ICANN president Paul Twomey said in a press conference that at the Cape Town, South Africa meeting ICANN heard that Africa’s primary concern in this area is creating the infrastructure to allow its citizens to access the Internet.
That’s not our primary function at all, Twomey said. ICANN coordinates the Internet’s addressing systems. But the functions ICANN helps coordinate ensure that when Africa does get online, Africa can access the rest of the Internet in a seamless way.
Following the meeting, AfrISPA, the African Internet Service Provider Association, issued a statement saying it supports ICANN, in the face of the ongoing Internet governance debate within the United Nations, in which ICANN is entangled.
Referring to this UN World Summit on the Information Society process. AfriSPA said in a statement that any externally imposed changes in the roles of ICANN or [African regional Internet registry] AfriNIC would not be well received.
There are more urgent and focal areas for the WSIS, UN and ITU to address, said Eric Osiakwan, executive secretary of AfrISPA. Coordination of the Internet’s unique identifiers is currently being handled very well.
WSIS should instead be focused on issues such as child pornography, spam, and the lack of bandwidth in developing nations. ICANN works well for names and numbers – the same bottom up approach can be used to solve these other ongoing issues, he said.
