The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everybody, welcome to the ICANN Open Forum. I'm Chris Disspain, I'm on the ICANN board. I will moderate the session. This is your session. Our ICANN CEO Goran Marby is going to make open remarks and then it's up to you to bring up topics that are relevant to ICANN and at the close we will have our Chair Steve Crocker make closing remarks. So Goran Marby.
>> GORAN MARBY: Thank you, Chris. Many of you have heard my speeches over the last couple of weeks and months so I will not repeat myself. Instead, I got a question several times over the last couple of days what are you actually doing now after the session. So in the opening I would like to share some of those things, some of the philosophies I'm doing at the ICANN.
And my job is really to make sure that the train runs. That is what I'm supposed to do after the community has made decisions and given them to the board, as you know there are bits and pieces we have to improve. One of them is above everything else is transparency. As we are trying to improve the transparency factor by adding more information. I don't know if you have even the CO report now, but when it was first released there was a perfect description or more transparent description of what we do.
We are also working to make some of those things a little bit more predictable. We are working on how to handle, we are writing down how process actually works so we get a better view on how we do this. We are in the period where we are trying to implement things that the community decided after its insertion. So that is the closest concerns we have.
Some of the observations I'm doing now is two going back to the work and I would like to thank everybody who was involved in this issue. It's about accountability for the whole system. One of the things that's become apparent for me over the last couple of days and weeks is that this multistakeholder model gives us an accountability but it also gives us mandate. Now, when we are talking about the accountability, I would say that the multi‑stakeholder model as it's proven itself over the last couple of years ending up, and you can work together and produce accountability the way we are doing it.
Going forward one of the things we are addressing more and more as ICANN is how we are going to hand in hand with the next generation of uses of Internet. We certainly at times during the couple of days found that we have 3.6 billion users and they are the easy ones because they are urban people, educated people coming on and now we are trying to reach more people in rural areas. We don't have the same economic factors going on. And I think we together have to think about how to address them in ways that they actually see the need of going on the Internet, which means that we have to be better probably working with local scripts, working with, giving the opportunity for local content because a lot of those people coming on board will have that need.
And I'm looking forward to work with the community on that one. But with that, I'm more open for questions than for giving long speeches so this is one of my shortest speeches ever and that doesn't say very much, thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks. So I can see a number of faces that I know really well, and I number of faces that I know less well and a number that I don't know at all so that's really great. This is your session. We will take questions, discussion points from anybody about anything to do with ICANN, and there are board members in the room who can respond or staff that can respond, so I'm going to throw it open to the floor and anybody who would like to speech or ask a question, please let me know, raise your hand. Sir, gentleman over there.
>> FLORIAN DANIEL: Hello, everybody, my name is Florian Daniel. I'm from the Youth IGF Project from Austria and I want to specifically know if there is any plans for ICANN to expand their Next Gen and fellowship project because right now it's the fact that you can only attend if you are from the same region as the ICANN meeting is under and if there are my plans to expand that and put more money into investing in young people in the Internet Governance sector. Thanks.
>> I'll not specifically answer the question but I will try to tell you what we will try to do. We are in a process where admittedly some of the ‑‑ this is really something that the community has asked us to look into how to foster a new generation coming into the ICANN community because that's what we need. Even if I assume myself as very young, I know I'm not.
But what we are trying to do now and we are putting in place which we will come out and sort to the board and also the community is something called more demand driven engagement policy where we actually go out and ask the community, when we say community, we use it broad terms, but going forward we have to better understand the needs of the specific group within the ICANN community or even different countries or different languages, and we have to be better at understanding how we will get more people engaged. What we had in India where we had the ICANN meeting was the longest and largest meeting ever we had a thousand participants from India, which is great.
We also need to make sure that they come to the next meeting which will be in Copenhagen. I challenge Parliament members yesterday that at least a thousand Europeans go to Copenhagen. We had a thousand people from the African continent at the Americas meeting. I would say we are in the process that we have to work from a more bottom up process when it comes to engagement where your question actually fits in perfectly because I don't have the answer to it. I'm happy that you are here, by the way.
