IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
17 SEPTEMBER 10
SESSION 50
1430
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. 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 session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: So we are going to get started. It seems like there are problems in connecting with Hong Kong and we are hoping that a Skype message might get through and there is a loop of some sort that is causing difficulties. And we will try and work that out if we are lucky and I am not sure if Jonathan is listening in at this point. I hope he is and we are working with Jonathan and we hope that you will be able to participate with your voice at a certain point.
So I would like I have a little guide, that I can if it is on the screen there that's good to connect with, but and there it is. Good. And so welcome to City TLD Governance of Best Practices. I am going to provide a little information about this. This is a thanks, first of all, to the Internet Governance Caucus and the Internet Governance Forum for enabling this presentation. And I want to make a word about Hawa Diakite of Mali. She was unable to be here. And she was unable to talk to you about the concerns about the pricing issues as they affect the Africa countries. The $185,000 fee proposed by ICANN would turn the Internet in to a less than permissible situation. I have a couple of slides here for about five minutes that will explain how I came here and I guess all of you can follow through.
And although I was involved very briefly in 1998 when ICANN was being formed my first time came in 2001 as ground roots governance. Basically said that the city should require dotNYC and develop it as a public resource. In 2005 I got a call from a fellow who encouraged me to get reengaged in the process and who will remain nameless but he said that they were just about to finish, the ICANN was about to finish the process and that I should get involved because we would be able to get involved in perhaps a second round of city TLDs but I started looking in to it and in 2006 I got involved I committed to and formed a non profit organisation and attended an ICANN student session in Prague that was hosted by my neighbor Wolfgang and ICANN passed a new TLD resolution which included major cities which Dirk had provided a good deal of effort in to it as well as others. And at the time we talked about a Paris Understanding. It was a document that we talked about that enabled cities to talk to each other and we have a draft of that. But in 2010 the process went dark as governments started to get involved. And I thought that the cities are not learning from one another for one thing and the public is not engaged in the process. So luckily, the IGC was able to help sponsor this event and here we are. So I just want to show a couple of quick slides for some context. Cities are amongst some of our oldest institutions. The new boy on the block is New York City since 1625 and before it there was a Spain, a France, a UK, Germany or USA. There were these cities.
The Greek city states shows that cities have long looked to cooperate with one another. Up in this neck of the woods were around for 400 years and commerce was shared between different cities and, pardon me, we are going to hear a little bit more later on about specific applications, but there are a couple of TLD applications that I thought I would mention that are really close to my heart, one of which is universal tagging which is related to the Internet of things and it involves giving a name to everything in a city. Every traffic light, every drop curve, fire alarm, utility pipe and this makes for a programmer friendly city, especially for the new location based applications that are on the cell phones. It is useful for service delivery by the Government and others. And one of the things we are doing in New York City we are changing these neighborhood names and they have some tourist benefits but no way to communicate locally in New York City.
One of the things we are looking forward to is having names like Greenwich Village and when we we are going to have a fantastic local intuitive neighborhood names that people will be able to link in to and find out what's going on and sort of set the course for the neighborhoods that they have never been able to do before. New York City used to be Manhattan. Just map there, simple one little island and in 1900 it spread out to be the five Burroughs and now we are faced with a situation where we have 800 Government bodies on that area of the map and that is an awful lot of redundancy. And the idea is that what happens in Hoboken which is right across the rivers from us and gets that name. And can we somehow broker a more regional Government structure. You want that name? Absolutely.
Here are the conditions and just be democratic Government and we would give to them and hopefully this could be true in other areas where there are these borders. It is not that New York isn't unique in that respect. Just note that we are very much an urban planet. More than half the population is now urban. There is sustainable cities mainly to a sustainable planet. We can say that city TLDs are the savior of our earth.
I have this wonderful picture here from Paris and that's Ms. Liberty in a Paris suburb in about 1885, but the question is how do we get cities talking to one another so we don't all work in our isolated little silos and how do we get residents engaged in designing infrastructure. We learn something with cable TV in New York, local communication and the Paris Understanding that I discussed before is available. And that's about the end of my comments. I just want to then talk about those in the room here who are going to be heard from in order. I think this is the order that will follow. And the next to speak will be Dirk Krischenowski who is the CEO of dotBerlin. Maybe if you could raise your hand when I mention your name. Dirk is going to talk about the troubles he has in leading the effort of city TLD. Bertrand de la Chapelle is going to talk about the ICANN and how this all fits in with the ICANN and what cities will do if this process continues to be stalled. Thomas Schneider is going to be speaking about the EURODIG and how it might have lessons we can learn from it. Hong Xue is going to talk about developing countries and how they are looking at TLDs. Izumi Aizu from Tokyo is going to talk about Japan and what they are going to be doing with their TLDs. How they are looking at city TLDs. Werner Staub who is the secretary of the CORE Registry based out of Geneva will talk about a particular application that he has been working on for a number of years.
Ana Cristina Amoroso das Neves will be the next speaker from Portugal. She has a number of TLD applications that I call them that she is going to talk about and then we are hoping for Jonathan. If we get this technical stuff done Jonathan Shea from Hong Kong who is the CEO of the dotHK will tell us how he operates. Anything that's missed at that point will be presented by Wolfgang Kleinwachter who is going to give some general comments on things that he has learned over the many years and then the last speaker will be Sebastien Bachollet. Sebastien is going to talk about where city TLDs fit within the ICANN structure. Right now they are in this tiny box. About 50 little boxes and one of them is where they intend to put the cities of the world under the current thinking and Sebastien has a different opinion. And Oliver Crepin Lebond is our remote operator and he is trying to bring in our folks from Hong Kong. Hoping that Jonathan is listening. What's he going to turn off? He is good. I think we are making progress there. So I then will turn over to everyone who is going to give about a five, six minute presentation. And if things are going well we are going to try and since there is an important meeting going on after this we might break when everyone is finished and head to our necessary discussion. We are going to start with Dirk Krischenowski who is going to talk.
