This morning, the 2nd Meeting of the Global Alliance on ICT and Development got underway at the Intel Headquarters in Silicon Valley. Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel opened the session saying how historic it was for the GAID to be meeting in Silicon Valley. Since Silicon Valley is known for getting things done (instead of talking), all are hoping that the GAID will be able to focus on getting things done. He talked about the innovative model of the GAID with no funding being provided by the UN, and the very small permanent secretariat. He called the GAID a "Pay to Play" organization, and that "if you don't pay, you can't play," and that "this is the Silicon Valley model. Following this opening announcement, and a video-taped welcome from the new ITU Secretary General, Dr. Hammadoun Toure, the new Secretary General of the ITU gave an interesting opening speech talking about the recently held World Telecommunications Development Conference (WTDC) in Doha and the Doha Plan of Action. The Doha Plan of Action contains five new programs and 25 new regional initiatives (five from each of the five regions). He recognized that there are more important players than are in the room, and that there is significant commitment to these issues from both the developed and the developing countries. I'll report more on this meeting as it progresses. One note; to my knowledge, there are no mechanisms whatsoever for remote participation in the meeting.

Cybersquatting is so 2000, or so we thought. The UDRP at WIPO, a process that was hashed out in ICANN's early days (see Mueller's Ruling the Root), has been chugging along for several years now, methodically determining if complainants IP rights have been violated and reassigning "ownership" of domain names. Typically, the cases are fairly boring. But some recent developments in the world of 800 lb search gorillas, Google and Baidu, suggests that the regime could be faced with substantial pressure in the near future.

Google has lately been fighting to consolidate its Gmail trademark globally, but it faces an obstacle in the world's second largest Web market, China. Gmail.cn is run by Beijing-based ISM Technologies, the largest wholesale Internet domain registrar accredited with Chinese government-backed Internet body CNNIC and it is refusing to sell its Internet address to the U.S. giant. Google is facing a similar situation, albeit probably a far less powerful adversary, in Poland where an alleged group of poets have been using the gmail.pl domain. It faces similar circumstances and has filed legal challenges in other EU countries. But the importance of the China case to Google is obvious, as Reuters notes, it is fighting to narrow the gap between its market share and Chinese market leader Baidu.com.

Now, Google's lawyers shouldn't have all the fun. Baidu could be facing their own geopolitical struggle as their popular search service grows in influence globally and economically. It turns out, Baidu.eu has been registered by an entrepreneur in the Netherlands. Some bloggers are interpreting the situation using the UDRP lense and indicating the entrepreneur is simply squatting to reap financial gain.

So, what's worth following here is how a tussle between Chinese government backed CNNIC and US government backed ICANN over competing domain name property regimes will play out. Should be fun to watch.

Eight years after its creation, ICANN is finally closing in on defining a process for adding new top level domains to the root. But the procedure it is putting into place threatens to give any individual government complete veto power over the words, concepts or symbols ICANN permits to be used as a top level domain. ICANN's policy development task force has put forward as an overriding principle the notion that "[proposed TLD] strings should not be contrary to public policy as set out in advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)."   more »

Since September I have been working on research on the wireless Internet, and specifically on the application of net neutrality principles to the mobile internet. I began this work at the OECD while I was in Paris on sabbatical. This topic seems to be a hot one. In November Nokia caught wind of it and I was invited to speak in Finland January 18 to present the work in progress. I was also invited to speak on wireless NN at the University of Tilburg (Netherlands) Law and Economics Center (TILEC) February 9. Upon returning from Tilburg I learned that Columbia's Tim Wu had released a paper on...Wireless Net Neutrality. (Beaten to the punch, eh? My report involves a lot more data collection and analysis than Tim's and will have to be reviewed by OECD, so it will be months before it can be released.) One immediate effect of my "testing the waters" presentations was to convince me that net neutrality is no longer a US-specific issue.   more »

Monika Ermert, writing for IP Watch, has posted a great summary on the recent IGF Stocktaking. Her article finishes with the debate whether or not to discuss Internet critical resources at IGF, in particular:

"Patrik Falstrom, former member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), said he personally would reject discussion on issues like root servers at the IGF as long as the questions to be answered were not more specified. While there might be aspects of the technical system that could be discussed at the IGF, so far questions had been very vague."

So, here's an open question to Patrik and other IETFers - what kind of specificities related to core Internet resources would get IETF members to engage IGF discussions more fully?

The IGF Stocktaking meeting is up and running, and they have worked hard to faciliate some level of remote participation in the meeting. For example, they make all of the archives from the Athens IGF meeting available, which is the subject of much of the discussion. Next, they have live webcasts (not webconferences) of the sessions available in both English and French (in both Audio and/or Video). They also have established email lists for submitting questions in either English (feb13-en@intgovforum.info) or French (feb13-fr@intgovforum.info). The are also making verbatim transcripts of the meeting available, on a short time-delay. Finally, they have a forum set up, and space available for the dynamic coalitions. So while not yet "pefect" from the perspective of the Cotelco research agenda, this collection of resources for remote participation is a real step forward. For more information, or to participate remotely in these sessons, please go to the IGF website.

On 13 February 2007, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will convene a "stock-taking" session, which is open to all stakeholders who were WSIS accredited, and to individuals with "proven expertise and experience in Internet Governance related issues. The meeting will be held at the Palais des Nations, United Nations Office in Geneva (Room XX) from 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00 hours. Interpretation in all UN languages and real-time transcription will be available during the meeting. For more information and to register for the session, download the IGF registration form. Also, at the closing of the session, we will host a brief wrap-up discussion with colleagues on the ground in Geneva. Cotelco Research Associate and intern at the IGF Secretariat, Sonia Arenaza, will host the webconference and provide feedback from the stocktaking session. Participants from IGP Partner Derrick Cogburn's Globalization Seminar will also participate in the session from South Africa, Syracuse, and other parts of the world. To join the webconference, held from 10:00 - 11:00 EST, please go to the Cotelco Web Conferencing Server and click on the link for the meeting when active. Please use your firstname and lastname as username, and no password.

Steve Jobs has made a proposal that is worthy of discussion in Internet governance circles.   more »

Last week was a busy one for the US National Science Foundation (NSF).  In addition to the meeting reported on ...   more »

On 31 January the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the OECD held a joint conference on "social and economic factors shaping the future of the Internet." Attendance was restricted to about 20 full participants selected by OECD/NSF and another 30 attendees who were allowed to ask questions.

For NSF, the meeting promoted their effort to incorporate "social and economic factors" into the research around their Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) initiative. GENI is a major new NSF initiative to fund a "clean slate" redesign of the Internet. The intellectual driver of this initiative seems to be David Clark, who was also one of the leading protocol architects of the old Internet. Suzi Iacono, the NSF program officer who concentrates on the social, economic and behavioral aspects of information systems within the NSF's CISE division, believes that GENI can create a "testbed" that will allow social scientists to experiment with the way various protocol or network designs interact with social factors.

My first observation about this meeting is that aside from David Clark's always-interesting ruminations on what problems a clean-slate resdesign of the Internet might involve, very few new ideas were bruited. Almost all of the discussion revolved around the social, economic and political problems of the "old" Internet. More importantly, I wonder whether the desire to link analysis and understanding of social problems to the engineering or redesign of a new Internet is unambiguously a good thing.   more »