Largest specialist conference in the German-speaking world concerned with the subject of domains and Internet Governance – Main focal points: technical aspects and institutional further development

Around 200 representatives of IT undertakings, politics, the legal professions and business in general met in Berlin on 9 and 10 February for the third Domain pulse, to which they had been invited by the German domain registry, DENIC. This specialist event dealing with domains is held yearly and rotates amongst DENIC and the equivalent organizations in Austria, nic.at, and Switzerland/Liechtenstein, SWITCH.

Dagmar Wöhrl, Parliamentary Secretary of State at the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, welcomed the participants on behalf of the German authorities. She congratulated the organizer, DENIC, on its successful work in recent years and then went on to encourage the ITC industry to probe critically into any political intentions to regulate and, if necessary, to hinder them.

The various topics at this year’s conference can be subsumed under the heading of "Future Prospects for the Internet". It was thus natural for the internationalized domains (IDNs), which were introduced in Germany in 2004, to be at the heart of the discussions. IDNs make it possible to use letters with umlauts and other diacritics and even whole alphabets in addition to the Latin one. In the German-speaking countries, IDNs now have a market share of 3-4%. In Taiwan, they account for nearly 50%. Up until now, the use of IDNs has been handicapped by the fact that the market leader amongst Internet browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, has not been able to display them. Michel Suignard, a program manager with Microsoft, was, however, able to demonstrate the new Internet Explorer 7 at Domain pulse and to show that it now supports IDNs too.

In addition to the long-established domain endings, such as .de or .com, various new Top Level Domains have been set up in recent years. The plans for some of them were presented at Domain pulse. These included .berlin, which is setting out to create a new identity for the German capital and its residents, and .mobi, which is intended to concentrate solely on the provision of special-format contents that can be easily viewed on mobile telephones or other devices with small displays.

Opinions diverged as regards the further development of global Internet governance following on from the World Summit of the Information Society, which was held in Tunis in November 2005. The head of the international Internet coordination body, ICAAN, the Australian, Paul Twomey, spoke in favour of continuing with the self-regulated private-business approach, which had worked well to date. This made it possible for all relevant stakeholders to be involved in a commensurate and transparent way. The German government representative at ICANN, Michael Leibrandt, warned against overrating the self-administrative format; ICANN’s significance was often overestimated too. He felt that governments ought to have a decisive role in the administration of the Internet, since only they were in the position to enforce democratic rights. The Austrian, Christian Singer, representing the current presidency of the European Union’s Council of Ministers, was opposed to shifting the balance away from the private administration of the Internet, since the existing private-business structure had a good track record. He too stressed that national governments ought, however, to continue to be involved, as they had been to date.

"There are no rules as to what the Internet has to look like; it is up to us to create a vision". Such was the credo proclaimed by Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of the Domain Name Systems (DNS). Nonetheless, it was certainly possible to learn from the experience of the past decades. The use of the DNS was growing exponentially, which was due to many new applications that built on it, such as ENUM, which links domains with telephone numbers, or the RFID radio-frequency chip.

"Do we have to be afraid of the Internet?" was the provocatively worded title of a panel discussion with the Internet experts of the political groups represented in the German parliament (Bundestag). All of them were against further-reaching regulation. The existing laws were adequate, for instance, for taking action against phishing or spam, was the view expressed by Günter Krings of the CDU. Heiko Hilker of the Left Party stressed that proactive media work to empower Internet users to recognize dangers and to handle them sensibly was more important than laying down statutory requirements. Hans-Joachim Otto of the FDP summed up the situation in these words: "the Internet has been so successful, because the State has kept out of it".

On the question of the mandatory storage of Internet traffic data for a prescribed period of time and surveillance measures it was not only Grietje Bettin (of the Bündnis 90/Green political group) who felt that the situation had evolved beyond a reasonable proportion between outlay and benefit. Larger providers could easily find themselves spending several hundreds of thousands of euros to make the necessary investments. The law-enforcement authorities, on the other hand, had only made a handful of queries about this data. Hans-Joachim Otto warned against creating an environment of generalized suspicion against the average Internet user.

The next Domain pulse has been scheduled for 8 and 9 February 2007 in Baden near Zurich.

Further information about Domain pulse 2006, including all the presentation material is available on the special webpages at http://www.domainpulse.de.