>> STEVE DELBIANCO: For youth to be engaged means far more than to attend a meeting. The work of ICANN is not at the meetings it's done in working groups that work at all hours of the night for several months often in a difficult approach to get to consensus so we are anxious to have new participants but not just to the meetings, but to engage, and the way you do that at ICANN you will learn quickly by attending a meeting where is the natural place that you would gravitate to, the at large, the business constituency, non‑commercial, you will navigate that acronym soup until you find a place and our job is to make you feel welcome and get you to join as a participant, and, again, that has to extend far beyond the meaning to where you sign up and participate at working groups, so please do.
>> MODERATOR: I agree with you, Steve, to build on what you said, I met a young lady yesterday who a year ago was on the ICANN next generation thing and I can't remember which meeting, and she knew very, very excited about ICANN. And within a year she is now working with the Minister of (indiscernible) in a particular country, specifically working in respect to ICANN. So these programs are incredibly important and make a huge difference. As Goran said, I can tell you that all of the information we get is going to be taken back and looked at, so thank you very much for raising it.
>> MODERATOR: Who would like to go next? It will be a quiet meeting.
>> AUDIENCE: Alfredo Caldero from Puerto Rico, and a couple of you know me because I was one of the cases he is mentioning actually, but I'm not a young person. I went to ICANN 57 with Eduardo, he has been my mentor since then, and actually right now I'm working in a few groups with Allen and Tijani and other people that are here and are members of the board itself. But you know what, it's not only the young people. I have the same problem. I can only go to meetings if somebody gives me a fellowship or I can get somebody that sponsors my expenses.
So think about also us, the not so young people that would like to get engaged working with ICANN but don't have the funds to travel or, you know.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Next question. Sir. Go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm a member of the European Parliament and in this session I should like to know more, a little bit more about your key crucial points that you are standing for. Yesterday we had an informal contact with Michael Leaks and members of the board already and there we could express our gratitude to the changes that have taken place, et cetera. And you are better positioned to keep the worldwide Internet open and to make the thing run and this is extremely important what happened and also the IANA new approach.
But can you tell us a little bit what are your main three points that you are really struggling for in the ICANN? It might be important because it looks like it's fixed now and they will go on, you know?
>> GORAN MARBY: It's a very good question, but it shouldn't be asked to us, not here on the board because it's actually ‑‑ I'm now ‑‑ I can't represent ‑‑ this is one of the fundamental things that's so important for us, it's the community who makes that priorities, and they have to make the priorities. We are the ones who implement the priorities of the community. There are a lot of discussions within the community too right now. If it's going to be a new DLT program, what can we learn from other ones? How do we better support local scripts? How do we streamline things? How do we end up not having too many conference calls at night? There are structural things.
The work stream 2 discussions about increasing accountability. So there are numerous steps, but I will always reframe back to say that speak to any given member of the community and you should have that answer. We are the ones who are implementing their wishes. I think that the overall, why are we doing this is because we believe in Internet has to be monitored. The other way the partners, the technical community, the people who work with protocols, we are in this because we think Internet is a real changer of people's lives. So until everybody is connected, until everybody is online working on the system, I think then we will stop talking about any of it. Maybe other problems will arise by then, but that gives you some of the answers.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Goran. Does anyone want to add their own voice to that?
>> You should answer it.
>> MODERATOR: Okay.
>> ALAN GREENBERG: Alan Greenberg, Chair at large ALAC committee in ICANN. I think Goran gave the answer, I will give it in words. If you ask every person, you will get a different three answers and that's part of the strength and part of the weakness that, you know, the multistakeholder group with so many different people represented each have different motives for being there. They each have different targets, they each want to achieve different things. Each of us believe we are here for the right reasons, and we will fight with each other over what those right reasons are, but that's I think what makes ICANN strong is because we have different people trying to decide what the important things are. And ultimately we, you know, people, what's the expression, we. I can't remember the expression, but where we decide to put our effort is where we end up doing the work.
