You get what you negotiate for, not what you deserve

Last week’s Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting will go down in history as one of the most successful.

This is despite earlier insecurity concerns, which almost forced the board to move the event to another venue.

The meting past the highest number of resolutions ever, some of them unpopular with sections of stakeholders.

There seems to be a return to reason in the resolutions, a sign that finally the board is stepping back from the rigid and pointless position that “an IDN TLD has to be three characters in length.”

The most significant resolution for Kenya and the developing world was the withdrawal of the expression of interest (EoI) for entities interested in applying for new gTLDs.

The EoI was published last December and was one of the substantive agendas at the Nairobi meeting.

The EoI required entities interested in participating in the first round of the new gTLD programme to submit basic information about themselves and the requested top-level domain, also referred to as “string”.

The model was a direct result of community recommendations for such an undertaking.

The board directed that a draft model be constructed based on public comment for additional discussion.

A decision on whether and how to proceed with the EoI was to be taken in Nairobi.

According to the board, the withdrawal was due to lack of certainty about the date when the issues would be resolved.

For developing countries, this stage would have been a major barrier to entry given that those interested in participating in the first round were required to put up a deposit of $55,000 out of the total $185,000 evaluation fee.

Short-term reprieve

This is further to a $ 75,000 annual fee.

The withdrawal may be a short-term reprieve though as ICANN staff work on a new model.

Other hot resolutions included the deferring of the .xxx decision to the next meeting which will be held in Brussels.

Supporters of the .xxx initiative have held that the board has been acting in a discriminatory manner, even ignoring its own committee on this resolution.

The board devoted a lot of attention to trademark interests at the expense of market diversity, some said, as most of the resolutions passed refer to various aspects of how to protect trademark owners from the horrifying prospect of letting people register names under new TLDs.

This against the reality of cyber squatting which has seen many companies lose their trademarks and forced to pay hefty prices to cyber squatters to reclaim them.

One thing I learnt at the ICANN meeting is that you will never get what you deserve, only what you negotiate for.

Lobbying and open talks on what the internet should be is all what ICANN is.

Hare is a director at the African eDevelopment Resource Centre, a training and consulting firm based in Nairobi. Follow him on Twitter@hareharry