Nation Building: ICANN's Next Mission?
According to press reports, ICANN "is looking at engaging the Indian government and sections of the Indian Internet industry on a new level, in order to help the country upgrade its role in the global Internet regime."

ICANN's plans a number of Indian-related initiatives including a series of public events in the county. ICANN President Paul Twomey was quoted as saying, that "India's current role in the global Internet space was miniscule [sic] compared to her size and potential and the country was not considered an important player in the Internet space." Dr. Twomey was also quoted as saying, that "India has a talent pool but that pool is seen stronger on the software side and not perceived strong on the network engineering side. May be the Indian technical education system should pay more attention to honing network engineering skills of people here."

On one hand, ICANN's interest in helping India expand their role in cyberspace seems laudatory. On the other hand, ICANN's new focus on India raises a number of important questions. One of these questions is the issue of how would the success of the ICANN's effort to upgrade India's role in the global internet regime affect the country's international competitiveness vis-a-vis other nations, particularly developing countries that have not been so favored by ICANN? Is ICANN now in the business of picking winning and losing countries in the global technology marketplace? Will countries in Asia, the Mideast and Latin America incur economic losses as the result of ICANN's attempts to bolster the relative technological strength of India?

A more fundamental question is, how is ICANN's new-found interest in building India's role in cyberspace consistent with the organization's function as a technical manager of the internet? Should ICANN play a role in determining which countries should and should not have a more prominent positions in internet space? Should ICANN be in the business of advising countries to concentrate more or less on hardware or software development? There is also the question of what relationship, if any, exists between ICANN decisions to focus their largess on certain countries and the difficulties ICANN has had in obtaining payments from some ccTLDs?

ICANN seeks to become a truly global organization. This would imply that ICANN should observe a strict neutrality in the relative competitiveness between states and in their internal affairs. If ICANN does not do so, they will have only themselves to blame if their international credibility is damaged.