With its meeting in Shanghai recently completed and another scheduled for Amsterdam next month, reforms are on the cards for the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body which looks after IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system and root server system management.
Stuart Lynn,president and CEO at ICANN, admits that the organisation has a "full plate" of policy work in 2003.
The international body nutted out at its Shanghai meeting a reform package for the organisation, designed to help it better achieve its objectives and to come up with a transition plan for these changes. Next month ICANN will meet again, this time in Amsterdam, to set an action plan to turn these reforms into reality.
Lynn described the meeting in Shanghai as a "significant step forward on the reform package".
"We've made some significant steps moving forward in restructuring ICANN and making it more effective and efficient in how we're going to relate to the community at large, and the representativeness of the structure," Lynn said.
In a report prepared by Lynn earlier this year, he highlighted issues facing ICANN moving forward as; too little participation by critical entities, too much process and too little funding.
Lynn told ZDNet Australia he believes ICANN is going to become more streamlined and effective, "putting effectiveness ahead of process". He also believes that it's going to have the funding issue under control.
However, recent reports have criticised ICANN for its lack of responsiveness following a denial of service attack late October, which briefly brought down nine of its 13 root servers.
But Lynn counters this by insisting that it has a robust system. "The denial of service attack a couple of weeks ago really, in my view, laid out the domain name system as very well designed and very robust," he said. "But we can always improve, always do better."
According to another report released early October, ICANN is also aiming to include a greater number of communities, such as country code and generic name registries and registrars, Internet standardisation bodies, as well as root name server operators.
"Not all of those sectors are yet sufficiently included in the ICANN community," the report stated. "With the stabilisation of the ICANN core represented by this reform effort and these proposed new bylaws, the next point of emphasis must be to complete this process by appropriately, almost certainly in different ways reflecting their unique circumstances, involving each of these communities to the extent not yet accomplished."
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