>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: Yes. As you may know my name is Dirk Krischenowski and I am founder and CEO of dotBerlin initiative for Berlin space and actually my father came from Lithuania many years ago. So I have a special relationship to this country. But we are not only looking for dotBerlin. We are also consulting other cities and capitals in Europe on the topic of city Top Level Domains and I am happy to share our experience we made throughout this with you today.
This is my third IGF meeting after Athens and Rio de Janeiro. But I will not focus today in particular on dotBerlin. I will focus more on the cities and how cities can benefit from the city Top Level Domains.
To go back a little bit in the history, already the idea of city and geo Top Level Domains is really generic. Already in the beginning of the DNS John Postel considered name space for countries but also for cities and regions. In mid of '90s he got John Postel requests to add the Caribbean and that was 15 years ago. First attempt for city Top Level Domains were made in 2000 when parties tried and they failed for various reasons. For instance, lacking of real good concept of operating a city Top Level Domain. The first person I know that had a good idea on how city Top Level Domain names could be managed and governed at the same time around 2000 was Thomas Lowenhaupt and he is sitting here. At dotBerlin we learned from this and in 2000 when ICANN was a clear cut concept and asked ICANN to open that application window for dotBerlin and others. But since this topic the city Top Level Domain names really became visible globally and virtualized for initiatives virtualized more than a dozen initiatives like Paris, New York and Tokyo and we will hear a little bit about this and we are all awaiting that ICANN approves new TLDs. Look to the future and not to the past when city TLDs are already in place.
And there are many areas of benefits where city TLDs can add some benefits but since my speaking time is limited I will focus on a particular interesting topic within our multistakeholder approach and politics, culture and among citizens we especially inspire the marketing and branding people of cities and city mayors organisations on this hot new topic. Especially it is digital branding and at the moment I am preparing a paper for the second International Place Branding conference in Bogota in February next year and I would like to share some ideas and share this paper with you today and hopefully discuss this. So the first is that digital branding will become more and more important in the future of the city's marketing strategy. Digital branding will become even more relevant as a competitive factor when it comes to attract capital people and general interest and in this sense the city TLDs are seen by city marketing experts and as a unique destination proposition. It is like comparable to using P in the normal marketing speech. And two city branding by on Top Level Domains of cities will be unleashing the potential of the whole city society to market their destination not only Government and institutions here and lead as they are normal in city marketing.
We think that each domain name, each city Top Level Domain name like oliver.paris would contribute as an individual ambassador for the city in the world and the last among the ten I have here, the third one in my speech is city Top Level Domain names have the potential to become the most important single contact point with a name of the city worldwide. How they will be used, the domain names a billion forwards a year for e mails and Web sites and they will better increase the search engine positions for the name of the cities. That's really interesting and we think this is altogether a really striking point in the city's marketing. I hope I showed with these three some important dimensions of city TLDs which makes it even more important to plan the management, governance of city TLDs with all affected parties, especially the city governments. Thank you.
>> BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you. My name is Bertrand de la Chapelle. Quite a lot of people around the table are actually directly involved in those processes. So I don't want to spend too much time on the general programme. What I would like to do is put a few highlights on topics that people applying for new TLDs for cities have to take in to account and I can structure that either later today but also in the run up to future discussions and future ICANN meetings. I will not come back on the delays of the ICANN programme for new TLDs. I think one of the points that Thomas will highlight and that came clearly out of the EURODIG discussions, one of the reasons for the programme for new TLDs is being delayed is because we are sticking to a one size fits all approach and we are trying to find s single programme for all categories of TLDs. This is surprising. In the case of city TLDs have specific characteristics that make them ready identifiable. They clearly are going to be run mostly by entities that will be based in the nation in most cases and should be potentially more subject to the national law with all the good procedures for handling disputes that exist in national laws. So in a certain respect we are confronted with a situation where city TLDs are not really generic in nature. They are actually somewhere in the range of truly generic words, like sports or music and Country Code Top Level Domain. They are much more common in country TLDs than with other very generic strings.
Another point is that there clearly is a problem at the moment regarding the pricing and the technical requirements for city TLDs. Because in certain countries and especially in developing countries it will be hard to muster the technical capacity and the financial aspect. However, city TLDs as Dirk said have a strong potential. So they are likely to be relatively strong TLDs. Therefore the technical requirements may be important for TLDs that will be relatively large. And finally in the current programme we do have a question that has to be scrutinized very, very closely which is in the virtual integration rules that are going to be finalized regarding separation of registries and registrars we need to be careful to make sure that city TLDs are not penalized by the vertical integration mechanism when there are no registrars in the region or if they have problem marketing their name. In this context there are a certain number of provisions that are interested today in the vertical integration framework that need to be finalized but it is there are provisions for orphan TLDs and situations where there could be exceptions and maybe city TLDs will use those exceptions.
There is a range of issues that will have to be checked when we finalize the applicant guidebook to make sure that city TLDs are not harmed by one application or another. I just want to highlight in the limited time remaining like one and a half minute or two one thing that has been an option always if for one reason or the other the gTLD programme cannot be finalized in a sufficient manner there might be a need to emphasize sort of pressure that would bring from major or key mayors a pressure to push for specific track regarding city TLDs. It is a last resort option but it should be taken in to account in case things have been blocked.
The next thing is we have had and most around this table know that we have had long discussions on the notion of categories that have not been implemented in the draft applicant guidebook. My conviction if it is not in the applicant guidebook categories will be very useful for the batching process and the processing of applications afterwards and it is clear that within the staff of ICANN it would make perfect sense to have a portion of this stuff dedicated to handling gTLDs applications. Cities among TLDs are clearly a subset that should be dealt with in a coordinating manner. The next point this could lead in the future to a specific grouping within the GNSO to handle together the needs of this specific group of TLDs. And as ICANN is evolving I would imagine that this structure gets some more autonomy within the GNSO or different subgroups dealing with different TLDs.
