Around the world in Eight ccTLDs
The workshop was co-sponsored by the four Regional ccTLD organizations covering Africa (AfTLD), Asia Pacific (ApTLD), Europe (CENTR), and Latin American (LACNIC). Building on the ccTLD workshop at the IGF 2007 in Rio, the goal of this year's workshop was to expand the concept of best practice exchange and showcase the diversity of country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) policy models around several topics that concern all ccTLDs. Eight ccTLDs from four regions were chosen to talk about seven topics. The panelists were:
- Rajesh Aggarwal, Nixi, Additional CEO, India
- Gihan Dia, Professor at the University of Moratuwa, CEO of the LK Domain Registry; Chars the IDN Task Force in Sri Lanka.
- Paulos Nyirenda, National Coordinator of the Malawi Sustainable Development Network Programme, Malawi
- Sabine Dolderer, CEO of DENIC, Germany
- Olga Cavalli, Technology advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina
- Dr. Alberto Pérez Gómez, Dep. Director for International Relations of Dominios.es and RedIRIS (Spanish National Research and Education Network), Spain
- Roelof Meijer, CEO of SIDN, Netherlands
- Erick Iriarte, General Manager of LACNIC, Legal Advisor of ".pe", Peru
There are all in all more than 240 ccTLD, each of which is contributing to the country’s national identity on the web. A striking characteristic of ccTLDs is the variety of their policy models. The workshop aimed to present the regional and political diversity along a number of tasks that are important for the work of ccTLDs. The following tasks were presented:
| Policy Setting | IDN | Governance Structure | Business Continuity | IPv6 | Engaging the local community | CERT | |
| India (.in) | x | ||||||
| Sri Lanka (.lk) | x | ||||||
| Malawi (.mw) | x | ||||||
| Germany (.de) | x | ||||||
| Argentina (.ar) | x | ||||||
| Spain (.es) | x | ||||||
| The Netherlands (.nl) | x | ||||||
| Peru (.pe) | x |
The presentations highlighted the challenges that each of the ccTLDs face.
International Domain Names, for example, are very important for multilingual countries such as Sri Lanka. Yet, the capacities that can be mobilized for implementing IDNs are limited and progress is slow.
ccTLDs can help to increase computer security as the speaker from Spain demonstrated. Examples were the promotion of the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to avoid forgery of the sender address or the introduction of DNSSEC.
The business continuity of ccTDs depends on redundancy in all the (technical) areas covered by a ccTLD such as the registration and resolving function but also customer services. The managing of security as well as financial and organizational stability also play a major role.
The introduction of IPv6 from a ccTLD perspective was presented as a step-by-step process.
For ccTLDs in developing countries as diverse as India, Malawi and Peru, the main challenges are the implementation of both stable and legitimate governance structures and the management of growth. The latter issues were also subject of the discussion that followed the presentations. Questions from the audience concerned issues such as how to manage growth and how to balance growth with maintaining a high quality of service.