Outreach meeting 15 February 2008 ICANN New Delhi, India. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Hello? Are we live? Can we have some sound? There. Could we have lots of sound. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, could you take your seats, please. We're about to begin. Good afternoon. My name is Peter Dengate Thrush and I'm the chairman of the ICANN board and I have a distinct pleasure to perform this afternoon. I'm going to say a few words on behalf of the entire ICANN community who were here gathered earlier this morning but due to a communications situation, we've moved this to now. I want to say on behalf of that entire community thank you. We have enjoyed a week of fantastic food, and wonderful hospitality, so I'd like to say just a couple of things about guests, hosts, and then to present a small token of the gratitude of that community. Dr. Govind, senior director, Department of Information Technology in the Government of India, and also Mr. Praveen Misra, joint director, STPI, which stands for the software technology parks of India. These two -- and there's a third who isn't here today, Rajesh Aggarwal -- have done the most extraordinary service on ICANN's behalf in the weeks and months leading up to this particular conference. Most recently, they've had overcome a trio of extraordinary problems. First, the cable that carries all of India's Internet traffic was cut in Egypt just five days before the conference. Meaning that everything had to be routed through Asia-Pacific. Problem solved. Second, a big fire in one of the venue hotels that 55 attendees had to be rehoused and hotels in a week where there were two other interns conferences, a very large traditional Indian wedding and the arrival of both the Dutch and the Russian prime ministers. Again, problem solved. And lastly, the venue for the gala event on Wednesday, which was the most extraordinary thing in the end, had to be changed at the last minute for an event given for the Russian prime minister. Once again, problem solved. And these are just three examples from an enormous list of things that our hosts have had to go through in order to deliver, as I say, the most extraordinary week for the ICANN community. So nothing, it seems, has stood in the way of your will to deliver ICANN a stunning experience, so incredible India, and I would just say impede. So gentlemen, would you come forward and join me on the stage and let me give you the small token of ICANN's gratitude for all of your hard work. Dr. Govind? [Applause] >>DR. GOVIND: Thank you very much. [Applause] >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: And Praveen, could you come forward? [Applause] >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Oh, hang on. So that's the end of the thank yous and now we move into the outreach seminar and I'm going to call on Paul Twomey to join me on stage to deal with the outreach exercise. And Ram? Where's Ram? If you'd come forward and join us. >>PAUL TWOMEY: I'llfall say welcome ladies and gentlemen to this session. This is a session we often have in each ICANN meeting, often at universities where we engage with students, but we, you know, had a slight variety here in India, which I think is very useful. And it is basically an outreach about the Internet and the Domain Name System and the addressing system generally. So the purpose, I think, for today will be just to talk to some basic principles about what is it that -- you know, key aspects about the Internet, I suppose, also to talk about key aspects of ICANN and how it works and the domain name system and take any questions. We have a cozy room. Probably we could have all done this up in my room and over a drink. So the -- we might move, I think, chairman pretty quickly to questions, I think, because it might make it easier format. But just to start off, Ramaraj, you are obviously a leading figure in the Internet in India. What has it meant for India? What does it mean for Indian companies? What does -- you know, what have you seen, the change in India and what do you think is the significance of the future of India being connected and online? >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Thanks, Paul. You know, we had a presentation the other day from the I.T. industry, of four or five people, the other day, and a lot of that business couldn't have got done but for a secure, stable Internet that runs around the globe as you have pointed out, Paul, many times. And I would think that a lot of the I.T. offshoring design and many things that's happening today to India and its economy is dependent on a stable, secure and well-connected Internet. So that, I think, is something that is of great value. >>PAUL TWOMEY: And perhaps just to follow up, how do you see it socially? I mean at the moment, there's a lot of -- there's a business connection in India, but the government has this plan for connecting 600,000 villages. When you look forward three, four, five years, what do you think the social impact is of an Internet that connects villages in India? >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Yeah. Actually, we have the Internet ISP association president also here, so he could maybe add something, Rajesh. >>PAUL TWOMEY: We'll get his view too. >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Yeah. But one of the things that the government has done is that at every state, they have created what's called a statewide area network, so they've actually got fiber on the ground connecting up different district levels already. And this has been done across most states, so there is connectivity available already across states. It's called SWAN, Statewide Area Network, and to this, there is now connectivity coming. Government information now flows through this. To have cities interfacing widely, we're now talking about 100,000 kiosks that will offer services to citizens