ICANN Welcome Ceremony Monday 11 February 2008 New Delhi, India >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Could you take your seats, please. We're about to start. Thanks. Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Peter Dengate Thrush, and I'm the chairman of the board of ICANN. This is our 31st meeting, and you're all very welcome. It's great to see lots of friendly faces and lots of new ones to our meeting here in New Delhi. I wonder if I could begin my comments by saying what a personal pleasure it is to be here in India. It's my first visit to the country, put it's a country that I've always known I would -- country I've always known I would visit. My mother was brought up here and went to school here. So growing up, I was always fascinated by her tales of life here in the last days of the British -- I learned Hindi words without even knowing until later where they came from. I thought they were part of the language. ICANN is committed to meeting in areas where the Internet is growing and evolving and India is an obvious and necessary place to meet. Just a moment on the facts and figures. They are quite astounding. The annual growth rate for India's I.T. sector has been 30% over the last 10 years. The global average is 10%. I.T. revenues are nearly 50 billion U.S. dollars. India represents 65 to 70% of global offshore services. India has 60 million Internet users, an 1100% increase since the year 2000. And India is the 11th trillion-dollar economy in the world. And there are many more statistic that I could quote, but you get the idea. India is a powerhouse of growth and innovation. Now, for ICANN's part, the introduction of IDNs in particular is an obvious path for further expansion of the Internet in this country. Mr. Secretary, as you know, this is going to deliver an Internet naming system that allows virtually any language to be recognized in a script that people can recognize. New gTLDs is another topic and the area of ICANN's work which will help to expand the business opportunity on the net. So there is a very real connection between the work of ICANN and the growth of the Internet for the average users across the globe, and particularly here in India. So without further words from me, I would like to invite the secretary to speak about the opportunities in this part of the world, any reflections you may have on ICANN's work, and how it will impact Indian Internet users. Secretary Singh. [ Applause ] >>SECT. JAINDER SINGH: Chairman of the board of ICANN, Mr. Peter Dengate Thrush, Chief Executive Mr. Paul Twomey, delegates, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to India. It is an honor for us to host this ICANN meeting in New Delhi. It is appropriate that this meeting of the board of ICANN is being held in India, both because of India's emergence as an ICT power and also because of the scope of the growth of the Internet in this vast country. India is poised to see a tremendous increase in Internet penetration. With its large and young population, the number of Internet users would grow very rapidly and would contribute significantly to the global expansion of the Internet. The issue of access to the Internet remains the single most important issue to many countries, particularly to those in the developing world. The Internet community is celebrating the success of having one billion Internet users, this was unthinkable a few years ago. However, we must not forget the 5 billion who are still left out. Providing access on such an immense scale requires new business models to support users who have insufficient funds. There is a need for innovative solutions including public/private partnerships and the need for private companies to work with governments and civil societies in order to improve access to rural areas. Though there has been an impressive increase in Internet usage in our small towns, there does exist an urban rural digital divide. To increase the access to the Internet and bridge this divide, the government of India have recently launched a scheme to facilitate creation of 100,000 Common Service Centres in rural India. These CSCs would provide government and private services to rural citizens and would be broadband Internet enabled. These centers would also provide assisted access to rural people. While these centers would add only another 100,000 Internet connections in India, yet millions of rural Indians would be able to use these centers to access the net at their doorstep. It would also be relevant to note that there has been an explosive growth in the number of mobile users in India. We already have more than 230 million users and are adding 7 million each year. This makes us the fastest growing mobile market in the world. We hope that we would also be able to achieve similar growth in the Internet area. 2008 is a year for Internet promotion and awareness in India. India is the host for this ICANN board meeting this February. India will also have the privilege of hosting the third Internet Governance Forum in December 2008. The Internet has changed the world in the last decade. ICANN has played a key role in the development of the Internet by involving all the stakeholders in establishing various technical standards and delivering a safe, secure, and trustworthy domain name system and I.P. address system. ICANN has, in recent years, made significant progress in the performance of core operational activities. This meeting is important to achieve further improvements in such functions. However, a big question facing the world today is: Can the Internet realize the vision of a truly inclusive information society? Government, academia, businesses, civil