By Nick Patience
Following on from our story about the ICANN governmental advisory committee (GAC) meeting on Tuesday from which some national representatives were expelled, we’re told by those present that representatives of Taiwan and Hong Kong did in fact attend the meeting, while a representative from New Zealand was among those thrown out, somewhat bizarrely. We had heard that Taiwan and Hong Kong had been excluded, as the person representing Moldova had been. Apparently, Taiwan and Hong Kong are viewed as separate economies, which gets round the problem of their national status being questionable.
However, we now understand that the ICANN board has basically accepted the recommendations of the GAC, which recommended accepting most of the findings of the recent report by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on the management of the domain name system. The board has agreed to let Hong Kong and Taiwan participate in future GAC meetings so long as their representatives are government officials and not someone from a company that runs its country-code top-level domain, for example. The board realizes that this is perhaps the most sensitive area in which it has to work and government officials do not want their meetings held in public. This week’s GAC meeting was held behind closed doors and its chair, Paul Twomey faced questions for a couple of hours afterwards. However, we’re still not sure who actually was in the meeting, as the list of participants has not yet been published.