I don't want to avoid as a next point the potential conflict because we are already seeing a few of them. There is the case of Las Vegas where you have competing applications for the same TLD of the same place. I do not know what kind of rule we have. I think the community of TLD applicants could help ICANN and the board identify possible solutions to help solve those problems, and the other element and here I am obviously self interested is we might consider to take in to account a sort of preference for capital cities when there is a conflict with other names in other countries. I know it is self serving because Paris, of course, has many other and Berlin is the same problem, but it wouldn't make sense in trying to solve this question. And finally it has already been done a little bit but a strong exchange of practices which is what we are doing here among the applicants who are not basically competing with one another could be structured around three elements. One that I know Thomas Lowenhaupt is very keen on is internal governance of those TLDs and how it engages the local community, in particular in defining the registration policy.
The second point to coordinate an exchange best practices is precisely on how you manage the second level domain. Paris maybe could be handled in a different way than just throwing it up for auction. And the third element is what is the promotion and lounge process to ensure that there is progressive adoption, that it raises awareness as it spreads. But it will be a criteria for the success. And so in closing I want to I know that there is already a group that is coordinating among those actors. I think it is important to structure it as much as possible but also to do a strong awareness raising not only in the conferences that Dirk was mentioning but also towards the international associations of mayors. I don't know what has been done probably already on that topic. But there are international Congresses and I think it would be extremely important as part of the communication programme of the new gTLD by ICANN to have a specific focus on these conferences. And if a group of applicants could come and make joint presentations on I think that would be spectacular. And I want to underscore that these are in themselves TLDs that are sufficient to demonstrate the benefit of an opening up of the space.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you. I appreciate that. Next we are going to hear from Thomas Schneider.
>> THOMAS SCHNEIDER: Hello to everyone. My name is Thomas Schneider. I work for OFCOM in Switzerland and I am the deputy director of the international department and I represent Switzerland in a number of fora including the ICANN. I will basically concentrate my intervention and maybe then take the floor later in the discussion. I hope we have time to discuss the interventions to present to you some of the key findings of the EURODIG discussion, the workshop that was called Geographical and Other Names of Public Interest. A number of names where a public interest is linked to the name and there was some findings and some proposals were made. And I am going to quickly present the most important of these to you.
First of all, the fundamental not revolutionary but nevertheless fundamental filing is its global resource which should be managed in a global public interest. According to ICANN's article in the AoC. This means that, for instance, its management structures and provisions should be drafted in a way that it is not only feasible for maybe dotBerlin and dotNewYork to get a city TLD but for cities in developing countries who have different provisions and circumstances. Then the fact that these TLDs could or should serve the public interest does not mean they have to be run as a not for profit. Commercially organised entities can fit the public interest.
There are different in our view there are different categories or uses for TLDs which should be somehow reflected in the regime that is applied to them. So different types of legal contracts is what we is not whether you call them categories but should be different types of legal contracts. But these regimes should be kept simple and gaming between regimes should be avoided. Possible elements of regime differentiation could be and be bound by contracts under the local law related to the community that they purport to rather than the California law only. Like I said there are other TLDs of public interest which I will not go in to detail.
There were some proposals that were made. Should build on experience with already existing TLDs. There is no existing TLD for a city but an existing TLD for a local linguistic and cultural community which is more or less close to the city of Barcelona and some experience can be drawn from them, one in terms of regimes which should not over complicate. And specific application procedures for terms of public interest in general should be explored. City TLDs is one thing but there are others. There was a proposal at ICANN to create a public interest team of qualified experts from all over the world that would assist ICANN in taking in to account the global public interest. ICANN could explore establishing a supporting organisation for public interest registries and registrars. This is also an interesting proposal also linked if this will not happen maybe the GNSO and other structures would have to be adopted and restructured. The registry operators contracts should reflect the local law of the community concern.
Thank you very much.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you, Thomas. Our next presenter will be Hong Xue.
>> HONG XUE: I guess I am the right person to present immediately after Thomas Schneider. Thinking of public interest registrars and registries possibly in ICANN. Yesterday afternoon there was a main session IG TLD. First time development agenda has become a primary issue for discussion of Internet Governance. This is quite tremendous improvement for the radical framework of Internet Governance. So my presentation is actually city TLD for development. I want primarily to analyze importance of city TLDs from developing countries and regions. I have just heard from my colleagues and friends from Turneta in Ireland country by the Caribbean Sea they would like to apply for a city TLD. It is also for poor countries and small communities. I also want to talk about city TLDs in IDN scripts. That's very important. Nonlatching scripts, user community and also the city TLD for smaller communities. So basically kind of development perspective for city TLDs.
For the benefit of time I have shot in the presentation in two points. One is how to develop a development fund to facilitate the application for these marginalized city TLD applicants. Talked about by previous presenters that this is very burdensome to assume the application fees $185,000 U.S. dollars for the people from a small town for ID community. That is very high for them. It is not affordable. It is possible to have a kind of funding from the auction of the TLD scripts. That has been raised formally as an ICANN process. This is one point. I don't have very careful thinking about that, but secondly I want to emphasize the importance of capacity building for this city TLD applicants from developing countries, regions and for small communities. I particularly want to analyze the capacity building from the following four aspects. One is that for ID city TLD community they will need to be aware of the technical and policy complexity of the DAG4. With respect to IDN it seems ICANN is not only fully prepared for the policy but it is not fully prepared for the technology. I don't want to repeat the famous example from the CJK community about the two version of variance scripts that cannot be matched together and there is still a big problem preventing the CJK group to go ahead for these new city TLD scripts in native language. That's a big problem.
