On to Rome?
In six weeks, ICANN will be holding a meeting in Rome, the first of the three ICANN meetings planned for 2004. The ICANN website announcement of the meeting states that “ICANN encourages broad participation in its bottom-up consensus-development process” and that all are free to take part in the meeting “by attending in person” or taking part in a webcast or through other means. However, critical information is still lacking from the ICANN website, such as an Agenda. More significantly, the announcement provides no information as to how stakeholders could recommend issues to be considered for placement on the agenda or how interested parties could apply to take part in a panel or provide a presentation. In short, ICANN is providing no information on how stakeholders could potentially participate in the meeting in any way more meaningful than simply being an observer.

The recently completed World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) presented a challenge to ICANN. If nothing else, the WSIS made clear that there are significant interests committed to either a radical overhaul or replacement of ICANN. Furthermore, the U.N. is going to spend at least the next two years studying options for potentially extreme changes in the technical management of the internet. Although such sweeping changes would be counterproductive, ICANN has been put on notice that they need to do a better job of living up to their own ideals, including adherence to the goals specified in their Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Commerce. The most recent amendment to the MOU calls on ICANN to “[c]ontinue to develop, to test, and to implement appropriate mechanisms that foster informed participation in ICANN by the global Internet community...” Providing stakeholders with the opportunity to meaningfully participate in ICANN meetings would be one mechanism by which the organization could foster informed participation.