It seems that the latest in the series of meetings designed to lay the groundwork for the entity that will manage the internet’s domain name system (DNS) will not be producing any great advances on what happened in the two meetings that preceded it – with one exception (see separate story). But it did expose the wider internet community to the views of the Asia-Pacific countries, whose views tend to get lost in the US and Europe-dominated net culture. Speakers from Asia-Pacific were given prominence and a chance to air their views and concerns, many of which had not occurred to others before. For instance, if governments are excluded from any involvement on the board of the new entity, as seems likely, it will leave the ‘private sector’ in many of the Asia-Pacific countries in a bind, at least according to Laina Raveendran Greene, one of the organizers of the meeting, the third in the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) series. She says that in many Asia-Pacific counties the private sector still has heavy government involvement, most notably in the country’s country-code top-level domain registries (ccTLDs). The title of the meetings indicates another problem faced by the Asia-Pacific countries. The ‘white paper’ part refers to the US government document published on June 5, and not surprisingly, many in the far east are not up on recent US political happenings and have only just begun to address issues in the paper and therefore cannot be expected to come to a consensus any time soon. The main thrust of the white paper is that the internet community as a whole must come up with a self-organized body to run the DNS, preferably by September 30 this year, which is now looking unlikely. The next meeting is August 20-21 in Buenos Aires, and it too is expected to be more of an educational meeting for those in the region, rather than one at which real progress will be made. However, the fifth and final wrap-up meeting, which is likely to be held next month now looks like a Boston, Massachusetts-based affair. The chair of the IFWP meetings, Tamar Frankel is a professor at Boston University and the Harvard Law School has recently become heavily involved in the process, providing legal advice and also providing summaries of the relative positions on its web site. We hear that Frankel is going to draw up a list of the key ‘stakeholders’ – probably about 30 – and one person per stakeholder entity will be permitted to attend a meeting at which provisional documents will be drawn up framing the new entity. The outcome of that meeting will then be presented to an open meeting as soon as possible afterwards, at which some sort of vote will be taken. It had been thought that Ottawa was the likely venue until now (07/30/98). That will mean two of the five meetings will have been held on the East Coast of the US; the first was held in Reston, Virginia, just out side Washington, DC.
