After a long, fruitless period of inactivity on issues surrounding domain names in Australia, the industry is taking action to resolve governance issues.
Several stakeholders in the struggle for Australian DNS governance are
attending a conference on global DNS issues in Singapore, called the Asia Pacific International Forum (AP-IF).
The AP-IF summit was convened for representatives from around the Pacific
rim to discuss the regional impact of the U.S. government’s recent White Paper on reform of the management of global top-level domains like “.com” and “.net”.
The White House has come under fire for dithering about the process by
which it will remove the monopoly held by Network Solutions, Inc. on
administering domain names.
Australian attendees of the summit participated in a video conferencing
session last Thursday, organised by the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), to
communicate the views of those stakeholders not going to Singapore.
The session covered Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, attracting DNS
luminaries such as Robert Elz, the administrator for the “.au” top level
domain, plus Paul Twomey, CEO of the government think tank the National
Office of Information Economy (NOIE), and several domain name registrars.
Steve Thompson, business systems architect for the ASX, said the
video conference was “worthwhile” for those who participated.
“It’s brought us to a base line understanding of where we are at the
moment, so we could go to Singapore with a single answer,” Mr Thompson
said.
The speakers at the session agreed that the debate on local governance had been too dominated by “poachers turned gamekeepers,” according to Mr Thompson.
The Australian “com.au” version of NSI, Internet Names Australia, has been criticised for having too much influence in the body which was set up to oversee DNS issues–Australian Domain Name Administration (ADNA).