So if enough of us want to work on IDNs then that becomes a priority. If enough of us want to work on privacy issues, then privacy becomes the important issue and so on, so forth.
>> MODERATOR: Tijani.
>> TIJANI BEN JEMAA: Thank you very much. It's not about that. I would like to comment on what was said our friend from Puerto Rico. Vice President of ALAC. I hear you, but there is no solution, everyone cannot be funded to come to the meetings, it's clear. But why ICANN is doing their meetings all over the world, it is especially to make people from this, from the country of the meeting to come to the meeting and to be more involved.
With the new meeting strategy, we created this small meeting where we don't need very huge venues, and in this case we will be able to go to the small countries and to make meetings there so that people can be involved from those countries, but to bring everyone, I think it is impossible.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you Tijani. Steve.
>> STEVE CROCKER: So I listened to your question and I listened to the answers that we are giving, and I maybe step a little bit further. It is certainly true that if you ask each person you may get a slightly different answer so I will give you three answers that are my answers but not necessarily the only answers that you would get. We spent the last 2.5 years with enormous emphasis on accountability and closely related topics.
That's still a key concern, but I will put that third on my list. One of our primary and enduring and continuing concerns is security and stability, smooth operation in every respect. We are not responsible for overall security of the Internet, but we do have a role to play in pieces of that, and we are quite vigorous about that.
And in the areas that we do have some responsibility, particularly the Domain Name System and the registry and registrar system, improving the credibility and legitimacy and trust in that how do we make that a marketplace that is more orderly, better understood, and more trustworthy? So that's one sort of answer number one I would say, number two which you have heard various echoes of is access. How do we make everything more inclusive? The Internet itself, ICANN as an organisation, all of the different aspects of reaching out on a core basis for the multistakeholder model.
And then coming back to the third one, we have gone through this long process of revising our bylaws and trying to expand the model that we have and now there is actually a substantial amount of work that isn't, doesn't attract a lot of attention. It's not glitzy, it's not glamorous, but getting these pieces to work right, absorbing the changes and it's fine grain activity. It infuses every single part of the organisation speaking just about the board itself, we spend a certain amount of time thinking about, okay, how can we not only adhere to the letter of the changes but how can we adhere to the spirit of it and what processes, what changes do we have to make in internal processes, and how do we do that in a sensible way rather than in just a for show.
So those are the three answers that I would give you. I don't think that they are contradictory with anything you have heard, but maybe they fill in a little piece.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Steve, any other comments on this particular issue or topic? Okay. So who would like to ask the next question or make the next comment? You are very well to go again.
>> AUDIENCE: So if nobody else has a question, I take the second chance. So for the part that I'm following in the NCUC discussion, I have seen several members expressing concern about Trump and his views, so I would like to know maybe from you, but also from everybody else in the room what are things that are a real issue and is there anything that ICANN can do? And if I'm correct I understood that the Internet archive is trying to get crowd sourcing money to move their data storage to Canada, so maybe there is something that I would like to know your opinion.
>> MODERATOR: I have a sneaking suspicion that Dr. Crocker would like to say something.
>> STEVE CROCKER: Bruce Dekale is a revered guy, a friend of mine, and I understand his concern about the Internet archive, and prudence and preparation is always welcome. You asked about Trump, that's a kind of local and temporary phenomenon. I wouldn't pay any attention to it.
>> MODERATOR: Anyone else want to tackle the Trump question? Allen Lusevis.
>> AUDIENCE: I won't answer the Trump question but being from Canada, they want to set up a copy in Canada, not move it to Canada.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm on the ICANN board, but I want to make a personal reaction because I have political background. We see a lot of recurring nationalism in many cases and Trump is one example, but there are builders and there are people all over the place. The amazing thing about the internet and about meetings like this is precisely that it connects us all regardless of borders, regardless of nationalities. I just came from a session on Sextortion. There were people from all other the world who want to do the same thing which is to make the Internet safe for people.
