[WSIS CS-Plenary] ICANN claims success in African outreach

[Marouen MRAIHI]

The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers has closed out its first
African meeting in almost two years claiming a successful outreach to the
Internet community on a continent with the lowest Internet penetration of
any.


7 Dec 2004, 09:47 GMT -
ICANN president Paul Twomey said in a press conference that at the Cape
Town, South Africa meeting ICANN heard that Africa's primary concern in this
area is creating the infrastructure to allow its citizens to access the
Internet.

"That's not our primary function at all," Twomey said. ICANN coordinates the
Internet's addressing systems. "But the functions ICANN helps coordinate
ensure that when Africa does get online, Africa can access the rest of the
Internet in a seamless way."

Following the meeting, AfrISPA, the African Internet Service Provider
Association, issued a statement saying it supports ICANN, in the face of the
ongoing "Internet governance" debate within the United Nations, in which
ICANN is entangled.

Referring to this UN World Summit on the Information Society process.
AfriSPA said in a statement that any "externally imposed changes in the
roles of ICANN or [African regional Internet registry] AfriNIC would not be
well received."

"There are more urgent and focal areas for the WSIS, UN and ITU to address,"
said Eric Osiakwan, executive secretary of AfrISPA. "Coordination of the
Internet's unique identifiers is currently being handled very well".

WSIS should instead be focused on issues such as child pornography, spam,
and the lack of bandwidth in developing nations. "ICANN works well for names
and numbers - the same bottom up approach can be used to solve these other
ongoing issues," he said.

http://cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=ED688EE3-43D5-482B-9C6E-EFAC0AA4A
7DD

Marouen