in terms of bill payments, in terms of land records, in terms of anything. Health, lots of things that that's what they're planning to do to connect up all this. Plus the telephone DOT, the ministry of communications, has been directing what's called a universal service obligation. That money is getting spent in building up infrastructure into those villages. So that's how all of this is being built out. >>PAUL TWOMEY: So -- >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Rajesh? >>PAUL TWOMEY: Rajesh, you might have a view on that. Come join the podium. >>RAJESH CHHARIA: Thank you, Paul. Internet in India is a very -- you can say presently we are growing at a very fast speed, and as Mr. Ramaraj has also pointed out, that our government, whether it's the DIT or the DOT, every department is supporting to the various Internet providers and all the means, but still, a lot of things have to be done. Now, the DOT has go out with their e-governance plan and all the villages, like the 600,000 villages are going to be connected through the Internet and basically, all this tele-education,e-help, e-education, e-health, everything is coming onto the Internet and there's a lot of plan into the government side. We as a service provider -- this is as a first meeting of the ICANN in India, we are very frankly -- I agree that we have learned a lot through this meeting, and we propose that in the future meetings, we are going to take, like you said, our representative over there, so that we should get a lot of information. And which will be beneficial for our country, which everybody knows that India is a very fast-developing I.T. country. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Thanks. Peter, how do you make that into sort of an ICANN experience? How do you see that going forward. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: One of the things we've been looking at this week has been the changes that are coming to the domain name system. Two, particularly. The introduction of new gTLDs, which may include the possibility of thousands, if not millions, of new gTLDs. So I -- one of the things I'd be interested in finding out about is the likely uptake in India of new gTLDs. Particularly if we go to the stage of what somebody started calling yesterday "vanity" names so every person could have their own individual TLD if they wanted. But perhaps more significantly than just new gTLDs, the prospect of gTLDs in local Indian scripts. At the moment, as you know, the TLDs are limited to effectively Roman characters, a subset of the English alphabet called ASCII. So I guess, Ram, what's going to happen if there could be thousands of new gTLDs and if many of them, if not all of them, could be in all of the different Indian scripts? >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Actually, from a personal point of view, one of the most exciting things that I have been seeing at ICANN is the development of IDNs. And in the 11 scripts that were tested, there are two from India, both Hindi and Tamil. And it's -- I think that's a kind of indication of the possible opportunities. If you look at television in India, most of the people watch local content, local language content. And there is a lot that is done because of the fact that you have not just local language content, but you have access to a medium that is new. And I would think in many ways the usage of the Internet is going to be driven, and the question you asked about how do we reach those villages or Tier 2, Tier 3 cities and I think a lot of it is going to come because of the IDNs. We have 11 scripts, so that adds to the variety, and I am sure we will find ways to get those rolled out in quick time. Paul, you had something to say. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Well, I was just going to ask you a question. I know you have to catch a plane soon, so one of the things that's happening on the cutting edge of the net at the moment now is much more video, and, indeed, video is taking up a lot of the broadband capacity worldwide. And the video at the moment is a bit clunky. It's, you know, you post it and it goes up or sort of one-way downloads but clearly will move much more to interactive video. I'm sort of interested in what that means for a community where there's high degrees of literacy, but nevertheless there is illiteracy and we've had an assumption that the Internet is something that people who can read use. What does it mean in five years' time for people who don't read using video and audio-type applications on the Internet and how do you think that's going to work socially? >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Actually, when some of these early Internet kiosks were taken to villages and smaller towns, one of the challenges was this literacy factor. And what they did was to employ literate youth to read out messages, and then to take that back and type out whatever responses. So I would think video would be far, far more powerful than that, because it could still remain personal. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Right. >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Just as a matter of information, a very, very large number of YouTube users come from India, so they're still finding there's clever ways to get onto it in spite of bandwidth and the clunkiness, but there is a very large number of people who get onto YouTube from India. