vertical separation of registries and registrars

[Fouad Bajwa]

Distress with ICANN ccTLD Contracts for developing world regions:

There is also another important issue that is dividing the
stakeholders in developing world countries. For example, in the case
of the ccTLD Manager in Pakistan for .pk is causing a lot of
discussion and dispute amongst the local industry between stakeholders
with claims regarding the mismanagement of the ccTLD. I have been
recording all the activities of the ccTLD since early this year.

One root cause of this problem arises from the fact that ICANN does
not have a clear transparency model for the management of ccTLDs,
secondly, it has many agreements with ccTLD managers that it received
under its take over of IANA. If you look at the ccTLD map on the ICANN
website, you will see it only highlights the agreements it did itself
and not those done under contract by IANA. This is leaving the
stakeholders in a country like Pakistan distressed and confused.

Issues at hand:
These issues have emerged over and over on the Telecom Grid of
Pakistan and Pakistan ICT Policy Network mailing lists sometimes
resulting in heavy flamewars between the debators and defendents. Only
last year in June 2008, PKNIC faced its worse downtime spanned over 7
days during which its 28000 plus domain names were on a total halt
inflicting heavy financial and intellectual property loss to the
domain owners and client organizations. All three key stakeholders of
Pakistan's E-Governance Infrastructure including the Government of
Pakistan, the Private Sectors including the Business Commerce and
Industry as well as Civil Society were amongst the effectees. Despite
this PKNIC walked away clean.

What to do:
ICANN must be encouraged to revise its ccTLD management contracts,
review its registrar and registration policies for ccTLDs and create
space for Public Participation or atleast the stakeholders of the
ccTLD manager's region so that these ccTLDs may be scrutinized and
become transparent to stakeholders.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 7:59 PM, Milton L Mueller<mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
> An important policy issue that is bitterly dividing the industry along somewhat difficult to predict lines is whether registrars and registries should become more integrated. ICANN has sponsored two economic studies. One, by Charles Rivers Associates International (CRAI) proposes a very moderate relaxation of this requirement. Another, by an economist named Carleton, proposes getting rid of it altogether, and this is the position than seems to be favored by ICANN staff.
>
> Afilias and PIR have come out strongly opposed to the proposed policy. You can bone up on some of the issues by looking at the web site they prepared: http://www.registryregistrarseparation.org/blog
>
> Ideally we should develop a position statement on this
>
> Milton Mueller
> Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
> XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
> ------------------------------
> Internet Governance Project:
> http://internetgovernance.org
>



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Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad Bajwa
@skBajwa
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