Media.Knet.Ca

There is a two page overview of the NORTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS (.NAI) proposal for a cultural and linguistic top-level domain in the current (ca 2008/9) ICANN new gTLD rounds. The overview can be seen at http://wampum.wabanaki.net/vault/2008/04/004460.html (Wampum).

For such an extension to be approved by ICANN, there is a need for First Nation groups to get behind such a development to demonstrate the need for this unique top-level domain that identifies Indigenous people and organizations. Everyone is invited to leave their comments and support letters on the Wampum web site or contribute in any other appropriate way.

The original proposal for a NORTH AMERICAN ABORIGINAL (.NAA) to ICANN was drafted in 1999.

Background

This proposal is the continuation of the original North American Aboriginal (.NAA) proposal1 for a "sponsored generic" top-level domain operated by a consortium formed by the original proposants -- the Nevada Indian Environmental Coalition, the Treaty 7 Tribal Council, the National Indian Telecommunications Institute, the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, and the Western Abenaki of Maine, as a shared registry on a cost-recovery, tribal infrastructure development basis, with a core policy that registry data is a public resource, subject to tribal and other privacy limitations, held in trust for the indigenous public.

In the intervening decade the personnel, interests, and abilities of authors of the .NAA have changed, as have the consensus policies of ICANN.

Introduction

There are well in excess of 1,500 indigenous cultural and linguistic entities in North America. These range from the largest, the Navajo and the Cherokee, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of enrolled members (viewed as indigenous legal entities) and culturally and/or linguistically affiliated educational, cultural and linguistic institutions, groups, clans, extended non-clan kinship networks, and individual persons, to groups consisting of a very limited number of culture and language practitioners, to groups engaged in cultural and linguistic recovery, and even peoples adopting an existant related culture and language as their plan for cultural and linguistic survival.

In addition to these general purpose legal, cultural and linguistic entities, there are tens of thousands of individuals creating works of indigenous scholarship, teaching in and administering indigenous primary, secondary, and post-secondary academic institutions, creating works of classical and contemporary music, fine arts and crafts, the culinary arts, clothing, teaching indigenous languages and managing indigenous cultural and linguistic materials.

In addition to these contemporaneous sources of cultural and linguistic activity there are hundreds of thousands of archived documents, recordings, and objects, in holdings of various kinds, in the Americas, in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, and hundreds, if not thousands, of archivists and archives.

Finally, consistent with our original purpose of creating a means for Indigenous Intellectual Property, also known as Traditional Knowledge, to become incorporated within the evolving quasi-legal ICANN system, and thereby protecting and advancing the interests of Indigenous peoples, implicit in our express choice in 1999 of the Mataatua Declaration, and our long history of work between Indigenous people in the Americas and the Pacific, the proposal includes "light the path" provisioning of indigenous resources for follow-on efforts in subsequent rounds of ICANN's evolving new gTLD process.

Why Generic?

The earliest effort to obtain any form of an indigenous namespace was the attempt by the late Dr. John Mohawk (Sotsisowah) to convince the late Jon Postel to create and delegate a namespace. This effort was doomed by Dr. Postel's choice to use ISO 3166, commonly called "country codes" (though many of its entries, then and now, are non-countries), to manage the task of making changes to the (pre-DNS) host tables. The next effort was a proposal by Mr. Eric Brunner-Williams to Dr. Postel to use X.121, which contains "continental codes", to allow non-national entry into the DNS root, prior to the establishment of ICANN, or ICANN's "new TLD" process of 1999-2001. The proposal died with Dr. Postel as the problem of determining the form and controlling authority of "the new entity", initially the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) and eventually the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), became controlling.

With the possibilities of an pre-generic alternative to a ccTLD exhausted, the focus of our effort became the ICANN gTLD, and we contributed to ICANN's Working Group C, authoring the "sponsored gTLD" model subsequently used by the proposals for .aero, .coop, and .museum in 2001/2002.

There are significant advantages to the "generic" TLD which are overlooked by applicants fixated on obtaining ccTLDs. These are:

• direct immediate use of the ICANN accredited (gTLD) registrars
• indirect immediate use of multiple ccTLD registrars via a "public interest (ICANN accredited) registrar"
• stability of contractual relationship with ICANN
• the "consensus policies" of the GNSO
• insulation from government(s)

The offset is the application cost, and the ongoing presumption that Verisign's for-profit business model, copied by Afilias and NeuStar, serves all uses of all namespaces.

....

Danny Younger wrote on April 3, 2008 ...

This appears to be an effort spearheaded by Eric Brunner-Williams who earlier in DNSO Working Group C proposed the TLD .naa (a gTLD scoped to North America and the territories, trusts and treaty dependencies of the United States and Canada, and delegated to the designates of the National Congress of American Indians/Assembly of First Nations) -- see http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/19991023.NCwgc-report.html

It looks like Eric is currently affiliated with CORE, (and he has had prior experience with the gTLD submission process via the SWITCH .org proposal).

Some in the NARALO may wish to assist in this effort.

The primary obstacle, of course, will be the cost of the the ticket to the ICANN Ball.