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Right. >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: On the new gTLDs, I think India and Indian business may not even have been aware of the opportunity, Peter. And I think the ISP association -- and I see Pavan Duggal from -- he's a leading lawyer in the I.T. space. I see a number of people here, plus the government, of course, and I would think that this is a great opportunity to educate business. That with new gTLDs. And, you know, India has a very, very large number of millionaires and vanity is something, I'm sure, will go down well, especially with newly, you know, acquired wealth. So there is plenty of opportunity, not just in that, but in more serious and sustainable business too, and I would think we need to build that awareness of the opportunity. >>PAUL TWOMEY: I'm sorry about this, but one of the things that strikes me, when you look at the North American and European experience at the moment that another thing that we think is very important, which is IPv6 is being used now by big networks leaning towards TV over IP and similar applications, considering this video story and the opportunity to build out the network to the villages. How do you see v6 and v4 in India? I mean that must be quite a discussion about the -- >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: You know, on the cellular telephone in India, they chose to use the right technology. We actually leap-frogged and went GSM, and in that, because of the choice of right technology, we've had an extraordinary proliferation of GSM. And now CDMA telephones. At that time, I think we had the vision and the foresight to choose what would work here, and we were actually ahead of the curve at that time. And, therefore, we have about 230 million cellular users. I'm told last month 8 1/2 million got added. So I think choice of right technology at the right time can give an edge. I did, when I was at SIFY, bring in IPv6 at SIFY onto the network, but I forgot it's like telephone, that you need a lot more people before you get the power of the network, and so now I saw that ER net and a lot more government networks have become end-to-end if I'm not mistaken already, and there's awareness of wanting to be having -- especially the global customers. So the networks in India would have dual stack to begin with and then move forward. That's how I see this happening. But I think IPv6 deployment. There is one conversation going around, "Is there a way we could leap-frog" since our penetration levels of the Internet are still low. Should we leap-fog and see, should we go into all new things IPv6. That is a little bit of socializing that's starting to happen and maybe that's something we need to think through a little more. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Does the ISP association want to say something about that? >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Pavan Duggal may have something to say. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Pavan may have something to say too. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: Hi. Do we have the mic on? We have amongst us a few I.T. people from around the stakeholders and I think I'd take this opportunity to just go down the audience because they have some questions, so what better way to get started, so maybe we get a practicing attorney here. What's your question? >>VIVEK GOYAL: I'm Vivek Goyal. I practice in India in the Supreme Court and I'm also into intellectual property rights, so I have a suggestion to make first that if -- I was thinking if we could have a dot Delhi addresses and like geographical-related addresses, dot Delhi, dot Panjab, and are they possible in India now, or in the near future can they be possible, technically? >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Well, there's two parts to the answer. One is if you want geographic names in the dot in space, if you want Delhi.in -- of course that's a second level -- >>VIVEK GOYAL: Delhi dot IN is available, but -- >> PETER DENGATE THRUSH: That's got nothing to do with ICANN. >>VIVEK GOYAL: -- if we want to have dot Delhi -- >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Sure. That's the second part of the answer. If you want a top-level domain, then you'll be interested in the new process that we've been working through in the last week. What we're trying to do with that is make it straightforward, objective rather than subjective. Under the previous proposal, these things used to have to go through a process and then come to the board. We're trying to make it so that we can leave the board out of it and the process will go -- you'll meet the criteria, you'll get your TLD. If that works, then this would be quite extraordinary. Now, you do need to be aware that the Government Advisory Committee has published a paper which -- on this, and it is saying we should be very careful in relation to geographic names, and the sense there is that there can be claims to -- claims to authority in relation to geographic names that we need to take care of. There's still quite a lot of discussion to go before that's finalized but you need to be aware of that. >>VIVEK GOYAL: And if the geographic names are started by their local governments, like for Delhi if it is started by Delhi government, then there will be authority on it and on that issue then... >>PAUL TWOMEY: Can I just suggest that this is exactly the reason why we want more Indians participating inside ICANN, and participating in the ICANN constituencies, because this question you're asking now is a live question. It will not be settled for three, four, five months potentially. >>VIVEK GOYAL: All right. I -- >>PAUL TWOMEY: And now is the time for you to have your voice heard and Pavan is an expert in telling you how, but I think your point is an expert one and we have not yet come to a conclusion. ICANN's model is a bottom-up one from its community. It's not that Peter and I decide the answer and tell everybody. We wouldn't last very long if that was to be the case. And so I'd really exhort you to -- they're good questions and there's no definitive answer yet, so I'd like exhort you to put your voice into that discussion. >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Some basic questions they're asking are how to participate. