Byron Holland
Byron Holland is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). View bio
29
Jul
.xxx Ushers in a New Era of Internet Governance?
During their June 25, 2010 meeting, the ICANN Board directed staff to proceed with contract negotiations with ICM registry, the infamous registry embroiled with ICANN for years in their attempt to launch the .xxx Sponsored Top-Level Domain (sTLD). Some are heralding this decision as a success for ICM Registry, and see .xxx on the horizon.
However, my bet is we will never see .xxx as a top level domain. The Board decision to move ahead with negotiations is only the first step of many before .xxx can be approved. Following the contract negotiations, the ICANN Board will seek Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) advice on whether the application aligns with public policy principles and the concerns of governments. Only after that will the Board decide whether to approve the contract. We know from previous GAC advice provided on the .xxx matter that governments definitely don’t support the creation of what is essentially an adult entertainment top level domain. I think it’s unlikely their advice will be favorable.
ICANN has always had the obligation to seek and consider GAC advice, and the GAC has always had a role with respect to policy development. However, there have been recent moves pointing to a shift in what constitutes GAC advice, how that advice is delivered, and perhaps the weight with which it is considered. GAC advice appears to be moving from input often put forward after decisions have already been made by the ICANN Board, to playing a more powerful role in the decision making process.
ICANN is in a real bind. On one hand, there is the possibility of legal action from ICM Registry if the .xxx application does not move forward. On the other hand, there is the risk of alienating international governments if GAC advice is not followed. Many even fear that that could encourage an attempt by another international agency to take over some or all of the governance of Internet-related public policy issues and the management of critical internet resources. ICANN surely does not want a perceived weakness of the GAC to be used as fodder to fuel a move by governments to take a more hands-on approach to Internet governance outside of the confines of the GAC. So my bets are on ICANN following GAC advice.
I think the .xxx debacle is just the symptom of something much more historic. I would even say we’re about to witness a tectonic shift in Internet governance, where governments, through the GAC, have far more influence over ICANN’s decisions and policy development than ever before, and certainly more than any other stakeholder group.
Could it be that we are coming to a point where, as the saying goes, all stakeholders are equal but some are more equal than others?
14
Jul
Digital Economy Strategy Consultation
Back in May, the Government of Canada launched a national consultation on the development of a digital economy strategy. Yesterday, I sent in CIRA’s submission to that consultation.
In our submission, we make 19 recommendations, ranging from recommending that the government leverage its purchasing power to spur the adoption of IPv6 to encouraging the government to include the development of a national digital literacy strategy as part of its digital economy strategy.
Fundamentally, however, what we are saying is that in order to create a climate for digital innovation in Canada, steps must be taken to preserve the Internet’s unparalleled capacity for enabling economic growth. At CIRA, we have been calling this capacity the digital economy value chain: the Internet stimulates human creativity with new technologies, outlets and opportunities which leads to innovation in products, services and processes. These products, services and processes improve productivity for individuals and businesses, thereby boosting their – and Canada’s – competitiveness in the global digital economy.
As part of its submission, we’ve developed a graphical representation of the Internet value chain:
The steps CIRA recommends involve ensuring the stability, security and resiliency of the Internet through the development of a DNS-CERT and the deployment of DNSSEC. We also recommend Canada support the bottom-up, consensus-based decision-making framework upon which Internet governance is currently based, through the continuation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and to continue to take a ‘light-handed’ approach in the development of policy and regulation with respect to the Internet.
Our submission is available here. Please take the time to read it and let me know what you think.
25
Jun
ICANN’s 38th International Meeting
This week, I’m in Brussels at the 38th international meeting of ICANN. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll know that CIRA is an active participant at these meetings.
I am the chairperson of the Strategic and Operational Planning Working Group (SOP WG) of the Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO). The ccNSO is responsible for developing and recommending policies to ICANN’s Board of Directors on issues related to country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), and the SOP WG facilitates the participation of ccTLD managers in ICANN’s strategic, operational planning and budgetary processes.
On Wednesday, the SOP WG hosted a fascinating debate on ICANN’s strategic objectives with a panel of experts, including Lesley Cowley, Chief Executive of Nominet; Alexa Raad, CEO of PIR; Fahd Batayneh from NITC; Rob Hall, President and CEO, Momentous.ca; and, Sabine Dolderer, CEO of DENIC. Certainly a panel of heavy hitters!