The city TLD applicants would need to know that. The second capacity building issue would be community based but initiative on categorization of new gTLD even though not accepted in DAG4 but an eye opening initiative. When ID TLD was introduced people raised the issue whether categorized as community based TLD. Not all of them are community based and not all of them are similar. Some of them appear public interest and some of them highly commercial. About how this city TLD for underdeveloped countries, can they become one category or categorized as community based TLD. This is a big issue. Some of the city TLDs can be categorized as community based and some are not. And this is other interpretation for this that will be very interesting, especially for those potential open registration city TLDs. I like the identity of hong.dot.Paris. I love Paris. So even I am living in Beijing and I want to register there.
The third issue for capacity building is geographical names. ICANN make policy in the new TLD programme for use of geographical names at top level. So this is there are some very clear restrictions and guidance on use of this and, of course, there is a multistakeholder involvement. When you attempt to use a geographical name there is one last issue I want to emphasize, that of intellectual property. . As an intellectual property lawyer I see some very serious challenging issues out of intellectual property law. Think about the following two scenarios, think about those famous city TLDs. Almost all of them, all of these city names have been registered as a trademark.s Tokyo is a trademark. Beijing is a trademark and has been registered by many companies in different categories in many jurisdictions. We have all these intellectual property conventions named after cities, but city names can still be registered as trademark. We have a governance issue indeed. When you apply you need to engage local municipal Governments. But what if a company owns the city name as a trademark. Should these privates sector organizations be involved in the TLD's management. Even the application is a big issue. There is another intellectual property issue that is even more complicated and that is geographical indication (GI). Champagne is among the most famous GI, it is specifically protected in TRIPS. But it is also a name of a town. Switzerland, Champagne, but Champagne is specifically protected as a most important GI. You cannot use the word Champagne. You can't say Champagne style or Champagne like. This is highly restricted in the protected names. And in developing countries where we have Dutching in Sri Lanka. If somebody attempt to apply dotDutching. It is a public SS. Should it be approved by Sri Lanka or it must go through an Internet trade negotiation. This is highly complicated. We need to open up all our minds and think about the legal issues that could be involved. Thank you. Sorry for running over.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you very much for complicating our lives even more but we got to know all these problems. Our next speaker is going to be Izumi Aizu.
>> IZUMI AIZU: Thank you. Here I am a member of the body called Japan Internet domain name council's steering committee. This is personal. And it is not associated with this body per se. But let me explain what this Internet domain council is which is tasked to deal with city or geographical TLDs. JIDC was created as kind of a multistakeholder membership and it includes several trade associations around the Internet and Japan Bar Association, including IP lawyers and not necessarily only that and also a number of academic or research institutions including my institution and others but no single full profit company can become a member. It is just more neutral association or number. Anyway the government initiated a sort of council, a high level policy regulatory council which convened several different levels of meetings or committees. And then concluded that private sector led council be established. So that first new IDN TLDs selected Nehong in Chinese or Japanese characters but the registry will be selected including those running already incumbents in an open neutral selection process.
We are tasked to do that and we almost at the very final stage of selecting the registry for dotNehong, announcement will come within a few days or at least a week or two from now. The second task of this council is to help the cities or those interested in providing the geographical TLD services. I will go in to more detail later. And the third thing is to engage a dialogue with international counterparts such as ICANN or this place under that and this was written in the ministry based council final report. We are tasked to help cities, et cetera.
So based on that in May this year we started a geographic name TLD working group and under which we also have a geographical name TLD study group. The working group consists of Internet associations and likes and the study groups measure functional members of the municipalities, functional Government bodies. The working group will prepare the material while the study group members, meaning the municipality guys interested in will give us the feedbacks or their questions or their challenges. Interestingly originally we had thought we better try to help the cities who are going to introduce the names TLDs. Over the course of two meetings many, many municipality people told us well, some are considering, some are wondering how to consider. Some are also wondering, we are not as a city bureaucrat, not planning to introduce but if some private sectors come to us and ask for it. What kind of procedure do we have to go through to say yes or no or whatever. Or in the case of Paris similarly what if some Japanese TLDs or city names apply from any other jurisdiction under the gTLD or geo TLDs.
Originally we are tasked to create material, handbook to support these introduction of. The city government of Tokyo, Hiroshima combined with Government with the same name but different Government bodies showed some degree of interest to perhaps introduce the TLDs but there is no formal official confirmation yet. There were more than 12 I believe cities or professional governments participated in the study group. And they mostly are in a very difficult situation. Of course, this 185,000 dollars application fee if these cities are to pay are quite a lot. More so the Japanese government, I mean local government and central governments are in the big red right now. Anything that requires investment must go through a very rigorous process including their parliament and it is difficult to make a case. So with that we also came to an interesting early conclusion that maybe we better give an information piece which stands neutral on how to deal with these issues of, you know, what exactly is happening at ICANN first of all.
And so we try to summarize the current version of the DAG and also prepare some FAQs, et cetera. So that at least they will not be surprised to be put in a situation that they have to answer for two weeks or four weeks once the process starts. And also if you are to really object then you need to know the financial obligation whatsoever, but you have to pay for certain fee to make an objection which puts them in a very difficult situation if that's the case. Very small cities also contacted us that because of their high degree of international tourism, a small village or two in Japan have attracted many Australian skiers in their winter, in their summer and our winter. But is there sort of how do you evaluate the demand or how do you make economic case and stuff like that. Very few authorities are here in Japan or there elsewhere. So these are the several challenges and especially we notice that not only you focus on the introduction of the TLD by the city or by any entity closely working with the city, there are various issues. Maybe it is a (Off microphone) especially if you talk about the public interest. It is not necessarily those interests who register the domains. But it could be a little bit larger and these areas in my limited knowledge are not adequately addressed yet. To go to the registration I mean the introduction site, yes, there is a huge need for policy incorporation of the registrations now that we have dotNehong. So these are the areas that we have to work in the near future.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you very much. I didn't mean to cut you off. You were getting a little faster than the scribes could handle there. There are some magic people out there who take these words down and put them up on screen. I understand we have inspired the first five speakers have inspired Bertrand to comment again and then he has to run off to the Taking Stock meeting. I am going to give him one more minute and then we will say good bye to Bertrand and then after him will be Werner.
