On the 4th two-day meeting of the ICANN-Studienkreise on 3 and 4 February the administrators of the national domain country codes appeared predominantly pessimistic about the perspectives of the reform of the international domain administration ICANN, which were decided in December 2002. Roughly 150 participants from the fields of industry, politics and academics followed the invitation of the NETCOM Institute, Leipzig and the German domain registry DENIC eG, to discuss "Internet Governance 2003: ICANN Reform". DENIC board member Sabine Dolderer spoke in the introduction of the conference after the years-long discussion with ICANN without concrete results of three years of stagnancy. However, one still were part of the ICANN process and would continue to accompany it critically. She renewed her demand that ICANN should center on its core competencies and should put all resources towards them. They would contain especially the IANA function, namely the administration of the contact data for the various top level domains and the allocation of IP addresses. Much were to be gained by this approach.

William Black from the British registry Nominet also presented himself as depressed from the suggestions for the ICANN reform. ICANN as an organisation still would be too complex in structure. He advocated radical simplifications and asked, whether it would not be better to restart from scratch and first define the core requirements and tasks. After that one could start to look for consensus how they could be realized with the least possible structural complexity.

Marianne Wolfsgruber, executive manager of the CENTR, the European umbrella association of registries, stated that the mutual trust has deteriorated because of the events of the last years. However, she expressed hope that with the new structure also new persons would take command at ICANN and that the "institutional incest" would find an end. All parties have not communicated with each other enough. New heads could see to a restart of the brainstorming, upon which a new atmosphere of trust could be built.

Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers of the Internet" and currently chairman of the ICANN board of directors, stressed in his presentation the principle of cooperation, which he called extremely important for the functioning of the Internet. Applied to ICANN this meant that all parties would have to work and communicate better with each other, even if they were in a competetive situation outside of ICANN. The new ICANN president, who took over from Stuart Lynn in spring, would face the enormous task of bringing the various partners together and implementing the decided reform plan. All parties would have to be clear on the fact that it is easy to compile rules, but that they could only make sense, if they could actually be implemented. At this point he expressly included the representatives of governments.

In addition to the cooperation between registries and ICANN the concept of an increased Public Private Partnership, which had come about in the discussions about the structural reform, was another dominant topic of the conference. The government representatives, who were present at the meeting, again approved of DENIC's activities. It was stressed that there is indeed a public interest in the area of domain administration. DENIC, however, would do a good job and conducted domain registration and management in a quick, cost effective, transparent and non-discriminatory way, explained Cara Schwarz-Schilling of the Regulierungsbehörde für Telekommunikation und Post. Michael Leibrandt, the representative of the ministry of economics, agreed with this assessment.