lack
of legitimacy of ICANN without a democratic public representation, the dissidence cannot be
taken lightly.
India has been conspicuous by its absence in these
deliberations since neither the Indian Government nor any organization
(other than naavi.org) has focused on the need to protect our country's
right to Cyber Space Management. In the coming years, when the IPV6 system
takes over, there will be major policy decisions on assignment of IP numbers.
This will be a critical parameter of development in the forthcoming
Convergent Society and any country which does not get a foothold in the policy
making body will suffer in economic development.
Since every Convergent device will require a IP identity,
lack of sufficient numbers for India may compromise its development in the
Cyber Space Economy.
It may be recalled here that while the Convergence Bill
under consideration has envisaged a "Spectrum Committee" and a "Spectrum
Manager" to monitor the allocation of frequency spectrum to different users in
India and to represent Indian interests in international fora, ITA-2000 did
not consider domain name space management a part of Cyber Space Regulation.
Unlike the similar law in South Africa (ECT-2002), which provided for an
office of the "Domain Name Manager", Indian law has provided for a similar
office.
So far, the only
organization that has an interest in domain name
space is NCST which is the domain registry for .in domains. As of 7th May,
there were only 5154 domain name registrations in the .in domain since the
formation of the registry in 1995. While there is no official estimate of the
number of domain names registered by Indians in the non .in domain, a rough
estimate of the order would be in the region of 100,000. The lack of focus of
NCST in promoting .in registrations has resulted in not only a drain of Indian
foreign exchange to the extent of nearly one million US $ per year,but has
also resulted in an opportunity loss for the country in attracting non
Indians from registering the Indian domain names.
It is in this connection that
we need to recognize the importance of the decision of Chinese authorities
announced during the Shanghai meeting that they will throw open the
registration of Chinese domain names to non Chinese from December 2002. According
to information available, there are already 130,000 .cn registrations while
there are over 700,000 non .cn registrations by Chinese nationals. China
expects several thousand registrations from non Chinese who would
value .cn domain names as a presence in Chinese Cyber Market place.
naavi.org is fully in
agreement with this argument and regrets that we in India have not moved in
this direction. As a result, India is losing financially and making a huge
strategic mistake in not promoting an exclusive Cyber Space of .in domain
names.
We need to urgently formulate
a wholesome plan to harness the potential of the .in domain name space so that
we will not lose an opportunity to create our own Business Place in the
Virtual World.
Will this notice from China
wake us up?
Naavi
November1, 2002
Related Article:
China opens up .cn domain
Governance of the Domain Space ECT2002 Vs ITA-2000
