Submitted by gradisce on Tue, 10 February 2009 - 17:47

At-Large Summit: Power Issues in New gTLDs: Gender, Development, and Big Business

Date: 
Tue 03 Mar 2009 - 16:45 - 18:15
Audio / Teleconference: 
English
Room: 
Alameda 2 (Hotel Meliá)

Instructions on how to participate remotely may be found at this URL:
https://st.icann.org/alac-docs/index.cgi?alameda_1_remote_participation

Chatroom: http://icann.na3.acrobat.com/powerissues/

Summit Microsite: The At-Large Summit microsite has complete information at: http://www.atlarge.icann.org/summit.

Background: What is the "At-Large Summit

The Mexico City meeting is a landmark for ICANN's At-Large community ("At-Large" is the name used for the individual Internet user community participating in ICANN).

The whole At-Large community will be meeting together face-to-face in the 'At-Large Summit'. Approximately 90 representatives of At-Large organisations (called "At-Large Structures") are already confirmed. You will be able to spot them easily, as each will have a ribbon indicating their status as a Summit delegate attached to their ICANN meeting badges.

The Summit is being held 28 February through 5 March 2009 at the Mexico City Sheraton and also at the nearby Melia Mexico Reforma Hotel. All ICANN meeting attendees are invited and encouraged to attend the sessions, all of which are open to everyone.

As proposed by the At-Large community, the Summit has the following objectives:

  • Develop the community's capacity for engagement in ICANN by increasing its knowledge and understanding of the key issues confronting ICANN and ICANN's roles and responsibilities;
  • Provide an opportunity for the community to finalise and present its advice on some of the most important issues facing the ICANN community today; and last but not least,
  • Highlight the successes of the community in recent years and build upon them to ensure that the interests of the world's more than 1 billion individual Internet users are well represented in the development of Internet name and number policy.
Agenda details: 

Organiser: Heike Jensen
 
Format: Panelists will give initial presentations followed by Q&A

Simultaneous interpretation into EN, ES and FR will be provided
 
Description: In the course of its existence, ICANN has slowly augmented the number of gTLDs and is now about to trigger a potentially vast expansion of the domain name space. According to ICANN’s core values, its decisions and actions need to safeguard distinct - and potentially conflicting – values, namely the economic value of furthering competition, the civic value of including those entities most affected by a decision, and the sociopolitical value of reflecting the functional, geographic and cultural diversity of the Internet in the deliberations. A multitude of comments that ICANN received on its draft for the application process for gTLDs suggests that many people from around the world feel that ICANN has not successfully translated its core values in the geld process.  So what are the power issues involved in new gTLDs? Who stands to gain what, and who fears to be marginalized how? In our session, we will explore these questions with particular reference to two digital divides that have been well-analyzed and that the world community has pledged to overcome: the digital divide between the global north and the global south on the one hand, and the gender digital divide on the other. The panelists, invited from different stakeholder groups and ICANN entities, will share their views of how new gTLDs could impact economic, civic and sociopolitical power relations in different ways, depending on the framework for their allocation that eventually gets adopted. Invited panelists include: Avri Doria (GNSO Council); Olga Cavalli (GNSO); William Drake (GNSO); Dirk Krischenowski (dotBERLIN); and Eric Brunner-Williams.