>> BERTRAND de la CHAPELLE: Thank you, Thomas. I want to share very quickly first of all, I am extremely interested by what Izumi is saying and probably interesting to replicate in one way or another at the various national levels and I would like to initiate a similar process. The second thing is I think there would be a very interesting thing to do which is to partner closely with a communication programme of ICANN in terms of producing in multiple languages this kind of summary of the DAG on the cities frequently asked questions, recommendations of process, how to set up this kind of structure at the national level. They will do an outreach. Anything that can help them touch this community is good and the final idea that just popped from a discussion ICANN is talking incredibly about dispute resolution systems or providers. We have never raised the question in the community of mediation support. What about introducing a completely free and nonbinding mechanism that could help actors that will have a dispute get together, try to find an agreeable agreement, I think it would be great.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you very much. Werner?
>> WERNER STAUB: My name is Werner Staub. I work for CORE Registry and it was chartered 12 years ago. And the underlining idea has always been for CORE that they should be introduced in the public interest. One of the reasons to introduce new TLDs is however very often the fact that a new Top Level Domain offers a clean slate of policy. So we are not encumbered in the case of a new Top Level Domain by legacy. So we can do things right with respect to certain objective. And it is in this context I would like to present one of the components of domain management that we propose to use in the case of city TLDs specifically and we call this component Name Space Mandates. I repeat the word Name Space Mandates. This is a replacement for some cases of the normal domain registration. If you look at the domain registration has about one domain and it is based on the relationship between one domain and one contract. The parties related to that with respect to a single domain and essentially the idea is that once a registrant has paid that's it. There is no other obligations. There is no service obligation on the part of the registrant and the registrant is not required to provide content. He or she can do as he or she pleases with that domain.
Now in the case of a name space mandate we take the inverse approach. We look at a number of words and there are actually many. In each case of a city I would expect there be tens of thousands of names that are of public interest. Take, for instance, street names, monument names or key words for public services or commercial products and services. All these have a public aspect and, of course, the public expects some information to be useful about these words. How are they currently used? If we have domain implication in first come first approach very often they are used for something different and they are used very often for paper clip advertising, and unfortunately as this paper clip advertising was built and the original words it has been allocated in so to speak people are tricked in to clicking on something because they believe it is what they were looking for but actually it isn't.
So overall these domain registrations obtained individually very often by specialized people they do not have a good image of the TLD itself or if it was a city TLD of the city itself. In the case of name space mandate, we have a different approach. First of all, we take here a set of domains names such as, for instance, all the street names that would be for a city like Paris or Berlin and including tens of thousands of names at once. Entrusted for a given time period pending retender at a later stage if need to be a party that has a commitment actually a mandate to provide useful content to the public. That party is allowed to make money on those domain registrations most probably by way of advertising and commissions. And there is rules imposed by the cities with respect to what they may do in terms of using those domains to make money. The money that they make is, of course, to fund the activities that they have with respect to providing useful content.
So if they provide more useful content they can, of course, have a better economic perspective. The fact that these domains are allocated to the same party at once means that this party can work on the global perception of that space. If somebody has learned that HL is available and has this useful information. So it makes sense if you have the entire space. Not limited to street names.
One other case typically Yellow Pages, what I call the professional or commercial key words. That is a space where very often there are actually professional organisations that would be able to provide useful content. However, they are sometimes too close and have too small a budget to do that. So they are actually happy if a neutral party can handle that. If in the case of a name space mandate we have a contract that enables the professional organisations if need be to recover their specific sets of domain names if they are not happy with whatever the name space mandate does. Then we have actually a very useful compromise between centralized investment by one company and the respectful interest of the stakeholders. Stakeholders have actually some negotiating chip to achieve that their interests, are going to be respected by the by the name space mandate without requiring the relocation of the respective names. This is a way of using the TLD in the interest of the public but an additional advantage of putting it on the map. On the very first day it be used so when dotNYC or dotParis goes live people will see useful domains where they can see the day to day activity of the city.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you, Werner. Appreciate that. Next speaker is going to be Ana Cristina Amoroso das Neves.
>> ANA CRISTINA AMOROSO das NEVES: Thank you. Well, are you listening to me?
>> It doesn't sound that loud.
>> ANA CRISTINA AMOROSO das NEVES: Okay. Well, I am coming to talk from the Government and public interest point of view in favor of the city TLDs and as a member of GAC and to point out some ideas how we see the interest to have city TLDs as an opportunity to organise information activities in the Internet according to geographical location once the Web is a virtual space of flows of information but we know localization. So we use city TLDs, can provide a cross organisation of the virtual space according to city locations. So this brings together even on one hand the open network organisation of the web with its impeling structure which on the other hand, the physical space of city activities. The most important advantages that we can see from the public interest point of view seem to be inviting the presence of a city in the Web. Facilitating search and exchange of information relating to city and local services and to create the city identity building in the cyberspace, a city branding in the Web. So something that was already touched upon by the first speaker.
However, for these advantages to be fulfilled it is not enough to gain addition for business other organisations and people to resist and that the city TLD. I think that it should be a strong force based on relationships within the city. It must also be living, a living community. Therefore it must federate sites of other Top Level Domains related to the city. This requires in my perspective a three pronged strategy. One, to create a movement of support and regulation of the city TLD among other mayors of other cities and of other countries. To divide a scheme of cross linking to existing content related to the city TLD. And develop a social network space centred in the city people and activities.
