Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

The European Summer School on Internet Governance offers annually (end of July) a one week academic course (48 hours). 4th Summer School was on July 25-31, 2010 in Meissen, Germany.

The course covers the political, legal, economic, socio-cultural, technological and other dimensions of the governance of the Internet. The course includes also practical oriented lectures covering the management of critical Internet resources as well as the development of the domain name market. Each academic lecture is followed by a Q&A Session. There are smaller more practical oriented workshops, round tables and case presentations as well as students project. Evening events with “Snacks & Wine” are for interactive communication among faculty and fellows. Students will get a “Certificate” for the successful participation in the Summer School.

Apart from representatives from the governments of European countries and European Union, a line of distinguished international academic faculties, Prof. Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, Wiiliam Drake, Avri Doria, Hong Xue, Milton Mueller and Wolfgang Benedek gave the lectures on a variety of theoretical issues on Internet governance. Their research reflects remarkable academic quality and international vision. There were also a series of presentations from 5 ccTLD managers, RIPE, UNESCO, geo-TLD applicant and others. Technical community is supportive for the Summer School. Fellows were self-stimulating and highly interested in studying.

An International Association of Summer Schools on Internet Governance was initially launched by representatives from Asia, Latin America, Europe and North America.

The Nominating Committee (Nom Com) is an independent committee tasked with selecting a majority of the members of the Board of Directors and other key positions within ICANN’s structure. ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit, non-profit corporation dedicated to: preserving the operational security and stability of the Internet; promoting competition; achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and supporting the development of policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.

Individuals selected by Nom Com will have a unique opportunity to work with accomplished colleagues from around the globe, address the Internet’s intriguing technical coordination problems and policy development challenges with diverse functional, cultural, and geographic dimensions, and gain valuable insights and experience from working across boundaries of knowledge, responsibility and perspective.

Those selected will gain the satisfaction of making a valuable public service contribution towards the continued function and evolution of an essential global resource. Considering the broad public interest, those selected will work to achieve the goals towards which ICANN is dedicated in order to facilitate the Internet’s critically important societal functions.

Prof. Xue, Chair of APRALO gave a presentation at APTLD Colombo Meeting in July 2010. This is the second briefing given by Prof. Xue to the Asia-Pacific ccTLD community. Although she was at the Nomination meeting at the suburb of Brussels, she managed to call in the APTLD meeting despite the difficulties of time zones and connections. APTLD staff went out for lunch and let Prof. Xue waited quite a while online. Eventually the connection was resumed and she gave the brilliant presentation, without being able to get the souvenir for all the presenters. In 2009, she managed to give a presentation on behalf of APRALO to APTLD via remote call-in, when she was in Connecticut for a conference.

(Drafted by APRALO Statement; Hong Xue, Chinese Domain Name Users Alliance

Posted at https://st.icann.org/alac-docs/index.cgi?statement_on_icm_application_for_the_xxx_stld)

The following Statement was drafted by Hong Xue and unanimously supported and endorsed as an APRALO Statement at the meeting of 27/04/2010.

APRALO agrees with the statement made by ALAC The .XXX is primarily an issue of procedural justice. ICANN has to follow truthfully the procedures set up by itself. We support ICANN to be a transparent, neutral and effective coordinator of the Internet domain name system, rather than interfering with the issues that are not really in its mandate. However, we do not have an interest in supporting any specific TLD, which we believe is out of the mission of the At-Large community.

(Drafted for ALAC Statement on IDN Issues; Hong Xue, Chinese Domain Name Users Alliance

Posted at https://st.icann.org/idn-policy/index.cgi?alac_statement_idn_issues)

The Synchronized IDN ccTLDs is a proposal to resolve some critical problems of the fast-track IDN ccTLD implementation. Although the proposal facilitated the Board to make the resolution on completion of fast-track string evaluation of two Chinese-character IDN ccTLDs on April 22, which absolutely addresses the pressing need from the Chinese-language community and is warmly welcomed by At-large community, we have the reservation that the proposal should be generalized to cover the other language and culture. ICANN may wish to limit the solution to script or language group, which would truthfully reflect ICANN’s bottom-up, rather than one-set-fit-all, policy-making & implementing character.