And if you want to say what can we do? This is what we can do, keep the Internet open and interconnected and make sure we are tackling the problems that are there. That's the reason I'm passionate about it and that's the best answer.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Anyone else game to respond? I will take the silence as a no. Fair enough. Next question, somebody at the back there. Okay. Somebody at the front then. This is going to be a very, very quick meeting. Jordan.
>> JORDAN CARTER: Thanks, Chris. My name is Jordon Carter. I'm the CEO of Internet NSEZ the CCLT manager for the domain among other things. I didn't want to answer your question because I'm not at the table and there are more senior people here than me, but you can, I think, observe as Louise has just said a kind of, a fracturing of the liberal consensus of you like that was the foundation stone for Internet Governance the way we do it today. This institution of ICANN that we are talking was set up in '98 and there is a long history of American support and patronage for and challenges from other parts of the world politically. I don't think the Trump thing is as interesting as to see what is the implications are if there is a broader turn away from open market and open trade and open politics.
And I agree too that the way that we can help solve that in our communities is by keeping talking to each other and not accepting that the kind of song of nationalism is the thing that should get in the way of that. I don't know if any of you want to answer that non‑question, but there you go.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks Jordan.
>> AUDIENCE: I am, of course, not going to answer that question either, but one other thing that is coming after the decision, and I said this a couple of times and I want to say it again because I think it's important. I realize that we always said that nobody, Internet is like a car, you actually don't know, you don't have to know how it actually works. But I'm starting to think that I have been wrong because there is, for natural reasons right now there are a lot of people around the world and Governments to start to get a grip on that Internet changes everything. We can say domain names, but the whole concept of a borderless society built on electronic data is something that changes everything.
And we still live in a fiscal reality. I live in a country with laws and borders and those two things right now under the sentiment of cybersecurity, terrorism, refugees, a lot of countries in the world are now under financial problems with atomization, with all of these things so what we are seeing now is starting the process of discussing it.
I'm starting to think that sometimes I hear legislative proposals and discussions that is based not on how Internet works, because everybody thinks that, I lot of people think that Internet is a national resource. It's a lake and you just jump in it. There are sharks around, but it's very pleasant, but it actually is a machine that needs to be oiled, managed, and developed. And sometimes there are even policies that I see around the world that comes up for good reason. You want to protect your citizens, protect people, protect them from something, and some of those policies can be against interoperability of the Internet. So I'm starting to think to myself maybe I have been wrong. Maybe we as a community, I'm not aging, but we are all involved, all have the obligation to train ourselves and train other people how Internet, not the big words about policies but the technical underpinnings of Internet.
Because if we end up with legislative proposals or discussions that actually has a negative effect on interoperability, we can really fragmentize Internet because of ignorance and knowledge. And a lot of discussions centre around the fact that we are trying to tell people Internet doesn't work that way. You get on line, you have 3.6 billion users. But it's one interoperability system. So maybe we have to figure out a way of working together, educate people how Internet works and maybe that can solve a part of the problem.
And as I said to Steve, I'm still looking for the off switch of Internet in my office. I haven't found it yet. Steve says I haven't been on board long enough. Thank you. And that was for the record a joke. There is no off switch.
>> MODERATOR: The two things we will take from this, Goran, is one that you suggested it was an off switch, and secondly, that four times you said that you might be wrong. So we will take that away and remind you. And I agree, I think, I mean, part of the problem is that we have conversations built around discussion of what ICANN does in respect to the Internet when actually what people are talking about is the Worldwide Web, they are not actually talking about the Internet, and we involve ourselves in the discussions. And we have got to find a way of making a clear distinction between those two things so people can understand. The gentleman at the back with his hand up.
>> HENRY RODRIGUES: Hello, Henry Rodriques from Estonia. I have a question regarding security and the latest DDoS attack on Dyn and entered a tax in October. What is the role of ICANN in securing those Internet backbone systems and responding to similar cyber-attacks? What is their role? Thank you?
