ICANN’s Noncommercial Users Constituency, which represents civil society and individuals in the domain name policy making process, has established a traditional of holding policy conferences at ICANN meetings that are usually far more interesting and creative than the official workshops put on by ICANN. The Beijing meeting is no exception. NCUC is facilitating a dialogue on Internet regulation in the capital of China that raises the issue of national Internets and the possibility of fragmentation or division of the Net.
The panel “One World One Internet? Integration vs. fragmentation,” brings together He Baohong, a leading policy maker for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s China Academy of Telecommunication Research; Tarek Kamel, ICANN’s Senior Advisor for Governmental Engagement and former Communications Minister for Egypt; and Leonid Todorov, Deputy Director for Government and International Relations for the Russian top level domain registry. Markus Kummer, the VP for Public Policy at the Internet Society, Yongge Sun, Director of the Internet Society of China, NCUC Chair William Drake round out the panel. Professor and NCUC member Wolfgang Kleinwachter will moderate.
The second panel focuses on Chinese and Western Perspectives on Internet competition and regulation in the wake of ICANN’s introduction of new top level domains. The creation of many new gTLDs will lead to new forms of competition, including allowing internationalized domain names operated by registries and registrars in foreign countries to compete with country code domains (ccTLDs). Will foreign competition be resisted by national authorities? This panel will be moderated by Dr. Hong Xue, Director of Institute for the Internet Policy and Law at Beijing Normal University, and include Limei Liu, Director of the Department of International and Legal Affairs, China Organizational Name Administration Center (CONAC), Xiantang Sun, Senior International Policy Strategist, China National Network Information Center (CNNIC), Milton Mueller,NCUC, Professor Syracuse U School of Information Studies, Internet Governance Project, Avri Doria, NCUC, Independent researcher, and Antony Van Couvering, CEO, Minds + Machines.
The event is free and open to the public, but may require registration for the ICANN meeting. You can see the full agenda here: http://ncuc.org/profiles/blogs/ncuc-policy-workshop-beijing-icann46
