1 of 1 DOCUMENT WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY April 17, 2009 Friday DOMAIN NAMES SECTION: DOMAIN NAMES LENGTH: 500 words ICANN wants comments on a proposal to create a Consumers Constituency in its noncommercial user group. The constituency will be the conduit for consumer interests relating to the safety and stability of the Internet under ICANN's mandate, said a petition by Consumer Reports WebWatch Director Beau Brendler. While ICANN isn't directly responsible for dealing with cybercrime issues such as spam or phishing, those abuses aren't possible without using the domain name system for abusive and fraudulent purposes, the petition said. The group will try to ensure that consumers' safety, security and stability concerns about the DNS are adequately represented in ICANN policy development, it said. Consumers' voices are increasingly heard in the public policy arena, and ICANN will gain legitimacy if it has a constituency dedicated to those interests, the petition said. Brendler doesn't expect opposition to the proposal, he told us. The point of creating the constituency is to give consumer groups around the world, which generally have limited resources, a more direct way to participate in ICANN poliycmaking, he said. Comments from the ICANN community so far have been positive, and the hardest problem is convincing small, underfunded consumer groups, which have to deal with issues such as clean water and public health, to devote resources to ICANN issues, he said. Moreover, the "learning curve for a newcomer into the ICANN world is very steep," something the constituency hopes to address, he said. Asked if the constituency's goals conflict with those of the proposed CyberSafety constituency (WID March 20 p1), Brendler said it's too early to tell. The ICANN board has yet to approve the structure of the new noncommercial stakeholder group, or to green-light any of the requested constituencies, he said. Two other proposals - for International Domain Name Top-Level Domain and City TLD constituencies -- are also in the pipeline, although formal petitions haven't been filed. The first will represent the interests of those who have been or are engaged in advocating, promoting, providing and developing IDNs in non-Latin unicode, according to its notice of intent to form a constituency. The rationale for limiting the group to non-Latin script is that countries relying on Latin TLDs and country-code TLDs are already adequately cared for by ICANN, wrote i-DNS.net International Ltd. Chairman S. Subbiah. ICANN's ability to make policy for non-English speaking or non-Latin writing communities is "particularly weak" and untargeted, and the proposed constituency will bring those communities into the ICANN fold, he wrote. The second proposal seeks a constituency for city TLDs. It would represent those running or planning to operate such TLDs, wrote dotBERLIN Manager Dirk Krischenowksi. ICANN will benefit from greater input from "very important true global players, the cities," he said. Comments on the consumer request are due May 14 -- gnso- consumers-constituency@icann.org -- DS LOAD-DATE: April 16, 2009 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newsletter Copyright 2009 Warren Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved To view results in Full, edit Settings, delete this Scheduled Search or to contact Nexis®, sign in to Nexis®. ********** Email Completed ********** Time of Delivery: Friday, April 17, 2009 06:13:15 EST E-mail Number: 1821:152173051 *************************************** Copyright 2009 Nexis®. All rights reserved. *** Scanned ** This e-mail message is intended only for the designated recipient(s) named above. The information contained in this e-mail and any attachments may be confidential or legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not review, retain, copy, redistribute or use this e-mail or any attachment for any purpose, or disclose all or any part of its contents. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and permanently delete this e-mail and any attachments from your computer system.