Business Daily (Nairobi)
Harry Hare
11 March 2010
opinion
After a lot of security concerns and re-assurance from the local Internet community that Nairobi is safe enough for the 1000 plus guests expected to attend the 37th Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting, things seem to have settled down and the summit is underway at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre until Friday.
For those not in the ICT industry, a quick background on ICANN and why you need to care about the policies they set will suffice.
To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number.
That address has to be unique so that computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world.
Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet.
ICANN was formed in 1998 and is registered in the state of California as a non-profit organization.
It largely works in partnership with people from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable.
ICANN doesn't control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn't deal with access to the Internet.
But through its coordination role of the Internet's naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the web.
So, why is ICANN important to your business you ask?
All Internet policy discussion in ICANN end up being policy decisions that affect you as a user of the internet.
Luckily, the ICANN decision-making process is bottom up and therefore offers a platform for different interest groups to influence the policy direction.
But this needs active participation by all Internet stakeholders, you being one of them.
For instance, on Sunday I was invited to the ICANN business constituent dinner and a later, for a breakfast meeting for the same group on Tuesday.
In both sessions there were not more than 10 local businesses represented out of the more than 50 global players in the room.
This could be partly due to the outreach problem, maybe ICANN and its local partners have not done enough to attract the business community to participate in this important meeting.
The policy decision that will come out of the Nairobi meeting and later in Brussels, will affect in some way how you use the internet and collectively we need to be strategic at these meetings.
The local organisers apart from putting a good show, should have also canvassed and come up with a country position on the new Top Level Domain names discussion which is expected to heat up especially regarding trade mark protection.
So, I feel like we have squandered yet another opportunity to make a positive impact at a global level as far as Internet governance is concerned.
All stakeholders need to engage, but to engage they need to know the rules of engagement to create one world, one internet where everyone is connected.
Hare is Director of African eDevelopment Resource Centre.
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