I was particularly interested when the panel took a look at what the drivers of change and the Internet will be for the next five years (an eternity in Internet years). New technologies are changing users’ browsing experiences, something that will affect how we conduct business in the near future.
Sparks flew, however, when the discussion turned to the political factors that will affect ccTLDs. Some passionate statements were made about the importance of maintaining an open and unregulated Internet. Last year’s events in Iran were cited as an example as to how important an Internet free from government tinkering is when we develop policies and take actions. I agree with this, but not everybody does. Governments around the world are increasingly waking up and wanting to control the Internet, and there are other international agencies that are attempting to adopt more Internet governance related activities.
Apart from the important role the Internet can play in democracy and human rights, it’s my opinion that it makes economic sense for governments to use a light hand when attempting to regulate the Internet. The organic, bottoms up nature of the Internet has allowed it to be an environment that stimulates creativity and self expression. Creativity is the foundation for innovation, which is the key driver for economic growth and stability. To put measures in place to regulate or control the Internet, either at the national or international level will affect the very characteristics that have allowed it to be the central driver of the economy of the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century.
On the topic of the future drivers of change in the DNS and the Internet, Rob Hall made an interesting comment about how search and the advent of the Chrome Web browser are fundamentally changing the domain space. Chrome has a search function built right into the address bar, which is directly changing the way in which people navigate to websites. This seems to be a reoccurring theme; I’ve blogged about how the ways in which we both access and use the Web are changing.
In my opinion, we have had a “stable” industry for more than 10 years ( at least the basics of addressing); now a separate, disruptive technology from another industry may completely change our business and the need and/or use for domain names as we currently think about them.
If a transcript or podcast of the debate is posted online, I will be sure to share the link on this blog.
By the way, I’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate Heather Dryden, a Policy Advisor with Industry Canada, on being appointed as the Interim Chairperson of ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC). The GAC is responsible for providing input to ICANN from governments, specifically on issues of public policy. Heather is a great champion of the Internet and the DNS in Canada. She is also an ex-officio member of CIRA’s Board of Directors.
In case you are interested, we’ve posted some photographs from the ccNSO and GAC meeting at ICANN 38 on our Picasa page and the CIRA Facebook fan page.
17
Jun
IABC Excel Awards
Recently, one of our partners received an important award.
Ingenium Communications, led by Caroline Kealey, took home the International Association of Business Communicators’ (IABC) 2010 Excel Award for Crisis Communications for work with Francis Moran from inMedia Public Relations Inc. and CIRA on the Confickr C worm.
As many of you likely remember, the Confickr C worm was detected in November 2008 and showed the potential of being a significant threat to Internet security. Ingenium assisted CIRA in devising and executing a strategic crisis communications strategy, allowing us to concentrate on protecting Canadians against the Confickr C worm.
It is for this work on the crisis communications strategy that Ingenium has been awarded the 2010 IABC Excel Award for Crisis Communications.
Congratulations to Caroline, her team and Francis!
4
Jun
CIRA’s Corporate Plan for 2011
On Tuesday, CIRA’s Board of Directors gave the final nod to our Corporate Plan for 2010-2011 (.pdf). This document will guide CIRA’s work for years to come and provides specific activities for the next year. The plan is the result of many months of hard work on the part of CIRA’s staff and Board of Directors.
Here are our high level strategic objectives which are highlighted in the Corporate Plan:
1. Enhance Corporate Reputation
2. Increase .CA Brand Value
3. Achieve Operational Excellence
4. Champion Effective .CA Stewardship
These are pretty high level objectives. Like all corporate plans, it’s the specific activities which achieve the strategic objectives that are the compelling part, and we have numerous interesting activities planned for the next year. The ones I think are of particular interest include the following:
- You may know that CIRA is engaged in a rewrite of its registry management system. I’ve blogged about this in the past, but this activity represents a lot of work for CIRA. It is, likely, the largest single project undertaken by CIRA in its 10-year history. Once we cut over to the new registry management system, it will be much more efficient and easier to register .CA domain names. The new system will be live in October 2010.
- Over the next year, we will be hosting a Canadian Internet Governance Forum, or CIGF. The CIGF will be a cross-country consultation to “take the temperature” of Canadians’ views on the topics of Internet governance and digital literacy. CIRA will develop a policy paper from the findings of the CIGF to be presented to the global Internet Governance Forum, a UN-sponsored, global multi-stakeholder meeting.
