John Demco
WCIT Fails To Achieve Consensus – The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) ended last week in a failure to reach consensus. The conference was held in Dubai under the auspices of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, with the purpose of reviewing and revising a treaty known as the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), last revised in 1988. Difficulties arose over proposed provisions to the treaty that were viewed by some as leading toward states having control over aspects of the Internet including content and governance. A significant number of countries indicated they would not sign, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. A list and a map of signatories and non-signatories may be found here.
New gTLD Priortization Draw Takes Place –
A priortization draw has been taking place all day Monday, December 17 in Los Angeles. The purpose is to assign each new gTLD application a randomly-drawn priority number, in order to determine the order in which initial evaluation results are released. Preliminary draw results [PDF] are being posted.
Picks To Click
- CIRA will host the third annual Canadian Internet Forum on February 28 in Ottawa.
- “The highlights and low points of WCIT”, by .Nxt.
- ICANN and its accredited registrars have not agreed upon proposed revisions to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), originally scheduled to be done by the end of 2012. Progress has been made on validation and verification requirements on Whois data; however, a “fundamental area of difference” remains on this topic. A number of other recommendations have not yet been negotiated.
- Planned root zone scaling measurements at the L-Root server have been announced.
- Internet New Zealand has launched a one-time Community Investment Funding Round.
Timeline
- Sun, Jan 13: Registration available for .ca domain names with French characters
- Thu, Feb 28: Canadian Internet Forum, hosted by CIRA, in Ottawa
- Sun, Apr 7 – Thu, Apr 11: ICANN meetings in Beijing