In close the semantic web, Web 2.0 can strengthen means of city TLD. While it is not developed the strategy of interlinking content of other TLDs can be a first answer to the federation goal of the city TLD.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Excellent. Thank you very much. Semantic web is something that interests me greatly. So I am happy to hear it introduced. Next we are going to go to Hong Kong. Is it possible to hear from Jonathan Shea who has been listening, too? Jonathan is the manager and the CEO of the organisation that runs the dotHK TLD and he is going to speak now.
>> JONATHAN SHEA: Hello. I am not sure if I am can be heard. Not sure if I can be heard. Hello. Hello. Hello. Okay. I have prepared a powerpoint. I am not sure. You guys put it up now or I just speak. Regarding the powerpoint. Okay. Thank you. Let me thank you for inviting me to speak at this work meeting session. Next slide please. Next slide please.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Jonathan, you can continue speaking. It is fine. You are going to hear yourself a few seconds afterwards. That's all.
>> JONATHAN SHEA: Thank you. Maybe I should try to okay. Thank you very much. It is my first time using the remote participation. So please excuse my lack of experience. And so let me proceed. DotHK, next slide please. That is quite disturbing. But let me press on. DotHK was introduced in to Hong Kong in the 1990s. And HK was selected in the year 2000. And it is a non profit organisation. Next slide please. And that we being a nonprofit organisation we do not have learning or membership scheme. So registrars of dotHK can become our members and (Off microphone) the box by the company. Next slide please.
Please press yeah. So our mission was very simple. We just want to meeting registration to provide active consumer centric and sustainable service to registry. Next slide please. So in addition to (Off microphone) dotHK space the company also have the mandate to interact in a regional and international scope so we can roll the ministry together and improve over time. Next slide. I think I have to skip this slide. I realise that we are talking about city TLD and I will try not to go in to too much detail. Please press key one more time. And okay. I think when you set up a city TLD the first thing you should decide on is categories of domain names under the TLD that you allow people to register. And most of the new Top Level Domains are likely to register a name at the second (Off microphone). But with the city TLD you need to consider the needs of the registry that they would like to have more specific categorizations.
In terms of the number of domain names we have grown in the past six to nine years now from 2,000 to about 190,000 now. And another thing I think the registry, we need to consider is whether you allow people to register without having to provide any documentary proof. Whether you want people or whether you allow people to register with as (Off microphone) project as possible or you want to have a little business more assurance of the identity of the registry and documentations. In the case of dotHK we request document proof, documents at the current level but for the second we do not require proof. But we still require registrants to enter document number in case we need to verify the identity of the registrant in the future. Next slide please. Another thing I think of the registry or a new city TLD you have to consider whether you have to often or type of language in addition to English. Or the city TLD in the case of Hong Kong in addition to the English dotHK we also offer Chinese dotHK.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Excuse me, if you wouldn't mind that
>> JONATHAN SHEA: I know depending on the culture and level of acceptance of people of different cultures or culture in the city, you may have to reserve or restrict the use of certain words under the domain name under the Top Level Domain. In the case of dotHK we research some of the names. That means that they are not available for registration. And words whereby the registrant will have to produce some authorization, approval of authorization before they are allowed to use those words in the names. Next slide please. Please press the button one more time.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Jonathan, can you hear me at all? This is Thomas Lowenhaupt.
>> JONATHAN SHEA: The powerpoint doesn't show up very well. I will explain the concept. For example, in the case of Hong Kong the word bank and insurance are controlled by ordinance. Therefore the registrant log on to register a name with the word bank and the registrant would need an authorization from the relevant authority in Hong Kong. And in the case of reserve names there are a number of categories. The obvious one being the medical terms like dot dot dot or http. Most of the time those are reserved to avoid confusion. Now when city TLD is (Off microphone) it is good to have a domain name resolution mechanism put in place. In we are lucky that we have ICANN already established TLD.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Jonathan, this is Thomas Lowenhaupt. Are you able to hear me? Jonathan? Jonathan? Yes, we are having some difficulties with the audio at this point. Could you give one more minute and then wrap it up?
>> JONATHAN SHEA: Sure. Yes. Okay. Maybe I just highlight some of the other aspects. That I think as a registry of city TLD is considered next slide please. I heard that some the previous speakers they also mention branding or digital branding. I totally agree that it is important that for the city TLD that the branding be established and have to be quite well positioned so that people understand what the letter is for register under the new city TLD.
Next slide please. And so I believe security is really important. When the domain when the city TLD is ready for registration the registry leader have to put in place measures to ensure that their livelihood of the city TLD being phishing and Spamming will be minimized. Next slide. Here we are lucky that we get the rights to administer the new dotHongKong domain name. The Hong Kong being in China's character. ICANN has approved our new domain name in 2.0. I encourage you to apply for it in their own language. (Off microphone). Next slide.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Jonathan, you are able to hear me? You acknowledge shaking yes, you hear? This is Thomas Lowenhaupt speaking. Just wonder if you could we are having you are near the end?
>> JONATHAN SHEA: Yes, I can hear you clearly.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you very much.
>> JONATHAN SHEA: Yes yeah. Yes. I think I am nearly finish.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Well, thank you so very much. It was I know it is very late at night in Hong Kong and
>> JONATHAN SHEA: I nearly finished.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: And your effort and participation is very much appreciated. You are working with Oliver and getting this all working has been a real marvel for us.