>> STEVE CROCKER: So you asked what's the role of ICANN with respect to the Internet of Things based DDOS attack on Dyn. We do not have a premier front line role with respect to that. The underlying issue which I suspect you recognize is that the devices that were bot based attack on Dyn have been fielded with inadequate security, so they were enlisted into a botnet and then trained on Dyn. They could have been trained on anything else in which case it wouldn't have had, it wouldn't have looked like a DNS issue. It would have looked like an Internet attack just the same. The real core of this is how easy is it to enlist those devices and I think there is quite a lot of discussion in various Forums about maybe there should be standards or should be testing or should be good practices or there should be something so that the devices that you buy off the shelf and install in your home don't serve something else's purposes quite so easily.
We are paying a lot of attention to that. We have been sort of up to speed. There is not a whole lot that is directly related to the things that ICANN is directly involved in, but it's quite regrettable that that happens. The other aspect, of course, is that because of an attack on Dyn which is a major DNS provider, you can also ask the questions in what other ways are DNS providers at risk? That's, again, a somewhat more complicated question, and a DNS providers are very much like any other kind of provider, they are businesses that have servers, and whether it's a DNS provider or Google or Amazon or Facebook or New York Times, you know, Al Jazeera or anything else they are subject to the same sort of attacks. And that's another evolving area that's sort of one or two neighborhoods outside of where our core is.
We pay a lot of attention and we keep up to speed on it, but it's not something that we have either direct responsibility or direct control over.
>> MODERATOR: Steve, do you want to say something.
>> AUDIENCE: Not on this topic but a new question. Would that be all right?
>> MODERATOR: Let me finish on this one and then I will come to you. Allen, go ahead.
>> ALAN GREENBERG: Not related directly to the attack, but the management of the attack process does use domain names and the abuse or misuse or ill use of domain names clearly does fall within our remit to the extent that we can have any control at all, and certainly there are people in ICANN who are looking at that and saying is there anything that is within our power to do? Of course, not being in a position to when I registered Alan Greenberg.org whether I will be running a botnet with it or not, but it's an interesting challenge but that's the intersection of what we do and the mechanism of the attack.
>> MODERATOR: Steve.
>> AUDIENCE: Let me chime in. Thank you, Allen, I should have referred to that aspect which is it is true that the controls that are used for triggering these botnets sometimes make use of a large number of pre-registered domain names. This came up very strongly and vividly in the Conficker bug, worm attack that we saw several years ago. So working out mechanisms to counter that that are both technically feasible and fit smoothly into the contractual machinery we have or to put it another way to keep the contractual machinery from interfering with smooth counters so that is an area we have had dealings with and try to be helpful on. I think it's still fundamentally a supporting role rather than a primary role but it's one we attention to.
>> MODERATOR: Henry, did you want to say anything?
>> HENRY RODRIGUES: Goran reminds we do have DNS security in the form of signatures added to records at the root level, the top level, and domain level and every level down below and we are in the process of rolling the key signing key, that infrastructure is a very powerful infrastructure whose value is going to pay off not only in the integrity of the DNS infrastructure itself, but a platform on which other stuff can be built. And I think that has, is going to pay off in ways that are going to take a while, but have a really pervasive impact over time.
Just as the answers build upon each other so do the technologies we use. The fast flux technology that is used to control botnets is also used for good things to provide routing to some of the heavier used sites on the internet, so you can't just stop it from working because then good parts of the Internet stop too. It makes our life interesting.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks. Allen.
>> ALLEN GREENBERG: Going on the analogy with the car and DNS is when the first cars were out there, they looked very different from the cars we have now and with the increased amount of cars we built in safety measures and there has been great standards out there so DNSSEC, but on top of that Dyn and DNS over TLS has been standardized and IETF. What we sadly see is the adoption of that is not by far as we should want, and it also goes really quite slow. So what can ICANN do and what should we do to make this go, to make this go faster?
>> AUDIENCE: Actually what ICANN can do and what should we do to make it go faster, we were listening hard for the answers.
