Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers) opened the 27^th edition of the council meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil with a number of positive developments to talk about. Most important of these was the signing of a Joint Partnership Agreement between ICANN and US Department of Commerce that continues the process of relaxing Washington’s control over the internet body.

He was also pleased to announce the formation of a new body uniting internet users in Latin America and the Caribbean. This body to be known as LAC-RALO (Latin America and the Caribbean Regional At-Large Organisation) has not been properly constituted as yet, but delegates at the Sao Paulo meeting are discussing plans to maximize participation of user groups.

Twomey said that Lac-Ralo will be the third Latin American organisation to help ICANN in its work. The other two are LACTLD (Regional ccTLD managers) and LACNIC (Regional Internet Registry for Latin America)

Issues on the agenda for this week’s ICANN meeting include the developments mentioned above as well as the recent agreement between the US government and Verisign for the running of the .com domain name; Internationalised domain names; the implementation of IPv6 (an expanded addressing system); and ICANN’s role in taking forward the processes initiated by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

One of the most visible outcomes of the WSIS meetings was the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) which recently held its first meeting in Athens, Greece. The next IGF meeting is due to take place in Rio de Janeiro, in November 2007.

Keynote speaker at the opening ceremony, Augusto Gadelha, Secretary in the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, praised the work of ICANN in maintaining the technical stability of the internet. In so doing, he was subtly reinforcing his government’s position about the limited, and strictly non-political, role of ICANN.

He then went on to outline the government’s political role in overseeing the allocation of domain names in Brazil where the local .br space is managed by CGI.br (Comite Gestor da Internet no Brasil). Gadelha said that there are nine representatives of the Federal government and twelve civil society representatives on the CGI committee.

He said, “The Brazilian government also believes that basic Internet resources in Brazil, such as domain names and IP addresses, should be treated as communal assets. In fact, the domain names of the ccTLD are not commercialized.”

Gadelha proudly told the international audience at the open session that 90 percent of the more than one million registered domain names in the country are .br names. But he also pointed out the importance of broadening internet access in his country. He said, “Currently, only 28% of the population, or 43 million Brazilians, have access to the internet in Brazil. Of those only 40% have access from their homes.”

Brazilians will certainly be interested in the debates on Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), another important issue on the ICANN agenda. IDNs will allow people to have web addresses that do not necessarily follow the existing limitation of the Latin alphabet and numerals. There are several Portuguese letters and accents that are not currently catered for in standard web addresses.