societies all have to play an important role in furthering this goal. ICANN itself is an interesting public/private experiment and the world is looking carefully at how this organization performs and achieves greater financial stability and international recognition. Principles such as inclusiveness, transparency, openness, and diversity will how the world to look upon ICANN as a positive influence for the technical coordination of the Internet. We would also like to endorse ICANN's strategic plan for the next three years. We wish ICANN all success in rolling out this plan. Introduction of IDNs and DNS security issues are of great importance to us. We also welcome ICANN's initiatives to promote adoption of IPv6. We eagerly look forward to an active engagement with ICANN on all these issues. All the players will welcome ICANN's efforts towards encouraging more participation in the Maryland model and further improvements in accountability and transparency. Discussions regarding the adoption of IPv6 have also been scheduled. There is a widespread agreement that IPv4 will be unable to cope with the expansion of the Internet in the years to come. The pool of IPv4 addresses may get exhausted in the next three to four years. In such a situation, the adoption of IPv6 would become more compelling. Perhaps a widespread adoption of IPv6 will occur once the impact of IPv4 scarcity starts to hurt. IPv6 will not only vastly expand the address space but also enable Internet connectivity between a large number of devices. It would also enable sending larger data packets and in a more secure manner. Since the use of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses would continue in future years, the need for interoperability is clearly evident. Recently, there have been a lot of discussions and open fora on IPv6 adoption. We will continue to work closely with APNIC and ICANN on this issue. It is indeed heartening to see the positive and proactive steps being taken by ICANN to facilitate cooperation between various Internet organizations on this issue. There is a need to ensure participation of all linguistic groups in cyberspace. The Internet is a key factor in developing a more inclusive information society, which stresses diversity instead of global uniformity. There is a growing concern that many languages may be unintentionally ignored during the rapid growth of the Internet. Although India has more than 100 million English speakers, they are still a minority in our country. India is a diverse nation with 22 official languages using 11 scripts. Our people need access to the Internet using their local languages. We cannot wait for years till these languages come to life on the domain name system. Our country's name cannot be represented by just a single script or only in one language. Such a move would exclude large segments of our population. ICANN has a sensitive role to play in the development of IDNs and we hope that there would be close collaboration with India to ensure rapid deployment of a multilingual, multi-script model. The important matter of security would also be discussed in a number of technical sessions. In today's world, we are becoming more connected than ever before through the Internet. We need to come together to build a global coalition against the threats posed by DNS denial of service attacks, botnets and other malicious attacks that result in massive damage. ICANN's various security committees play an important role, and we look forward to these committees working collaboratively to secure global infrastructure. India's addressing and naming infrastructure will become more robust as we implement international best practices and secure critical national resources. There is a need to implement effective measures to protect cyberspace and infrastructure. For this reason we require international cooperation not only to exchange information but also to enable technology development and capacity building. India's I.T. success story has unfolded over the last decade. India has emerged as the world's preferred provider of I.T. services and is steadily moving up the value chain. Companies from across the world have vest invested in India making this country their hub for software development and R & D. Information technology has given India a tremendous brand equity in the global market. Ladies and gentlemen of the ICANN community, let us all work together to expand the reach of the Internet and its naming and addressing system in a way that benefits people around the world. We need to keep building an open interoperable and universal Internet. In conclusion, I wish you well for your discussions in this board meeting. I understand that a wide range of issues would be canvassed at ICANN. Some of the issues would be of historical importance and some will, no doubt, be controversial. Once again, I thank all of you for participating in this meeting in New Delhi. I also invite you to the third IGF meeting in December this year. Welcome to New Delhi. Welcome to India. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. [ Applause ] >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary, for those kind words about ICANN and about its role. And thank you particularly for your endorsement of the strategic plan. That's very welcome. I would like to call now on the CEO and president of ICANN, Dr. Paul Twomey, to formally respond to secretary Singh and to tell us a little bit about the work in the coming week. Paul. [ Applause ] >>PAUL TWOMEY: Thank you, Peter. Secretary Singh, ladies and gentlemen, secretary, I was going to spend some time here taking you through the main issues that we were going to discuss this week. But as you have shown so clearly, you seem to understand the issues better than I do. Indeed, I am wondering whether I can offer you a job (laughing) because your grasp -- the grasp of the specific technical issues that the ICANN community are looking at at the moment is excellent, and I think the context in which you put them was just right. So I wish to first of all thank you because now I don't have to say so much, and these people will be particularly pleased to hear that. Can I also go further and say that I would like to thank yourself, joint secretary Ravi Shanker and Dr. Govind for all the efforts they and others in your department and in the Indian industry have gone to to help put together such a good program, and to help us establish this meeting here in New Delhi. We appreciate you put the cooler weather on for us, and that's a further bonus. But we do very much appreciate, thank you very much, all the work that you have done personally to help our meeting take place. As you said, Secretary, what the ICANN community stands for, I think, is an essential part of building an inclusive and global Internet. And, indeed, what we stand for is a -- I think what gets people out of bed in the morning is each playing our own part in continuing a single global interoperable Internet. And there's probably at the moment something like 20,000 people in this broader community who help make that reality come to play. What does that really mean? Well, I think you have given us a good example. The sort of business outsourcing I.T. services industries that have been booming here in India. One of the main reasons they do so is because there is a single global interoperable Internet which ensures that seamlessly they can serve not only their customers, both in India and offshore, but their customers' customers. And as we were talking before we came on stage here, my -- one of my previous background is actually in trade administration. And we all have known all our lives that in physical trade, we always hear about tariffs and nontariff barriers and quotas and all these other things that slow down such interaction in the physical world. But in the online environment and in the delivery of services particularly through the online environment, that has been globally seamless because of the sort of system that this community helps to coordinate. And that system, I think, has delivered to India, as an example, great opportunities. It's not the only thing, obviously, that delivers opportunities to India, but it's certainly been a major contribution. We are looking to have more fully participation from South Asia generally and India in particular in all of ICANN's aspects. Indian government place a key role in the Governmental Advisory Committee. In particular, the Indian government hosts the ICANN GAC Secretariat, for which we are thankful. But we expect to see more Indian business, more Indian civil society participants and others participating here in ICANN's processes going forward. And we do think that IDNs will be one of the ways in which we will, again, bring more people in, not just in terms of their ability to express their own languages but also, frankly, because I think it will present new business opportunities for Indian business. So I would just like to finish there and say thank you very much to you and your colleagues. Please join us throughout the week as you are able to. We appreciate very much the program that you have helped personally to put together showcasing the Indian I.T. industry, which will be later this week. And thank you. [ Applause ]. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Paul. This is going to be a big year for ICANN. As you know, it's our tenth anniversary celebration later in the year and I hope to announce some details at the board meeting on Friday as to how we're going to be celebrating that. At this meeting in New Delhi, the topic, it's probably been characterized as the internationalization of ICANN and there's two parts to that. The first part, and there's been a lot of media attention on this recently, is what we think of as the technical part and IDNs are going to occupy a lot of time here as we grapple with making them work and setting up processes for creating them, managing and administering them. The other aspect of internationalization we can think of as the political administrative kind of thing as we look at the internationalization of ICANN the organization. And we will be talking about the Joint Project Agreement and review of that as it comes up and trying to take ICANN into a transition phase where it's responsible for more of its own activities. So it's going to be a fantastic week. Thank you all very much for coming to contribute to that. It's extraordinarily hard work. I know many of you are not going to sleep very much in the next few days. We acknowledge that and are grateful for that. You, however, have the opportunity to participate the unique, probably first Maryland organization responsible for managing a crucial international resource. It's exciting, as Paul says, and it's what gets us up off bed in the morning. And with that I am going to declare the 31st meeting of ICANN New Delhi open. [ Applause ] >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Goodness, if I had known you were going to respond, I would have organized a drum roll as well. Thank you. We are going to have a short break for coffee and resume back here for the first of the public fora, which is a report from the CEO and an outline of what's been going on. So I look forward to seeing you back here for that. Thanks very much.