Paul Twomey, CEO and President of ICANN, gave the opening keynote at the 2006 Domain Roundtable.
Reporting live from Domain Roundtable in Seattle…
Paul Twomey was the first speaker at Domain Roundtable in Seattle today. He spoke to a room packed with a couple hundred players in the domain name community. I’ve summarized some of his key points:
1. Security – there are a number of concerns for domain name security right now. Domain hijacking is an obvious concern. Alternate roots and IDNs are also an issue. But Twomey suggests the domainer community pay particular attention to denial of service attacks. Twomey said that some of the recent attacks have shown an unprecedented level of sophistication. If these tactics were used against individual sites they could take down businesses. Twomey suggests following this issue closely and getting involved in the process.
2. IDNs – will be one of the most important domain issues of the next 5 years with regards to stability and interoperability of the internet.
3. .EU– ICANN’s role in ccTLDs (country code domains) is to approve the domains but not to decide policy. The European Commission selected EURid as the registry. ICANN does not have a role in accrediting registrars for ccTLDs, nor can it set the policies of how these domains are administered.
4. Whois privacy – Twomey suggested that many people in the room are probably on the side of more privacy, not less privacy, in the Whois database. Twomey posed the question “what is your true business need for more privacyâ€. Without taking a side on the issue, Twomey urged that domainers look at the long term implications of privacy. He noted the importance of offering access to such information to law enforcement. If law enforcement doesn’t have access to this information and something big happens – say terrorism in which having access to this data is crucial – governments might make snap judgments that will hurt privacy even more.
Twomey took Q&A after his speech. I’ve paraphrased the questions and answers:
Q: Why introduce new TLDs at all? There are many more domains that web sites and introducing these new TLDs just results in massive speculation. Why not wait for supply and demand to catch up?
Twomey: That’s not my role to decide. But we have a process for granting new TLDs. You can register your opinion about this issue on our web site.
[Editor’s note: In our 2006 Domain Name Wire Survey, only 45% of domainers wanted to see new TLDs introduced.]
Q: (Marc Ostrofsky) Why should ccTLD operators be allowed who can register their domains?
Twomey: It is not ICANN’s role to decide policy of ccTLDs.
Q: (Marc Ostrofsky) Why should Verisign be allowed to raise prices on .com domains?
Twomey: The $6 registry fee was an arbitrarily set fee. There was no basis for it. [Editor’s note: Twomey then talked about competition and such, but didn’t directly answer the question.]
Q: (Senior VP of Public Interest Registry, which manages .org domains): You say that we need Whois privacy so law enforcement can access information. But law enforcement has always been privy to information like this, such as unlisted phone numbers.
Twomey: Keep in mind that other communities use Whois as well. An example is the engineering community. We recently had what we thought was a denial of service attack but it turned out to be another problem. Because of the contact data in Whois our engineers were able to contact the responsible party and fix the problem rather than treating it like a DOS attack.
Q: (Someone from the Phillipines): why is ICANN under US control instead of international control?
Twomey: We took over responsibilities that were managed by the US government since 1969. It’s a default that our memorandum of understanding is with the US government.
I’ll post updates on other sessions later today…
Jothan says
The cited Q&A members above were David of PIR, and Larry from AMPhilTech.com.
Editor says
Thanks Jothan!