Paul Twomey, the former CEO of Australia's National Office for the Information Economy, has been elected as the chair of ICANN's Government Advisory Committee at its meeting in Melbourne.
Representatives of 32 governments were present.
In the Government Advisory Committee's (GAC) report to the ICANN Public Forum, Twomey said the committee had recommended that any agreements between ICANN and the operators of country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) should be provisional and interim, to avoid putting obstacles in the way of tripartite agreements that also include governments.
He noted that there are hundreds of governments not yet involved with GAC, and many of those do not understand the significance of the domain name system, but once they do, their ccTLD becomes part of their national strategy.
According to Twomey, such bilateral agreements - especially where an operator is outside the country concerned - make it difficult for government to renegotiate.
GAC recommended there should be no such bilateral agreements where a redelegation request is pending for a ccTLDs, where the relevant government or public authority has advised ICANN that it is taking steps to implement a tri-partite regime, or where the ccTLD administrator is not within the jurisdiction of the relevant government or public authority.
That is, unless the relevant government or public authority is comfortable with such an arrangement.
GAC has set up working groups to consider multilingual domain names, geographic and geopolitical terms as first and second level domain names, and the applicability of international conventions.
Twomey stated that GAC has no opinion on the matter of internationalised TLDs (the ability to represent, for example, the .jp ccTLD in Japanese characters).
But Sang-Hyon Kyong, the representative of the Address Supporting Organisation, suggested there would be merit in handling the political issues at the same time as investigating the technical feasibility of the proposal.
The political aspects are urgent, he said, and ICANN stands to gain "an awful lot of clarification...and an awful lot of time in smooth implementation," risking only some wasted effort.
Twomey replied that GAC was conscious of governments' long-term policy issues, and considerations such as competition and interoperability would remain concerns as the technical side developed.
