Despite lawsuits, ICANN attends to 'business as usual'

IDG News Service - Apparently unfazed by two fresh lawsuits questioning the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' authority, the group's president characterized its meeting in Rome this week as "business as usual."
"What ties [all the Internet players] together are contracts; therefore, having disputes over those agreements is not at all unusual," ICANN President Paul Twomey said during a conference call today. Twomey's remarks came one week after the organization was slapped with a lawsuit from VeriSign Inc. over a delay in implementing one of the company's services (see story); it was then hit a day later with a lawsuit lodged by a group of domain name registrars trying to block the service's implementation.
At stake is not only the future of a VeriSign service allowing customers to back-order Internet domain names, called Wait List Service, but also ICANN's role as an Internet regulatory authority.
With Internet governance matters still to be hammered out by the various stakeholders, the nonprofit body charged with overseeing technical matters related to the Internet has been placed between a rock and a hard place.
While VeriSign, among others, contends that ICANN is overstepping its charter by taking actions such as delaying the domain name service, ICANN leaders acknowledge that there is no clear authority tasked with dealing with such matters.
That doesn't mean that ICANN doesn't wish to offload some of the issues it has been facing. Speaking during the conference call, ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf pointed out that there are other established international organizations that already have business rules in place, such as the World Trade Organization.
"Even when we are talking about e-business, there are a number of other bodies that have policies on international business," he said.
Still, ICANN leaders said heightened policy concerns are a natural byproduct of the Internet's growth. "The Internet is a collaboration between many parties ... and these disputes are an example of how the Internet works," Cerf said.
Twomey added that despite the recent legal wranglings, the meetings in Rome this week have proceeded with "business as usual."
Whereas the lawsuits reflect the business sector's concerns, the meetings this week will focus more on global and technical issues related to the Internet, Twomey said.
On Monday, the group formed the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization, and working groups have been focusing on how to improve the Whois database that contains information on domain name owners, he said.
However, governance issues were also being considered during a workshop on the World Summit on the Information Society.
"ICANN is acommunity more than an institution or an organization, and we have people participating in discussions on a variety of issues," Twomey said.
The Rome meeting runs through Saturday.