>> AUDIENCE: Well, it could easily be said that open DNS package is, which provides DNSSEC is hardly easy to deploy and I think much can be done to improve the ease of deployment, help registrars deploy it and create more awareness among end users who have websites to enable that, or perhaps work on enabling it by default as has been done by Acme and lets encrypt which was a huge improvement for the security and proliferation of security on the Internet.
>> STEVE CROCKER: You just pulled on a thread that's got a lot of things connected to it. The general picture at least as I hear it in sharing with everybody is developing software packages and getting them to be adopted and that's a complex marketplace problem, and it's not as simple as, well, just put some money in this and that would help. I mean, that might help a little bit, but it's not a complete sustainable package. So I think it's an important and worthy problem. And I think it is one of the areas that as a community we might study. I have been concerned, for example, about not just about specific packages like that that are improvements, but even the whole DNS infrastructure depends upon a relatively small number of software packages that come from extraordinarily dedicated but underfunded non‑profit mostly operations.
And I think that when we lift ourselves up from the immediacy of this pressure we have been under with all of this accountability and so forth and start focusing on as I listed number one as security and stability issues that that's an area that ICANN does not have the man date or the resources to be in control of, but it's one that I think in conjunction with many other players in the community, we would want to bring to the surface.
>> MODERATOR: Steve, thank you. I want to say something about this. I think to go off of what Goran said when he was talking about the list of three things and that that's up to you. The times that the ICANN organisation and board gets itself into trouble which with we tell you we would like to concentrate on this or we should do that. If the community comes to us and says we would like to facilitate us to work on the things you have talked about, and that's what the community wants, then, you know, that's our job. Our job is to facilitate that and make that happen. That's how I would ‑‑ we have to be very careful that we don't ‑‑ if we try and top down this, we will end up in heaps of trouble. Do you want to respond and then I will go to Steve.
>> AUDIENCE: A quick response I think it is within the scope and mission of the board to insure that the DNS runs stable, and for that if there is a dependency only software packages that might fall within the remit and perhaps that not just waiting for the community but proactive work may be done, for instance, security is too dependent on a package like NTP. NTP has no funding at this moment whatsoever, so I think it does fall within the responsibility and understanding of the ICANN and ICANN board to see how we can have this healthy technical infrastructure on which we depend.
>> AUDIENCE: Just to make sure we are talking about the same things and unpack, you referred to NTP, Network Time Protocol, so you are suggesting that the Network Time Protocol is now within the scope of ICANN's concern?
>> AUDIENCE: I would definitely say that to be able to make use of SSL, which is important to make use of PGP SEC, we are dependent on NTP so we cannot say we have nothing to do with it. I'm not saying it falls under the complete remit that it should be managed like that but we should be concerned that there is no maintenance or security testing nor an audit ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE: Please get two other people and then we have a quorum that can say the community is interested in this.
>> MODERATOR: Steve.
>> STEVE DELBIANCO: A new topic our mission is clear to coordinate unique identifiers for stable and security delivery of packets and yet there is relentless permissionless not just at the applications layer but at unique identifiers layer and I have heard talk over the last several months of the attractiveness of alternatives way as such as digital object architecture and I would ask what the organisation ICANN, because the community I don't have any idea if the community has discussed this sufficiently yet, but I would be interested to know if the corporation is watching the discussions about DOA and because I think we would learn, we would learn what problems is DOA solving that we are not solving with our current names and numbers? And if we are not solving those problems, let's take the steps to do that. In other words, we can learn if alternatives are being considered and introduced, those alternatives must be doing something perhaps we could do bet.
And the second alternative is to embrace. So we might learn but we also might embrace that some other form of identifiers could well be an area where policies, policy making is necessary no matter how you do your identification, but the policy competence of ICANN could be a ready resource for even alternative forms of unique identifiers.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Steph, I will little Goran to respond first.
>> GORAN MARBY: Everybody jumped on this. But I will give a general answer and I will hand it over to Steve. But one thing that I think many people forget in this is that Internet isn't built up, you don't because you always remind me it's a voluntary system. We have actually accepted a way of doing this forget with the friends in the numbering community and the protocol community and the end users, and we all came into a voluntary system and I would say we have to deserve the right to serve the ICANN community. Someone gets better at doing what we do, we should be replaced.
