ICANN participation

On January 17th 2008 the German Bundestag (Parliament) approved, with supermajority of 82.7%, a resolution with the title “Advancement of Address Space in the Internet”. The resolution includes the following excerpt:

II. The German Bundestag calls upon the German Government,

1. within the scope of its participation in ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), to support the approval of new top-level-domains, particularly those for regional and urban communities in Germany, such as ".bayern", ".nrw" and ".berlin", provided the initiatives concerned are supported or backed by the responsible public authorities. The introduction of new, regional, top-level-domains is a sensible addition to the national identifier ".de" and is also suited for the stimulation of regional economies and to promote local identities in the Internet for business, culture, politics and citizens. Particularly the semantic, i.e. the meaningful character, of top-level-domains using the name of the region, offers a long-term and economically relevant location-based advantage for the local authorities affected in the national and global competition for resources, encouraging self-confidence and a sense of community for each region concerned. Germany has an opportunity here to participate in a worldwide trend and must not be put at a disadvantage compared to other regions and metropolitan areas.

2. ... Following the usual international practice for the administration of domains, the German Bundestag has excluded the national administration of the ".de" domain from the responsibility for the administration of numbers by the Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Authority), leaving it in the responsibility of the privately organised institutions of self-regulation. This has proven successful, even in the area of reducing bureaucracy, and could also apply in future as a model for the new regional top-level-domains. At the same time, the owners of rights to names must be granted an appropriate interest in the issuing of domains below the top-levels, both as far as the rules for issuing names is concerned, as well as the reservation of domains at no cost, which are associated with their function (e.g. "staatskanzlei.rheinland-pfalz", tourismus.nrw").

3. within the framework of their participation in ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to promote the introduction of flexibility in character sets for the domain name systems through so-called Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs = umlauts and other special characters) in top-level-domains (e.g. ".köln"). Umlaut domains and umlaut top-level-domains promote the use of the Internet, the German language as well as business and culture at local and regional level. The successful and positive implementation of umlaut domains below the ".de" top-level-domain has already confirmed this (e.g. www.köln.de).

The rationale for the resolution by the governing parties from January 17th 2008 and also a translation of the original resolution filed on March 7th 2007 can be seen here:

here

AOA Sir,

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