During his address at the World Summit on the Information Society, an International Telecommunications Union-organized event in Geneva, Twomey told the assembled senior global government officials that ICANN welcomed their input.
We do not stand in the way of governments and others feeling that they want to establish a mechanism to discuss issues in the area, he said. And our experience suggests that equal participation of all sectors is essential.
The WSIS agreed on a Declaration of Principle and a Plan of Action on various Internet-related issues. Early drafts called on the ITU to take over ICANN’s functions on the debatable pretext that they constitute Internet governance.
The push to have ICANN, which has overall responsibility for managing the internet’s naming and addressing systems under contract with the US government, replaced by the ITU was made by some countries that believe it is too US-centric.
Twomey reiterated ICANN and the US’ view that ICANN does not govern the Internet, referring to the limited technical functions ICANN helps coordinate and manage and pointing to his own background in the Australian government.
The anti-ICANN proposals in the WSIS documents were ultimately replaced by a call for a UN working group to produce a report two years from now that defines Internet governance and makes recommendations on who should carry out those functions.
Twomey said ICANN intends to ramp up its overseas presence. He said: ICANN is expanding its physical office presence over the next six months to having offices in all regions of the world. And our virtual global presence will be increasingly multi-lingual.
ICANN recently redesigned its web site, and now has some basic information in Arabic, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as the much more extensive pages in English.
The organization recently also opened an office in Brussels, its first outside of its native California, to be headed by Paul Verhoef, who previously worked at the European Commission’s information technology directorate.
It was not immediately clear how directly related to the threat of the ITU taking over its role ICANN’s expansion plans are. A spokesperson for ICANN did not return a call for comment yesterday.
This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.