It's actually in the bylaws and that's the same thing for the whole of ICANN. If someone comes up with an alternative method that is better than we do to support the Internet of the W06R8D, we should try to involve ourselves to be as good as we can be, but we should also be competition in terms of technology. I think that's very, very important. But with that said, I don't think that DOA is the answer, I mean, we follow is and we look into it and try to understand it. That is one of the technologies you have talked about, but I think that is a very important assumption from the beginning. Steve?
>> I think the question you asked is what is a good Forum? And I think there is frankly a lot of confusion about that. The underlying idea of a digital object architecture is somewhat more complicated and reaches at a different part of the problem space than the Domain Name System, but then the question arises where is that line and why, you know, are they both needed or can one replace the other? And I think there is a certain amount of cone fusion that needs to be untangled there. I would much matter have Ariel speak on this than me.
>> ARIEL BALBOSA: I think Steve mentioned it clearly that ‑- I'm Ariel Balbosa I'm in technical engagement at ICANN. So you mentioned the confusion that is out there around the DOA and we are looking at that very closely from ICANN technical engagement perspective. Last week we had a workshop specifically dedicated to that and how we can also follow the work that the ITU is doing in that area in Study Group 20 where this is being discussed to, one, understand the different link and prepare to see the linkage as you mentioned but also to help people to understand the confusion.
What is it providing precisely? People talk about persistent identification, what does it mean? Is there a standard that exists developed by the IT that has solved that problem? How can we promote them? Are we solving a real problem? Is the industry taking it? So there is a lot of work that will come or position in the coming, but it is something we are following and we will probably provide more information as we get on.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks Ariel. Allen you wanted to say something?
>> ALAN GREENBERG: Just briefly, those of us with acronym phobia. DOA means dead on arrival. Thank you, Steve, for actually saying what it meant to those who might not have known.
>> MODERATOR: Steve, did you want to ‑‑
>> STEVE DELBIANCO: We want to coordinate unique identifiers for the purpose of delivering for registrants and users reliable pack delivery and unique identifiers may be more than names and numbers so I'm glad to hear that management and the board are aware and open to investigate and to educate themselves and the rest of us in the community about what are the actual versus speculative benefits, try to compare them, there is no need to be defensive. We have to welcome competition, we are in the Internet business.
And I think that's the right attitude to take and by engagement at the ITU is entirely appropriate. But I would look forward to having a discussion of that sooner than later, perhaps, even at the next meeting.
>> MODERATOR: We have time for one more question if there is one. Yes, sir. Go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. My name is Sarl Gamocho, I'm from Mexico, from the youth observatory. I have a question regarding the database because we live in an era of personal information flowing every day, every second on the net. So here in Mexico like a couple of years ago we were having like an awakening on the importance of personal data. So people started asking questions regarding why I have to give my personal information when I register a domain name. I understand that it's for a public purposes because I'm related to the Domain Name System, but a lot of people out there, they don't have an idea, and they are very concerned that they could have maybe a personal information data breach because they have to make public their personal data.
So my question is what does ICANN do to maybe start preventing this data breaches on personal information? Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: So there is a lot of work going on in ICANN at the moment with all things to do with registry directory services which is the new Whois, I guess. This is a very, very difficult and complicated problem. The ICANN community has been discussing Whois for as long as there has been an ICANN community, Whois predated the ICANN community, and it's a very difficult issue. There are many conflicting opinions so law enforcement, for example, and I'm generalizing here, but law enforcement is very keen to have as much available data as possible the privacy people are keen to have as little data available as possible. The registrars would like much as long as it doesn't cost them money.
