KEY POINTS:
In the virtual world of the internet, ICANN might be said to be the equivalent of the United Nations. The United States-based internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is the body that manages internet address naming. It was set up in 1998 and, for most of that time, it has been chaired by American Vint Cerf, widely considered the "father" of the internet.
At a meeting in Los Angeles late this month, Cerf will be stepping down, leaving the chairmanship open to one of ICANN's 20 or so other directors. One of those is Peter Dengate Thrush, a Kiwi who has been associated with ICANN from its inception and who continues to have deep involvement with New Zealand internet governance.
Last year, while at an ICANN meeting in Morocco, Dengate Thrush was confronted with the personal tragedy of the deaths of his wife, brother and father in a car crash in the Hutt Valley. Despite that calamity, he continues his work.
Last night, in advance of the Los Angeles meeting, Dengate Thrush and the rest of the ICANN board were to get together in Frankfurt to discuss Cerf's replacement. "We've been working on succession planning for some time," Wellington-based Dengate Thrush, a lawyer, said before setting out for Germany, "and we're going to see if we can finalise things at that [Frankfurt] meeting." While the Frankfurt meeting was restricted to ICANN's directors, anyone is welcome at the Los Angeles event, which runs from October 29 to November 2. Cerf, in fact, has gone as far as making a direct appeal for people to come along in a posting to YouTube (owned by Google, where he is chief internet evangelist). "Your opinions could count," Cerf tells viewers, in a pitch for public participation in running the internet.
In fact, before the public part of the Los Angeles gathering gets going, various bodies associated with ICANN will have been meeting for two days to talk about technical internet governance matters. Those sessions will include discussion of changes to the WHOIS database (by the Generic Names Supporting Organisation), new generic top-level domains, or gTLDs (by the Governmental Advisory Committee), and IPv6 (by the internet Assigned Numbers Authority).
When the issues are stripped of the jargon, they're not as inaccessible as they first sound.
Take WHOIS. It's a little-known online service that provides contact information for the registrant of any domain name. For websites ending in .nz, go to www.dns.org.nz, enter the domain name in the search engine and all will be revealed.
Similarly, gTLDs are a burning issue for any group wanting to establish a new category of web address.
The already approved ones include .com, .school, .govt and the lesser-known .aero. But what's to stop the porn industry creating .xxx for websites with adult content? It is already trying but ICANN, and its supporting organisations, have so far said no.
Keith Davidson, executive director of internetNZ, which sets the rules for the New Zealand internet, says Cerf's stepping down represents a "profound" change for ICANN - not affecting its functioning but its stature.
ICANN met in Wellington in March last year and such was Cerf's fame as an internet pioneer that organisations signed up as sponsors.
"You can look around the internet for a long time and still fail to come up with the name of a person of such status as Vint," Davidson says.
That's not to say Dengate Thrush, who has experience chairing internetNZ and ICANN committees, would not be a handy replacement, Davidson says. internetNZ is backing his bid for the chairmanship.
Davidson doesn't think Cerf exaggerates when he says anyone can make a useful contribution to ICANN. One of the interesting things about the forum ICANN provides is that ideas rise and fall on their merits, not because of those proposing them.
An idea that internetNZ will be pushing in Los Angeles is the internationalisation of domain names, an increasingly pressing issue now that more than half the internet's 1.2 billion users don't speak English as a first language. "You still basically need some English knowledge if you're to type in a URL in your browser ... and that's an unfair ask on 80-something per cent of the planet's population," Davidson says.
Meanwhile, Dengate Thrush says an important quality of the man he may succeed is his clear thinking, which steered ICANN through its "tempestuous formative years". "For an engineer he's able to articulate principles and both sides of an argument, which is unusual for someone with such enormous technical expertise."
The question for ICANN's board now is if it's time to put a lawyer in charge.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist.
What's in a name?
* ICANN, the internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a non-profit organisation.
* Its tasks include managing the internet's system of domain names.
* The chairman is Vinton Cerf, who played a key role in establishing the internet.
* Directors include a New Zealander, lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush.
