What's it like to be a Frenchman on the board of an organization like ICANN, where the main language is still English? We tag along with Jean-Jacques Subrenat as he takes his first steps as a new board member.
Jean-Jacques Subrenat was one fo several new members to join the ICANN board at the Los Angeles meeting
For many, today's ICANN is still the English-only club it was when the organisation first saw the light of day in 1998. Although the predominant cultural bias remains very much Anglo-Saxon, ICANN now brings together many different nationalities and languages. Europe has a strong presence and within that, France seems to be on a charge at the moment. For this first time in its history, ICANN has chosen to come to Paris for one of its international meetings (next June). And a Frenchman has just been chosen by ICANN's nominating committee to serve on the board.
Jean-Jacques Subrenat officially took over his new post on Friday November 2, the last day of ICANN's Los Angeles meeting. But naturally, he was in attendance for the full meeting and Domaines.Info met with him two days before to talk about his first contact with the ICANN world as a board member.
How does a new board member prepare himself for the task ahead? There's a lot of new information that you have to learn. The important thing is to realize that on top of the technical issues, there's an operational and conceptual complexity to ICANN's world. A domain name is not just a technical identifier. There are also commercial and Intellectual Property aspects to consider.
Dealing with this level of complexity may require new ways to manage or regulate. We're seeing strong growth in Internet use at the moment and new uses appearing every day. So while it's important to ensure that the basic technical systems continue to function, there are also wider issues to deal with: national representation or transparency for instance.
What are the issues that you consider to be the most important for ICANN? It's still a little early to say: I won't officially take my place on the board until this Friday… But the first thing to really strike me is ICANN's effort towards internationalization. Users can feel it through the work being done on IDNs for example. But even within ICANN people are showing a strong desire to be able to speak and use their own language, to see documents being translated… But ICANN isn't the UN. It just doesn't have the same budget to commit to translation. So how do you meet those sorts of expectations from the community? Should ICANN's translation costs be added to the price of a domain name for example?
These are fundamental questions which need to be addressed. There are obvious technical aspects to deal with, but there are also less tangible things like the representation of different languages or nationalities. In the end, ICANN faces the same problems that the whole world has to deal with. And if we're able to find and apply the right solutions within ICANN, then those solutions might also work for more general issues such as better management of our energy or drinking water sources. Humanity faces all sorts of challenges and problems for which the right solutions haven't yet been found and which could benefit from new approaches.
How are you taking this meeting, your first as a board member? Right now, it's essential for me to understand the problems, the issues and the various arguments and interests before saying something. If anything, it's a way for me to respect the past and the discussions that have already taken place inside ICANN. I'm not here to try and reinvent the wheel.
This Friday, the first thing you'll be asked to do as a new board member is choose Vint Cerf's replacement amongst fellow board members that perhaps you haven't really had a chance to get to know yet. What will you be basing your decision on? I clearly won't have had much time at ICANN when I come to cast my vote. But that's the way things work and I accept it. In all sorts of areas, you often have insufficient time to take decisions, but you still have to do so. And note that I have had some opportunity to see how the other board members work as we've all met a few times prior to this meeting.
For me, our job is to elect a president that has all the right talents to make sure that ICANN continues to grow, while keeping ICANN relevant and in synch with what's happening in the world in general.
You've been elected for 3 years. At the end of that term, what will make you consider your term on the board of ICANN to have been a success? On a personal level, I hope to discover new ways of looking at things. A large part of this community is made up of technical or legal experts and I would also like to bring a different stance by putting ICANN's development, and the Internet's in general, in the larger context of the challenges the world faces as we move towards ever greater globalization. The Internet is a tool of that globalization, but it's also a result of that globalization. By working, at our level, on ensuring people behave in a truly global way on the Internet, we can help promote a more international vision.
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