>> JONATHAN SHEA: I apologize for the very awkward presentation here.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Absolutely nothing to do with you. We will talk to the technology providers but thank you very much. And our next speaker is going to be Wolfgang, Wolfgang Kleinwachter.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: Thank you, Thomas, and I want to thank you for organizing this because I understand that it is not so easy to organise such a panel with so many interesting speakers with so many interesting ideas after we have discussed this issue discussed for more than ten years. What's new can come here to the process and because although today nearly everything has said. So that I ask it myself what I can add. I want just to make two observations. One is short historical reflection. I remember the second ICANN meeting I think it was in Berlin and in 1999 when a debate started about new Top Level Domains because ICANN had the mandate and it was established to look in to the introduction of new top level domains to bring in to the domain space. There was a thing such as a gTLD registry but only had one member. It was NSI at the time. And the small workshop organised by the TLD registry constituency had six participants. One was Don Telage from NSI and one was Roger Cochetti later also of NSI, but at this time he was from IBM and we had that debate from two different positions. Milton Mueller argued for hundreds of thousands of Top Level Domains which should be introduced in the next few years. Don Telage said no, we have to be very careful. We should have a phased process and a phased approach. And this was echoed by Roger Cochetti from IBM, a big trademark owner. He said if we open the door for hundreds of thousands of Top Level Domains we produce trademark problem and then companies like IBM have to register in all these new Top Level Domains.
So I think was this is funny to see after years of debate and now thousands of pages and new rounds the structure is the basic argument. The pros and cons has not changed so much. So we know now much more how naive we have been in 1998. The whole thing is much more complex than expected and we have learned a lot about the difficulties and the complexity all laid out all in the presentations by Hong, by Anna and others. Anyhow we are still in the early days because we have not moved forward so quickly.
This was first just historical reflection and it is up to you to draw a conclusion from this own memory. Second point is that we define domain names as a resource, as a critical resource like IP addresses. And if we say okay, these are the key resources for the information economy or the Internet economy and we compare this with the resources of the industry economy, then we discover that there are two basic differences between the nature of the resources from the industry economy and the Internet economy. Then the two differences are that the resources in the industry economy are limited and they are linked to a territory. It is like oil or coal or something like that. Even the frequency spectrum for IT resource is to a certain degree limited.
The positions on the stationary orbit for communication satellites is limited resources. While in a more theoretical approach the resources of the Internet economy IP addresses and domain names are not linked to a territory and they are unlimited. And I think this has traumatic consequences for the way how we have to manage this resources. And a limited resource certainly has to have a certain management for fair distribution. We have a lot of aspects involved. And if it is linked to a territory then we very often you have a battle over the control of the resources. If there is a lot of oil in the Middle East, you should not be surprised that there are wars because somebody wants to control the resources. All wars in the last 200 years it is very often around control of resources. Nobody can control all the IP addresses or domain names. So that means this is totally different, but if it comes to the management and the question of limitation, then I think we should rethink our approach because you see that in the IP address space now with the transformation from four to six as now when we see the situation now the IP for address space, you know, comes to a certain end and some people see this, discover this now as a limited resource. Immediately we see a market and this raises new issues of management and distribution.
Thirdly IP version 6 is nearly unlimited but how quick this will go and some people have an interest to develop a market for IP version 4. And if we take this in to consideration and approach from this perspective the debate about new gTLDs then we should take this in mind that on the one hand this is an unlimited resource and we should be very careful not with certain policies try to limit these resources. Because if we try to limit this resource then we provoke battles. We provoke all kinds of other side effects which are probably not planned that we have these effects.
Anyhow I understand fully the implications. That's why I started with the historical observation and we have to take all this in to consideration. So it is not easy but what I wanted to say with my short intervention here is sometimes we have to take all our time to lean back to rethink why we are doing this, what are the implications and the understanding of the nature of the resources of the Internet economy I think is an important point and we did invest so far too less time to discuss this nature of the resources. Thank you.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you, Wolfgang. And I'd like to mention that the timing couldn't be more perfect because Peter Dengate Thrush, the Chair of ICANN, has just walked in just as Sebastien Bachollet who is the VP of ALAC is going to give a presentation.
>> SEBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Thank you very much. First I want to start like start with my great grandmother came from this city and she left as a young woman with her sister to come to Paris in the late 1800s and you can imagine what could have been a life of a young girl from this country in the late 1800s coming to Paris to decide to make study of medicines and to be able to become a doctor. And I want now to turn to my part of the presentation. I hope that powerpoint will be okay transferring from one to another because it seems to be a little bit difficult. I tried to draw a design and try to recycle things. There are three types of TLDs in the future who could be joined partly together and work together as a gTLD stream and it could be interesting to work at the level, of course, the city ones, what I call the cultural ones and the third the original or the original ones. We have today an example of some of them. For the cultural we have dotCat. One is under the gTLD umbrella. It is dotAsia and one that's under the umbrella of city TLD it is dotEU. And then you start to see that even today it is difficult to have to know where is the home for the type of TLD we are talking about.
And in addition to that we request, we were struggling from some years starting as Dirk told us a few years ago. Sorry. That's my Chair who called me. I guess there is some trouble. Sorry. And one of the problems we have since five years in this process is a general one. It is where candidates to gTLD or TLD proponents could join together to discuss. There was not a place in the GU to find a place to discuss. We need a place to discuss. The meeting today show exactly what we need. We need to be able to exchange because there are some experience in the NYC project. There is some experience in the dotBerlin project and some idea from the (Off microphone) in Portugal. Idea of somebody from the legal side in China. And we need to be able to be together. And if the room is not set up for us within the ICANN framework we need to build it ourselves and then to suggest to ICANN that we that's something that could fit within the organisation in one way or another.
Because if not we will come one day, we don't know when, but one day with one on one project and we will have not been able to take advantage of what the others we are doing and it is why taking this second slide, I will go to the second myself, too, I tried to take a list of the projects and to see who could be the member. In fact, we need to have a stakeholder organisation with people from the possible registry, candidate registry. Some end user business and individual from the place who would like to join and to help the project to be put in place. Registry providers services and potential registrar. And in each and every city and we can duplicate that for the original and the cultural one. We will need some additional people who have expertise, who are not dealing directly with one or the other project. The idea here is once again to push the project, the projects to help ICANN to fulfill its mission to have new gTLD or have new TLD may I say like that, city, regional, cultural to allow exchange of ideas maybe to do something like hey, look ICANN, we are 10, 12, hundreds of city TLDs. All this part is the same.