- We have also committed to a Community Investment Program (CIP) to support social and economic Internet-related activities in Canada. Our focus for the CIP will be on governance, internet technology infrastructure (of the soft, rather than “hard” variety), internet education and knowledge, and excellence in the use of .CA. We are going to do some very worthy as well as fun projects and I will most definitely blog about it in the future.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we do pretty important work at CIRA – as well as some pretty cool stuff. These aren’t just words. As CIRA staff, we will live and breathe this over the next year and we are excited to really get going on the work articulated in this plan. I encourage you to take the time to read it.
1
Jun
The Future of Web Browsers
Last week, I attended the Mesh Conference with a few of my colleagues. Mesh is billed as Canada’s Web Conference and CIRA has been a proud sponsor for two years in a row now.
Aside for the usual conference goodies (interesting swag, some valuable takeaways, interesting sessions, and great networking), there was a workshop that stood out from the rest in terms of meaning for the domain registry business. It was a presentation by Aza Raskin (@azaaza) on the future of Web-browsing at a related event called MeshU. Raskin is the Creative Lead of Firefox at Mozilla, the most popular browser in the world.
According to Raskin, the way we browse the Web is going to change dramatically in the next three to five years. Raskin spoke in terms of Web browsers becoming “you-centric.” What does this mean?
To surf the Web, you login to your browser – your browser knows all of your passwords, knows your contacts, and even knows how you like to interact with those contacts (Facebook vs. email vs. Twitter, and so on). With all of this information, your browser becomes your online identity, your Sherpa, your personal shopper, and even your security advisor. Forget about remembering your passwords, your browser stores them. Looking for a new vacuum? Your browser knows what your friends purchased and will recommend it for you. Want to find a great source for local news? Your browser knows what your contacts read (and, with location-based technology, knows where you are), and will take you there. In essence, the Web now revolves around you. It’s your Web.
Putting aside privacy and security issues for the time being (a topic that warrants its own post), there’s something really interesting going on here. Technology is getting to be more intuitive. As that happens more and more, the Web truly becomes a public space, not a communications medium. It’s a place where people interact, not just on social media platforms, but through day-to-day Web-browsing. Until very recently, we’ve considered the Web a medium for information exchange. No longer – it’s a place where we interact with each other.
It may also signify some changes that will affect the domain name registry business. I can see the future of this radically altering the way we surf the Internet. Instead of finding http://www.cira.ca, our browser will take us to that .CA registry that hopefully all of our friends are members of. If one of our unique selling points as the registry for .CA domain names extensions is the ‘Canadian-ness’ of .CA, what happens to that unique selling point when the likelihood that you’ll type in the website address is greatly reduced?
I look forward to this new generation of intuitive Web browsers. It will certainly enhance our online lives. At the same time, however, it is something that we, as a registry, and the privacy folks need to stay on top of.
26
May
Anti-Spam Legislation
Earlier this week, the Federal Government introduced legislation to curb spam in Canada. Bill C-28, the Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act (FISA), replaces Bill C-27, which died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued in December 2009.
According to Industry Canada’s website, Bill C-28:
“ . . . provides a comprehensive regulatory regime that uses economic disincentives to protect electronic commerce and is modelled on international best practices. To enforce the legislation, the bill would use the expertise, and expand the mandates, of the three enforcement agencies: the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Competition Bureau Canada and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.”
Bill C-27 was a decent piece of legislation and it appears that C-28 is very similar.
As the CEO of the organization that runs the .CA registry and the Domain Name System that underpins it, I strongly support measures to reduce spam. It is the bane of our industry; an incredible amount of traffic on our servers is spam, and it is a drain on our resources.
I encourage Parliament to ensure the quick passage of Bill C-28.
14
May
CIRA’s Board of Directors Election Process Starts
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending the Canada 3.0 Forum in Stratford, Ontario. This event drew together Canadians involved in digital media to talk about key issues facing Canada’s digital community. It was incredibly inspiring to spend a couple of days in the company of some of Canada’s most influential digital leaders, and got me thinking about the importance of what CIRA does.
At CIRA, it’s our Board of Directors who set the policies and strategies that steer our activities. That’s why this time of year is so important to CIRA – this week we started accepting applications from Canadians to join our Board.