So there are lots and lots of competing views on this and it is something we are working on consistently and constantly. I don't have answer for you other than to say if you would like to involve yourself in the debate, it's available, you can do so. You can be involved on line. You don't have to be at a meeting. You can involve yourselves in working groups. Now, I have Akram who wants to stay something and Leon.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, Chris, so the community has actually looked at the issue, and there is a few PDPs or possible development processes in that address the current Whois and there is next generation Whois that is looking at it from a blank sheet of paper answering the questions from the beginning. In the meantime also there is a proxy privacy program that is in place that allows a restaurant to use a proxy registration so that they don't reveal their information publicly, but the information can be retrieved if needed. So there are some avenues to address the issue that you are asking.
>> MODERATOR: Leon.
>> LEON FELIPE SANCHEZ AMBIA: Thank you very much. I think I'm familiar with the context of your questions since we are both from Mexico, and the Whois, I mean, you technically don't have data breaches from the Whois data base because it's a public database. So there can't be a breach. And as far as concerns from people not wanting to have their data all around, widespread on the Internet, well, I think Akram as provided a right answer to your question, and you have to think of it also as when you buy some kind of real estate, you have a public registry for that. So it's no different than that, right?
The data is public, and if you want to keep your data safe from being widespread on any other databases, you should protect them maybe with one of the services, privacy services. So that would be.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks Leon. Rinalia, did you want to say something?
>> RINALIA ABDUL RAHIM: I'm Rinalia Rahim, member of the ICANN board. There are people who experience moments of awakening on specific topics when they engage at the IGF or at ICANN meetings or in regional meetings related to ICT or the Internet. The challenge is whether they are interested in it because they want to know more or because they actually want to actually get in and do something about it. And I think when it comes to ICANN, one of the challenges is that being able to present information in a digestible way so that that someone who is not very knowledgeable about it can go to a site or a page and actually have a good surface level understanding of what it is and then can decide whether they want to engage and then can be channeled properly to where they can be more active.
And I think that that's a responsibility of the organisation to help make that happen.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks Rinalia. I have been reminded for completeness sake it's worth mentioning that there is a replacement protocol to the Whois protocol which is called LDAP which is much more flexible from the point of view of the information provided and gating and so on. And that is something that is being worked on at the moment, the introduction of that which will make some of the problems easier to handle.
Anyone else finally on this topic? Okay. So I will ask Steve to make a few closing remarks and then if you can come back to me at the end, Steve, I have something I need to say.
>> STEVE CROCKER: First of all, thank you, Chris, for moderating. Thank you, everybody, for coming. I don't think I recognize my fellow board members, how many we have here Rinalia, Lusivic, Goran, Chris, Martin, did I miss somebody? Good. We hope this has been helpful to all of you. Probably an overriding message from our perspective, you have heard the thank you's many times. The other part of the message is we are bearing down on getting work done, sort of going back to all of the things that are backlogged plus the digestion process as I call it, the absorbing the changes that we have agreed to and that we have begun to make and will continue to implement.
And it's a pretty exciting environment. And so one of the things that I say each and every time is there is plenty of room to get involved and there is even plenty of room at the top because soon enough all of us will be gone and you guys will be in charge. So do it. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Steve. Before I close, I would like to just ask you all to consider finding, consider people you might want to recommend, put their names forward to the nominating committee. The nominating committee selects members for the board at large committee CCNS country code name supporting organisation and the generic name supporting organisation, and it's a way that ICANN has to bring expertise from our side of our community into the leadership of the organisation. The 2017 nominating committee is now sitting. It has its web page is about to be updated. Their job is to find people to take seats at this time next year at our IGM. Three members, one men of the CCSO, three members of the at large advisory Council with two-year terms and two members of the GNSO Council with two‑year terms so applications will be opening in the next week or so.
NoncomICANN.org is the page to watch. It's critical for the nominating committee to be able to do the best job it can, that it has as wide a range of people putting their names forward for all of these positions, not just the board, but the others ones are justify as critical, just as important and I would encourage all of you who would to consider the possibility of doing so, and also if you know of people who you think would be useful candidates, please encourage them to put their names forward as well. With that, I would like to thank Goran for his opening remarks in answering most or not answering most of the questions. And Steve as well, and all of ICANN org for putting this whole thing together and you for coming and participating. Thank you all very much.
(Concluded at 1555).