An ICANN meeting will be held in Prague between 24-29 June 2012, where issues and topics impacting users, consumers and registrants, like whois access and the extension of domain space with ongoing new gTLD program, will be discussed. As a reminder, ICANN is an Internet governing body managing mainly IP addressing and domain names and which is implementing a multi-stakeholder model, bottom-up and consensus-based policy-making process .

ICANN as an organization still needs important improvements on accountability, transparency and public interest aspects and also in the involvement of the civil society, activists and academics. It is also developing more complex structure and processes advantaging insiders. The debates are dominated by business and trademark perspective and privacy, human rights, freedom of expression are still marginalized and not systematically included or assessed in the policy making process.

One of the rare open spaces in ICANN for the participation of the civil society remains the Non-commercial Stakeholder Group (which includes for example NCUC - the historical non-commercial users constituency). It is one of the stakeholders forming the GNSO (the structure responsible for policy making for gTLD).

Prague meeting is an opportunity for NGOs in Europe to follow ICANN activities more closely and to participate in the process since there are several public sessions and in particular the traditional public forum on Thursdays where they can express their concerns.

From a European perspective, the discussion about Thick Whois may definitely interest privacy advocacy organization and also people interested in data protection. ICANN is getting pressure from LEAs with support of some governments (US,UK etc), members of GAC (Governmental Advisory Committee) to implement Thick Whois without real privacy safeguards or a privacy impact assessment and pushing to include those provisions in the registrar's agreements or RAA (Registrar Accreditation Agreement) which is currently under negotiations as well as in the expected new gTLDs to be launched in next years.

The ongoing new gTLD program also represents new challenges, benefits and risks for consumers and users. The list of applications for new gTLD was revealed on the 13 June 2012. The process will continue and will include a period for community comments and also possible objections against some TLDs, which may raise a Freedom of Expression issue, in particular, with giving governments, via GAC, the possibility to send "early warnings".

Finally, European NGOs are strongly advised to attend the ICANN meeting to be more familiar with those topics and to see how they can be involved in the process to influence it although domain names issues seem narrow as compared to Internet policy topics in general. The development of policies in ICANN and its own model are setting a precedent in the Internet governance context that we need to care about.

Website with practical information about ICANN Prague meeting (24-29 June 2012)
http://prague44.icann.org

Explanation of the process to object an applied gTLD
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/objection-dispute-resoluti...

Whois recommendations from the review team (5.12.2011)
http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/whois-rt-draft-final-repor...

Homepage of Non-commercial Stakeholder Group
http://gnso.icann.org/en/about/non-commercial.htm

(Contribution by Rafik Dammak - Non-Commercial Users Constituency/Non-commercial Stakeholder Group)