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2 March 2004
Representatives of 46 ccTLDs (87 attendees) met in Rome on 1-2 March 2004.
To allow for remote participation the meeting have been broadcast by the ICB UK.
The representatives offer their thanks to the local hosts for the very good meeting room, and facilities, and to those who had assisted in sponsoring the event: Nominet UK, Basic Fusion, TWNIC and Afilias.
On the morning of 1 March 2004, a joint session was held with the GAC, which gave an opportunity for ccTLD representatives to seek and gain clarification from members of the GAC working group on a number of issues arising out of draft revisions to the GAC principles. The ccTLD community expressed its thanks to the GAC working group for taking on board many of the issues included in CENTR's response to the draft. The ccTLD representatives were encouraged by the direction that the draft has been taking, particularly in the form of the February 2004 version, and hope that the GAC working group will continue to clarify the scope of the document and the remaining open issues.
In the afternoon, several briefings were held on the WHOIS, the proposed Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act (FOISA), and the Universal Postal Union's work on the possible standardisation of addresses. These presentations allowed a sharing of views and developments, which were useful and interesting. In respect of the FOISA, the ccTLD representatives present felt that the draft legislation raised numerous concerns on which it looked forward to further clarification.
On the same day the ccTLD group had excellent presentations from 5 members which addressed issues such as right to left scripts, scripts other than accented Latin characters, whether the contract relates to ASCII, Unicode or both, and we look forward to learning more about this issue. It was noted that development may be being inhibited by the lack of appropriately uniform, interoperable and comprehensive applications.
The 5 regional ccTLD organizations reported on their activities. Over the years we have seen an increasing number of these organisations becoming formally incorporated. This shows an interesting trend in the regional importance in DNS governance.
Updates were given from 7 registries, demonstrating (a) the immense diversity in the set up and operation of ccTLD registries, but also (b) increasing interest and intervention in the DNS from some governments.
A debate was held about the IANA function and performance. There was unanimous, cross-regional support for IANA to move to a key-based asymmetric encryption structure, as soon as the practical details can be sorted out. Volunteers from each region offered to co-ordinate regional efforts to demonstrate the feasibility of this.
The meeting concluded with a discussion about the future of the ccTLD meetings in the light of the creation of the ccNSO. The meeting asked the AP region to take a leadership in organizing a similar meeting in June in KL, distinct, for now, from any ccNSO meeting which might be held there. The meeting also asked CENTR to arrange for the nomination of some individuals to collaborate with and support AP, LA, AF and NA in the preparation of this meeting and its agenda so that it will cover the interests of all regions.
The meeting gave special thanks and acknowledgement of the work of Elisabeth Portaneuve, who was attending her last meeting after 5 years of work on in the international Internet community on behalf of AFNIC.
The documents and presentations relating to the meeting are published at: http://www.wwtld.org/meetings/cctld/20040302.Rome-documents.html