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Okay. How to participate. I'll let Kieren McCarthy partly talk to you about that, but we have some suborganizations. We're a little bit like a Parliament. If you can imagine, we've got various houses of Parliament that represent various interest groups, so we have a Parliament for the generic names grouping of all the people who have got an interest in generic names. We have a Parliament for the people -- a house -- new like, a chamber for the people who are interested in country codes, we've got a chamber for the people who are interesting in IP addressing. We have a sort of legislative council type advisory grouping for the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, for the Government Advisory Committee and the whole thing is a parliament in itself. So it's in the generic name supporting organization that your interests, intellectual property interests, the questions you're asking, that's where the discussion is. You -- there is a click on our Web site. It just says "participate" on the left-hand side, a single button. Click on that and explore -- sorry, I'm talking too fast. You can click on that button and explore and certainly also talk to Kieren, who is our guru on how to participate in the ICANN process. >>VIVEK GOYAL: That's it on this issue. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: Yeah. Thanks. There's a counter-comment here from one of the members of the group, to please. >>LORD BRAR: Well, I would actually like to make -- yes, I'm Lord Brar. I'm from DN forum. Well, there's a point I would like to make about the geographical domains. In India, there are a lot of provinces which have the same name. So if let's say in Jaipur, in Rajasthan and there's a Jaipur in south and there's a Jaipur in northeast, so which -- if we really want to rule out something like that, which region actually has the control? And how are they not going to stop other people from registering that name? >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Well, that's a very good question. How are you going to solve your problem? And that's the way ICANN works. You can't ask us to solve that problem. We'll help you, we'll create a forum for you to come and talk about that, and then we'll make sure that you get assistance, but that's exactly what the bottom-up process means. >>LORD BRAR: My solution would be you if don't need a geographical ID like that. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Okay. Well, see if you can persuade the rest of the community and then it becomes a consensus policy, when you've managed to persuade all of your colleagues. >>LORD BRAR: All right. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: Thanks. We also have somebody here from Microsoft India. He's a thought leader in this space, and I thought Deepak Maheshwari will have some questions. >>DEEPAK MAHESHWARI: I don't have any questions, but I think within India people are really keenly looking at IDN becoming available in Indian languages. Thank you. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: We had some questions from you? >>BRAJESH JAIN: Thank you. I am Brajesh Jain. I represent an Internet service provider, as well as I am an executive council member of ISP Association of India. Really, we have learned a lot by participating in these last five days, but let me admit that our knowledge of ICANN is very, very limited and I would request ICANN to look at some ways where our participation can go up. For example, can there be a small representative office or something that could be more frequent if quarterly, once in a year kind of event, which not all of you could come but some of you could come, and through a level of interaction, we could help. And of course the fellowship is available and if that mode could be available for us to participate. That's number one. Number two, as we just now said, we are already having 230 million phones, adding about 8 million phones every month . We should shortly be reaching 400, 500 million. And this debate of IPv6 and IPv4, while we are working in a small way for IPv6, but I believe that we will very shortly reach a stage where we may -- I do not know -- have a shortage of IPv4 for every ongoing process. And I'm not sure -- I'm told that there are some organizations who already are sitting on large unutilized pile of IPv4 addresses. At some stage, would we be in a situation in India that we have to necessarily no choice but to migrate to IPv6 or IPv4 gets traded and we are forced to buy that IPv4 for surviving. Thank you. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Thanks, Ram. Ram has to catch a plain to Chennai, so thanks very much. >>RAJASEKHAR RAMARAJ: Thank you. >>PAUL TWOMEY: They're an excellent set of questions. I think I might break it into two parts. First of all, Theresa Swinehart, our manager of global partnerships, the lady who is just standing up in the back at the moment, now a vice president or senior vice president for global partnerships has a group of people who work to her which are with what we called regional liaisons. They're like our ambassadors, if you like, because the functions we do are global functions and it's a very important point. What we don't do is a geographic function. We serve a global interoperable Internet but we are conscious, just as you said, that we have to deal with people in their own geographies and their own time zones. We are in the process of finalizing the process to appoint someone to work here on a full-time basis and frankly I've said to a number of you this evening, today, I really hope to see a lot of Indian faces in ICANN processes in five years' time, in two years' time, in one year's time. Because Asia is where the growth is, and I think there's a lot of the values of the Indian companies and I.T. sector accord with the values of the Internet and so we'd like to see you participating. To the question about V4/V6, I think it's probably very useful -- and you're probably very conscious of this -- that Indian ISPs continue to work very closely with APNIC and that directly link, I think, is very important. And I know there's a matter of discussion around that, various aspects of that, but I do think that's a very important thing, to keep in contact with Paul Wilson, the CFO of APNIC, in the process of discussing V4 -- I was going to say "exhaustion," but I know that's the wrong word. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Completion. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Completion. The V4 allocation completion. Some of the V4 address space is now being moved within the RIR regions to transfers and so some of the regions are now looking at a concept of transfers for those people who have have been allocated V4 blocks but are not utilizing them. ICANN itself just recently got net 14 returned back to the unallocated pool by approaching people who had allocations. Their question is a fairly complicated one, but I think that's another reason why I think it's incredibly important that the industry be very -- working very, very closely with APNIC directly on this, because they're the people who are going to sit -- at the moment, the chair -- the CEO of APNIC is the chair of the Number Resource Organization, which is the global RIRs, so that's a great opportunity. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: Paul, before we move forward, a question for both Peter and Paul. India lives beyond the metropolitan cities, and there is an increasing number of Indians who don't get any exposure in ICANN, who don't know what ICANN is but are using the Internet on a very regular basis. These are people on the smaller towns where Internet has caught on like mad and the cyber cafe culture has suddenly opened up new doors of people coming onto the bandwagon. Do you have a specific program you want to launch out to reach out to these kind of people that need to have exposure to ICANN who don't -- and are not able to come to these kind of conferences? I think these guys could be of critical mass from the Indian perspective. Your thought? >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: The answer is any program like that would be ideal and would be the thing that the new person that Paul was just talking about employing, we have these regional liaisons, those are the kind of things that the regional liaisons do, they work out the appropriate program for the particular part of the region. When we get that, that's the kind of thing we will do. Can I just suggest another line of involvement for Indians in ICANN. And I'm coming back to Vivek Goyal, I suppose. One of the consequences of all of these new IDN and new gTLDs and new people joining will be more disputes. There will be disputes about claims to ownership, and we heard a little bit from the gentleman before about competing claims of provincial names. One of the things we're going to have to do is extend the dispute resolution system that we have in ICANN called the Uniform Dispute Resolution System, the UDRP, which is for dealing with clashes. We're going to need experts in Indian scripts to represent claimants in that space. For example, I've been an expert in the UDRP previously but that's because it has been limited to ASCII. Many, many of the current experts in the system will be unable to operate in a system using all of the different Indian scripts. There is going to be a lot of opportunity for Indian dispute resolution providers to provide a resolution service and for lawyers to get involved in either representing clients or in acting for those services. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: Thank you. Any other questions? Can I have one from this side of the audience? >>PAUL TWOMEY: Pavan, just before you do, I should make the point, you were talking about users. And Peter's right, we will need to see what the right message is for India and the subcontinent. One of the things that's key also is we consider the voice of the users of the internet absolutely essential. So essential that it is actually -- if you look at our transparency and accountability framework, it is one of the approaches in the leadership groups in ICANN, that they actually as part of the standards of behavior are expected to take the individual user and the overall security and stability of the Internet as the primary value. The second part is actually built into our parliamentary system, if you'd like, a special legislative council which is called the At-Large Advisory Committee. And it represents the -- what we call the At-large community, the users community. And we have five regions of the world, there is an Asia-Pacific region, and the Asia-Pacific Regional At-Large Organization -- actually we signed its founding charter here a couple of days ago -- or yesterday, although it has been operating for 12 months. We would like to see organizations joining that, people who represent consumers -- individuals who represent consumers. Those people are going to tend to be the people who can think beyond just getting the Internet and people who can think about the issues of the domain name system and the I.P. addressing system from the view of the consumer. And some of our biggest policy work has been in things like in transfer policies, redemption grace periods. You will begin to get the view that everything in ICANN has some sort of religious overtone, "redemption" and "grace periods," "transfer periods." These are all specific policies that relate to looking after consumers in their relationship with registrars and can they choose from one registrar to another and shift. So the Regional At-Large Organization and the At-large Advisory Committee is a really essential part. Again, we need Indian voices on that. It's probably not grand mar in the village but it is people who think about the consumers. This is a very active civil society society. So we would like to see that participation. It is very important. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: If I could talk to that very briefly. My name is Kieren McCarthy and I'm the general manager of public participation, so my job is to try to involve as many people as possible. The way I see ICANN working in terms of participation is effectively there is two streams. One is if you are an individual user, you can approach the Regional At-Large Organization in your region and you can apply to them and, say, become what we call an at-large structure, which is simply a group of people who have the same ideas, that get together and want to participate within ICANN. You become that at-large structure and then you share information with the RALO back and forth and that's how decisions are made that way. If you are an Indian business, you probably want to take a more organizational role, a more formal structural role which is where the regional managers come in and they would direct you into how you join what we call the GNSO, this is how you join what we call the ccNSO, the different structures we have within ICANN for formal policy making. There is two streams. There is the Internet users and then there is the businesses and governments, et cetera. And on one level the At-large community will pick you up, and on the other level the regional managers will assist you in how to involved within ICANN. >> BRAJESH JAIN: Thank you. You mentioned we could join at-large. We have just taken the initiative to form an ISOC Delhi chapter. I was interested to know whether we are better off creating an at-large organization or go through our issues through ISOC? >>PAUL TWOMEY: Particularly, we don't consider that an either/or question. Sitting behind you is ICANN's vice chairman Roberto Gaetano who has a lot of life experience about that particular question. We welcome ISOC chapters applying. We also do not want to undermine the work of ISOC and its chapters. We're very careful about that. We're not trying to play the role an ISOC plays. Perhaps, Roberto can give you some real experience about that. >> BRAJESH JAIN: Thank you. On I.P. addresses -- >>PAUL TWOMEY: Just a second. Let's let Roberto respond on the I.P. addresses. >>ROBERTO GAETANO: As Paul has said, the organization of the Asia-Pacific regional organization that gathers all of the at-large structures that have been created up to now have signed off only yesterday, although it has been active. The idea is that we have a certain -- how can I say -- conditions that are, basically -- that the organization has to be representative of a certain number of users and has to adhere to certain principles and wants to engage itself in dealing with matters related to Internet policy. At that point, there is a very simple process of, I would say, application by the organization and certification by ICANN and then the organization becomes active and becomes part of the system. All the -- I think that I can give you offline after the meeting all this information, but they are available on the ICANN site or, you know, we can talk offline or you give me your business card and I will send you all the material. >> BRAJESH JAIN: Thank you. And then if I am permitted to go to the I.P. address, we have been in touch with APNIC, and there are also some issues which we are facing, even though the [inaudible], we have been trying for an RIR because presently what is happening in APNIC case, certain RIRs that have been formed, they are paying far lower fees to APNIC than what Indian ISPs are paying. And APNIC probably appears to be in a situation if India becomes an RIR, they may be short of funds. That is a typical situation which is there, and I think in some form probably we will need ICANN support that an RIR gets formed and APNIC also remains an active body. >>PAUL TWOMEY: We don't want to make any comment about internal operations of APNIC. I will just say that we work very closely and as a matter of pure coincidence in geography Paul Wilson's office is about a kilometer away from the house I grew up so it is a place I get to reasonably often and we are always happy to be part of any discussion. The bottom line on things that help serve a global Internet community is, I think, twofold. We really need to keep a focus on it being a single interoperable network. All the Indians in this room remember the tariff barriers, the financial barriers, the limitations that were in place prior to now the prime minister's decision on the rupee. The Internet is not like that. The work that you as ISPs and the way you link with other ISPs around the world through the I.P. addressing system ensures that it is seamless for your customers. That's an important principle we must not put at risk. The second principle is like anything, even if it is a not-for-profit, it doesn't mean it is for loss. There is a responsibility, I think, generally. I am not making a comment about membership of the RIR. But there is a general responsibility from those who ensure that those who benefit from that to ensure that at least its cost are being covered. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: I wonder if I can move on to two other ways people participating within ICANN. I mentioned earlier for lawyers and the dispute resolution providers outside, within ICANN there is a place for at least three, I think, of some of the speakers. For example, ISPs, we have a special ISP constituency inside the GNSO. So we would like to have Indian ISPs and Indian ISP associations join that ISP constituency. Strengthen that and provide that with your input. Exactly the same for the gentleman at the back, there is a business constituency, so all those businesses that are dealing and have got interests should be joining the business constituency. And you at the front, Mr. Vivek Goyal, there is an intellectual property association as well inside. We may be restructuring, but there is a lot of places within ICANN you can contribute to our policy making process. That's the first one. You will be hosting here in India the Internet Governance Forum in November. That's something that's grown out of the debate at the United Nations and how the Internet should be governed. This is a place where policies on content -- these are things that ICANN does not do, so things like revenue fraud and phishing and cyber crime and pornography and all the different things that run across the Internet that ICANN cannot deal with and is not set up to deal with and won't deal with. There, nevertheless, needs to be place for that and that's the IGF and it is coming to Delhi -- or coming to India in November and you would all be very welcome to participate and follow the activities of that. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Can I just take the opportunity to point out we have a Nominating Committee, and one of its roles is to appoint officers to the ICANN board, some of the board positions are dedicated to be appointed by the Nominating Committee. And some of the leadership positions in these different what I refer to as houses of parliament Supporting Organizations. And the chair of the Nominating Committee this year is Dr. Hagen Hultzch. Hagen is there in the back. Maybe, Hagen, you want to say a few words about the process that you're presently operating the ability to be able to apply >> HAGEN HULTZCH: Thank you, Paul. Yes, actually the process, how it works, to accept our invitation to provide a statement of interest for one of the jobs to be seated by the Nominating Committee is hosted in nomcom.icann.org. And you find it also on the normal www.ICANN.org Web page. This year we are looking for six individuals, serving two of them on the board, one must be from Africa. The other from somewhere in the world. One for the GNSO Council, one for the ccNSO Council, two for ALAC for the At-Large Advisory Committee, one must be from Europe due to our bylaws. One must be from North America, so that doesn't apply so much for India, but the other four openings are probably of high interest for people from India. So I would like to encourage you to accept the invitation to provide a statement of interest. The way how it is done, the statement of interest is completed, is sent to the address -- the e-mail address, I think, it is nomcom@icann.org. It is written in the Nominating Committee Web info. And then the Nominating Committee sees these statements of interest, which contain two or more references for individuals who can give some information about those who provided the statement of interest. And then the Nominating Committee, which is actually 21 people, being sent into the Nominating Committee from the different organizations on this log being involved in the Internet. For example, ISOC and others, IETF and other delegates are sending into this team. This team, under my chair, without my voting, then decides which seats should be occupied by whom. One of the things we are considering and it's not yet agreed by the board but I assume the board will support that, is that those who have applied or sent in a statement of interest who are not appointed will be asked whether they would be ready to put their name and some information into a pool of people who are interested to serve ICANN. And since we are always looking for people who are willing to chair or to run a task force, this might be an excellent chance to become familiar with ICANN to be involved with one of these working groups. One of the things that might be of interest for those of you in India willing to become involved in the Internet and ICANN is that working in such an international environment in ICANN is an excellent training opportunity. Even though it is volunteer work, it is giving those who do that work providing large expertise not only to communicate on technological and service issues but also to communicate in an international environment which as all of us know is not, let's say [inaudible]. So, again, I would like to encourage everybody here to find the proper people, to look into this web info and see whether there are some talented people that would be interested to do this. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Let me just add two things to Hagen's excellent presentation about the Nominating Committee process. The first one is that we will pay your expenses if you are nominated to come to the meetings. So ICANN will pay travel and accommodations. That's something just to bear in mind. The other thing, I guess, is that in addition to some training ground, it is absolutely excellent network opportunities. This is one of the most vibrant, clever, connected, interesting communities, I think, on the planet dealing with the world's most exciting communications technology and dealing with really difficult issues for the first time. There is no other model anywhere in the world of trying to build a global multistakeholder environment to deal with complex technology. Most technologies develop in one place and then spread from country to country. By the time they go international, there has been national structures developed and sometimes regional structures developed. Suddenly, we are faced with having to create a structure to manage the Internet, coordinate the Internet across the planet all at once. As a result of that, the people you will meet are really worthwhile. