Africa's liaison to ICANN: Outreach is under way

The Highway Africa conference, held last week in Grahamstown, South Africa, is the largest gathering of African ICT journalists. Computerworld Kenya interviewed Anne-Rachel Inne, Africa's regional liaison at the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Computerworld Kenya: Why are there very few African countries participating in ICANN activities?

Anne-Rachel Inne: This is not a problem affecting Africa only and it may be because ICANN does not have a lot of fellowships; it is a problem for all developing countries where people don't have the means to go to international meetings. The meetings are held in various places and the pricing changes. One time it could be $1,000 and the next it could be $5,000, which is challenging for participants in Africa.

Another issue may come from the nature of the organization -- ICANN is not an intergovernmental [body], and government officials must receive formal invitations and explain what ICANN is before they are allowed to go.

The Internet has evolved and is more pervasive so one has to be proactive and look for ways to participate locally and internationally, via, for example, remote instruments we keep setting up to facilitate that.

Computerworld Kenya: Why is the business community not interested, compared to other regions?

Inne: Maybe just because they ignore the benefits of participating. And maybe because the ones that could be most interested are from the GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] community in the region, and they view it as services on mobiles so ICANN does not readily come to mind

ICANN has hired and is still hiring regionally to get more outreach to the Internet community at large, and engaging more with the business community.

The hiring of regional representatives who speak various languages and understand the regions has also helped in engaging the community. ICANN has slowly become more international.

Computerworld Kenya: African countries have criticized ICANN for not helping in the redelegation of their country code top level domains; has ICANN tried its best?

Inne: There is a lot of confusion over what ICANN can do or can't do. The redelegation process is well set out by IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), and we spend time to explain that we can't interfere in local matters. That is not to say ICANN can't help in thinking it over and showing how it's done elsewhere. ICANN officials worked with Kenya over the redelegation of .ke from an individual to a multistakeholder body. Most recently, we worked with Nigeria to redelegate .ng in the same conditions.

Lack of knowledge has led people to think ICANN will redelegate without proper documentation, data and technical infrastructure to ensure that any Internet users under the domain are not switched off when redelegation is done. There are people with businesses on that ccTLD; we must make sure that we don't just switch off people following a redelegation. In some cases, people don't understand the technical issues that you need in place to make the TLD work and run consistently.

Other countries have differences over which body should run the ccTLD registry and think that ICANN can help them in determining the right body to run it, but this is a sovereign matter and beyond ICANN.

I concur with a recent view by Vika Mpisane, [of the] Africa TLD organization, who noted that half of African ccTLDs are having issues. They are not being run properly because of administrative and technical management issues or internal fights on who has the right to oversee the TLD.

Computerworld Kenya: ICANN has been reaching out to Africa for increased participation. What are some of the benefits?

Inne: ICANN meetings are attended by about 1,000 people from 70 different countries. It is a forum to network and talk to counterparts on software, networks, security, sharing challenges and getting help.

The best example is perhaps the case of Brazil, which offered to train African ccTLD operators on using the open-source registry system that .br was using. Kenya and Tanzania have benefited from the training, and Kenya's registry is one of the good examples.

In every ICANN meeting, the country code Name Supporting Organization (ccNSO) has a full day of technical workshops. An African ccTLD can come and present challenges and exchange ideas.

In the meetings, the root server operators are present and could help in exchanging ideas on how the ccTLD can get a copy of the root server, which improves the registry stability and resilience in case of DDoS attacks.

Other more advanced ccTLDs offer to host copies of registry data where in case of an attack, the data will be available globally -- the registry is not switched off. IANA has a repository of the ccTLDs offering secondary platforms where the African ccTLD data can run on other networks free -- and in case of anything, the information is still visible.

Computerworld Kenya: How is ICANN working with regional organizations to raise awareness in Africa?

ICANN is working with AfriNIC on IPV6 adoption in Africa, holding workshops for technical managers and ensuring that Africa is ready. AfTLD and ICANN collaborate on workshops for ccTLD managers.

One of the reasons I am at Highway Africa is to engage media and get the message out: our domains are still not functioning properly; we have jurisdictional problems; maintenance of networks is still a challenge we have with broadband coming.

Training and human resource is still a problem. How many people do we have that can react to a DDos attack? This is not a prerogative of ICANN, but with country code networks, we will always help and work with Internet communities.