It’s an important job and an incredibly rewarding one as well. Board membership provides opportunity to:
- Work with leaders in the Canadian Internet community.
- Help shape the strategies and policies that affect the .CA domain.
- Gain insight and experience around technical innovation, Internet policy and organizational governance.
I know it sounds a tad overstated, but it really is your chance to help shape the Internet in Canada.
If you are interested, I encourage you to visit our elections website for more details. Applications will be accepted until June 11.
11
May
Odds and Ends
A few items from the news caught my eye over the past few weeks, and I’d like to bring some attention to them.
First, the draft text of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was released – or at least part of it. I’ve blogged about some of the provisions in the ACTA that make me nervous, here and here. Until we actually got to see what was in the agreement, in some respects what I was blogging about was simply speculation. The three strikes text has been removed from the Agreement. This appears to be a good sign; however, all references to specific country positions have been removed, and the negotiations are still anything but transparent. Yesterday, the European Union called on Canada to support more transparency for ACTA negotiations, calling for the negotiations to move to the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO. This is an issue I’m going to be following very closely.
On a related matter, the federal government will introduce “new” copyright legislation within six weeks. This has raised the ire of many people and organizations in Canada as it appears that the legislation will not include any of the recommendations from the public consultations held on copyright reform last year. Rather, it sounds like the new bill will closely resemble Bill C61, originally introduced to Parliament in 2008. It died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued in December 2008.
There are a few items in Bill C-61 that made me uneasy. The legislation would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to notify a subscriber if there has been an allegation of copyright infringement made against them. Once an allegation has been made by a copyright holder the ISP would be required by law to retain customer data for six months from the day they receive the claim. This makes me uneasy as there is no judicial oversight proposed – it is simply a private company retaining your personal information, including a history of your Internet activity, based on an allegation of wrongdoing. However, since we don’t yet know what will be in the new legislation, it’s a little premature to comment, but it’s another issue to follow, for sure.
On a positive note, last week was a big week for the Internet. On May 5, the first three top-level domains in non-Latin characters were inserted into the DNS root zone. I’ve blogged about what the introduction of International Domain Names (IDNs) means, and I’m proud of CIRA’s support of their development. Congratulations to the team at ICANN on this historic accomplishment!
Lastly, if you’re at the Canada 3.0 conference in Toronto, plan to attend the Usage of Networks – The Can of Worms session. Yours truly will be one of the panelists, along with Jim Roche and Scott Vanstone. The panel will be moderated by Chris Labrador, the VP of Advanced Technology at RIM. I encourage you to come out as it’s shaping up to be a dynamic session on networks in Canada. If you can’t make it to Canada 3.0, no worries: I will be posting my speech to this blog on Wednesday morning.
3
May
Today is World Press Freedom Day
As a relative newcomer to the world of blogging, I have been very conscious of the role that I, and other bloggers, play in the mass media. We have become what many are terming, the “new new journalism”, not to be confused with the new journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Although I don’t believe mainstream journalism can ever be replaced, bloggers in many cases do make an important contribute by not only writing about their opinions and personal experience, but through investigation, research, and analysis. There is no question that this resonates with many segments of society – otherwise, we wouldn’t have our respective followings.
Bloggers must strike a careful balance between accurate, relevant reporting, with expressing one’s own opinion. I personally feel committed to responsible blogging as it is important that single voices do not overtake public discourse. That said, as the blogosphere expands and carries more influence, we see that in countries that don’t protect freedom of speech, bloggers can suffer the same fate as journalists when they express opinions or report on facts unpopular with the government. This is never acceptable.
This morning, CBC covered the story Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian Newsweek writer who was arrested in Iran last year and spent 118 days in prison. This case demonstrates just how vulnerable journalists are, regardless of where they are from.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 136 journalists were in jail and 71 murdered worldwide in 2009. Threatened Voices reports that to date, 232 bloggers have been threatened or arrested around the world.
I feel fortunate to live in a country that is committed to freedom of speech for all. It is important to remember, though, that so many in the world do not enjoy this protection. They are vulnerable to persecution and prosecution for anything from talking politics with a neighbour to posting a blog about government policy.
With this in mind, I hope you will join with me in recognizing World Press Freedom Day. This is a day that raises awareness of the perils that journalists face by simply doing their jobs. I know I will certainly pause today to consider the vital contribution that traditional journalists and “new new journalists” make to society.