When you will have looked to that to one candidate you will have looked that for all and to put what it is different, if differences they are and to allow to shorten to the time to decrease the cost and to help the process to go quicker. I think it could be very interesting after what we heard here and maybe it could be done with the help and within the ICANN framework. Personally I would prefer to do that like that. But anyhow we need to move and I think all the ideas exchanged here will help in that direction and I would like to terminate to stay on schedule to thank you, Thomas, who have organised this workshop because it is very important and very interesting to exchange idea on the projects and even if Wolfgang says it is something discussed 12 years, yes, it is, but we discover still things we can improve and it is why we still need to be together to have discussion. Thank you very much.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you very much, Sebastien. I think what we could do, most of us in the room are in touch at this point. I thought during our QA if we went to the people who haven't been a speaker or anybody on line, I don't know if that's possible would raise their hand, will ask that we will see if they have any questions and we will see if we can resolve them and Peter, is the first. So Peter, please.
>> PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to this session. I wonder if I could ask Sebastien for a copy of the slides, if you could e mail those to me. Two quick responses. It is fairly clear in the ICANN world that country codes are different from any other TLD because they represent a place for an entire country and there is a definition of the local Internet community in a national sense band more importantly even than that they can be found there is two other country codes in the ISO 3166 list. I guess the question is there some suggestion that there is a similarly definable group for any other geographic region that would justify differentiating them at a contract level from for the rest of the gTLDs. The current thinking at ICANN, of course, that there isn't any justification and that all other TLD, then ccTLDs are completed as TLDs and get bound by contractual conditions. Some discussion in some way that gTLD mirror for contractual reasons. Savings for bulk processing and that's something that I have raised. It seems obvious to find ways to reduce the fees. So I will be able to come back to you hopefully after the workshop in Truntime and whether or not there would be advantages for group application and the counterpoint is we don't want to find ways that can be gamed. We don't want applicants bundling themselves together as a way of reducing fees.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Sebastien had an answer for at least one of the questions.
>> SEBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Okay. Thank you, Peter. And yes, I will send you the presentation. It is a work in progress. It is not I give it here also to allow some feedback and I will say that I will not move but I will send you with pleasure. I think you are right, of course, Peter, but I take the example of that dotEU who is a ccTLD and a little bit different than the ccTLD because the national base ccTLD we can discuss in how the local Internet community it is organised. But nevertheless it was to show that we can gain some knowledge from the cc.
A few years ago when the process start I say if we need to have a list of cities outside of the ISO, one used for the ccTLD there is one list existing and who could be used at least we need maybe to study it in more detail. But I know that IAT, International Association for Travel organisations are released and for airports what is different from a small plane. Airport is for large city. And, for example, NYC is just code in this list of city. Then you have the name of the city and you have the BCN. And if I take the example of Paris we have Paris and we have three type of three letter code. We have three. We have PAR for Paris and we have ARY for Ararat. It is the same in New York, London, and then we have both list of major cities because they have an airport. Generally international airport and they have a three dot code for the city and airport. Then it is my in my previous work I use very much this list and I know quite well. But if it is needed we need to do some additional work. But if it is something who could be interesting, I am available to help in that direction if it is something who could help any process. And thank you for your I will say your commitment. I know you are the Chair of ICANN. I don't need to say that but I think what you say you will do during the next weekend, it is important to us because I have the impression that you are in front of a very big effort to be done in a very short time but I am hopeful that you will be able to do it and we support you. Thank you very much.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you. I have a question from Izumi.
>> IZUMI AIZU: I quite admit to agree there is no explicit list of the geographic names other than the ones for airports. There is a suggestion that there will be a geographical panel, certified that a geographical name even though the application is in a gTLD in general. That's procedurally different from the other gTLDs. Because while you are not there I made a presentation, many cities in Japan we have a study group. They are not intending to submit anything, but what if something that corresponds to the string of their city name comes up or some outside operators who come to their city or two of them come trying to get support. Those sort of external to the city or government but that will happen. So we are dealing with, make how tos and that. As much as building on New York willing to start the TLD there are many other cities, potential ones who do not have a clear idea but one way or another they will be affected. Thank you.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Dirk, yes.
>> DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI: If it comes to New York and what I understood from the RFPs city of New York issued last year that applicants were asked to provide two proposals for dotNYC. One open proposal in which dotNYC is operated like dotCom for everyone and no nexus requirement and the other approach was a community approach. So we might see in the future city Top Level Domains which are completely operated like a dotCom and that makes it even more complicated to put all city Top Level Domain under one regime. Cities have sometimes interesting idea how they want to monetize or how they want to keep it as a city Top Level Domain. For example, only for the city use, not for private entities or civil society. Just for institutions of the city. That's another extreme and this is really complicated if you say city Top Level domains should go to a ccTLD like space. There will be exceptions. Anyhow.
>> THOMAS LOWENHAUPT: Thank you. Any other questions or comments? We are up against our deadline here of 4:30. So in relation to that question if I just may note possibilities just off the top of the head that the GAC is an established part of the ICANN process and perhaps they could be asked to give names of interested parties within their countries that might be interested in acquiring city domain names and as well Bertrand who was here earlier, mentioned cities talk to one another and coming up with standards as what's appropriate or not. So if we can do perhaps two of those things we might somehow down the road come up with a more acceptable list, would make it easier for ICANN to proceed. With no hands up I am going to call the meeting to an end. Thank you so much. I don't know how many we have how many Lithuanians we have but I say atu to you. Thank you.