Initial rumblings coming out of the current set of meetings of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) going on in Singapore this week have been rather sketchy so far, and included a fairly perfunctory announcement by ICANN’s nascent government advisory committee yesterday saying that it has secured the support of 17 national governments and a clutch of standards. The committee will advise the ICANN board on governmental issues. There are also committees advising on membership, independent review and DNS root server matters. What is not clear is just who is on the committee, which is chaired by Paul Twomey, currently the CEO of Australia National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE). The committee held its first meeting yesterday, March 2, but all that came out of it was the support of such bodies as the European Commission, International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – all of which have been fairly close on internet matters over the past few years. More substantive developments are expected to spill from the ICANN meeting, especially after the public meeting being held today.
