State and internet community reconcile
December 7, 2004
 By Lynda Loxton
Cape Town - Long-strained relations between the government and the internet community were considerably eased by last week's International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) annual meeting in South Africa, Kalvin Brown, the director of Uniforum, said yesterday.
Uniforum was one of the main sponsors of the event, which saw 735 delegates converge on Cape Town from around the world, including 217 South Africans, government ministers and officials from 28 other African countries.
"The cross-pollination of ideas and education about what Icann does went a long way towards fixing up the perception problem that it has long had with the government," said Brown.
He said the generally conciliatory opening speech last week by communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri had set the tone for the meeting, which included several workshops as well as the Icann board meeting at the weekend.
During her speech, she had vehemently denied that she was "anti-Icann", but made it clear that she expected it to do more to help developing countries have a greater say in the way the internet was run.
Brown said Icann's willingness to do this had been demonstrated by its decision to grant provisional recognition to AfriNIC, the new internet number registry for Africa.
This would pave the way for it to become the fifth regional number registry in the world after the establishment of similar bodies in Europe, the US, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
Icann said that it had appointed Frank Fowlie as ombudsman, highlighting its "commitment to ensuring Icann's accountability to the global internet community".
Adiel Akplogan, the chief executive of AfriNIC, said that having its own number registry would give Africa greater say in managing the development of the internet on the continent, working in close co-operation with African governments, which would provide the needed infrastructure to support the internet.
Brown said an important decision had been to give the go-ahead to develop more top domain names. These included .com, .net and .org, and there had been pressure for more to cover specific interest groups such as tourism, which wanted .travel included on the list of international names.
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