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: Any other questions that we have in the audience? Last night I was sitting here doing some work and there was a sweeper who came across and he came to me and he said, "sir" -- what is the Hindi word for gentleman, I can read New Delhi in Hindi but I can't make head or tails of this. Can you tell me what this is? Is there any way for ICANN to put up its Web site or content in the Hindi language? >>PAUL TWOMEY: Spectacular question. We have a translation policy -- what we call a translation policy. You will see in the room we have translation taking place in five languages including English. Our present policy is that we will -- you can find this in our accountability framework, first of all, the U.N. languages and then, secondly, for major languages where there is there's not a high degree of bilingual -- lingualism inside the Internet community. You will appreciate if we were to move to translation to the 260 or 280 or 1,000 languages of the world, we'd be bankrupt. So we don't do that. But the point you raise is relevant. ICANN evolves and changes as the Internet evolves and changes. It is more and more people coming from different parts of the world. I think people came from 72 countries to this meeting today. And so to take your question, it won't be the policy to do Hindi now. But if it were to be the case in three, four, five years' time that over a very sizable group of Internet users who were Hindi speakers alone, that might well be a justification under the policy for us to consider moving towards a translation. At the moment, I think our judgment is in India, the Internet community in India, the people that use the Internet do have a high degree of bilingualism in English. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: This is a very good time to raise this question. At this meeting, we published a draft translation program which we want the community to give input on how ICANN will approach the very translation issue throughout all its processes. And one key element of that is to find a way to get the community to work with ICANN. In the same way, the community -- the whole process of ICANN is bottom-up which is a very unusual model, we are trying to find a way to get the community to work with ICANN in terms of supplying the information. So as part of that, we hope to find a way -- maybe through the at-large structures, we don't know yet -- but find a way in which we provide the information and that can be disseminated by other people, translated by other people because ICANN as an organization can't afford to translate everything into every language. But if there is a requirement, then we want to work with the community to find it and then find all the information we can in whatever language is required to interact with the model which is all the more reason for you to participate as much as you can within ICANN because the more you participate the more desire there will be for us to be able to communicate with you. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: Thank you. >>PAUL TWOMEY: In terms of time, I wonder if we could raise one other topic. I think it would be ideal to close at 4:00. One of the topics that I think is very important that I want a people to know we do is security and stability of the domain name system. We talked earlier -- Peter talked earlier in the presentation about the impact of the cutting of the cables, in other words, the physical disruption to service. Of course, there are other forms of disruption to service, in particular what's called distributed denial of service attacks. Basically, if your usual traffic on your server is like a small ripple on the beach, a DDOS is a tsunami and floods your capacity to deliver service. Not only is that an impact but then there is impact of what that means in terms of people's customers, relationships, et cetera. This is one area where we do a lot of work. We have a Security and Stability Advisory Committee that does a lot of the technical advice and they produce reports. I strongly recommend everybody here who runs an ISP or has technical responsibilities to look at those reports off the ICANN Web site because they are full of good information about reprograms that you don't have open recursive servers. Open recursive servers can be really dangerous as we saw of a DDOS attack nearly two years ago. The other thing we are doing increasingly is partnering with the country code community to help do exercises so people prepare because we're not -- we're not an organization or a group who said that you can build high walls and protect yourself. The Internet security is not about building castle walls. It certainly has technical response. The key thing is resiliency, the ability to do what to do in case of attack and what to do about it and come back online. It is about crisis management and planning. That's another other that we are increasingly involved with other partnership organizations, specifically on DDOS and DNS and I.P. addressing issues. Of course, there are other organizations that do a lot in security. One of our board members, Reinhard Scholl, who is in the room is from the ITU telecom section. And the ITU clearly has a role in the security discussion. Other players do as well. This is no -- there is no comprehensive I own security on the Internet framework, but at least in terms of DNS and I.P. addressing, that's an area which is of great concern to our community. >>PAVAN DUGGAL: It appears we are almost to the end of the clack and there appear to be no more questions. I think I would like to hand it back to concern. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Just very briefly, I have put together a small packet. I have tried to keep it as small as possible in the hope that you will read all of it so we should outline how ICANN works. It has a few fact sheets about DDOS and IPv6 and it will run on how we work and how to get involved in ICANN. So if you have any questions, I'm here if you need it. If you want a packet, I have some here. Otherwise, thank you very much. Peter and Paul. Thank you very much for attending. I hope I see you at the next meeting and hopefully online and in comments and so forth within ICANN's processes. Thank you. [ applause ]