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Concerning the recent politically motivated smearing campaign against Charles Mok, in regard to his previous resignation from the board of Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation Limited (HKIRC), it is necessary to set the record straight to the industry and the public.
The non-profit HKIRC was set up in 2002 to administer the operation of the .hk domain. Charles Mok has been a director of HKIRC from the beginning. In 2004, ICANN, the global domain name governing organization, opened up the application for new top-level domain names. Some people from the Asian industry came up with the idea of .asia, to be run as a non-profit body and based in Hong Kong. Profits from the company will be used for Internet development within Asia and not distributed to anyone. This idea received the support of over 10 regional country-code Top Level Domain registries, including China Mainland, Taiwan region, Macau SAR, Japan, India, Singapore, etc., as well as regional Internet organizations including APNIC which is responsible for IP address administration in Asia Pacific, and these organizations later became founding members of DotAsia. In 2004, DotAsia was in fact not even formally established, and some of HKIRC's directors has been supportive of DotAsia since that time.
But there were differing opinions within the board of HKIRC, and because of differences of opinions, five directors resigned from HKIRC board in May to June 2004, including all four former to present chairman of the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association (Daniel Ng, Charles Mok, Chester Soong, York Mok) and the former CEO of HKDNR, the predecessor of HKIRC (Alan Ho). These people are among those who are most familiar with international Internet and domain name governance, and they chose to monitor HKIRC from outside of the company.
The important facts to note are: - Both HKIRC and DotAsia are non-profit organizations.
- The matter was resolved satisfactorily four years ago, and no legal action or proceeding has ever taken place, and there was no conflict of interests involved.
- From 2004 to the present, Charles Mok has not conducted or participated any Domain name related business, or received any benefits including monetary, or conducted any business with any local or overseas domain name organizations. From 2006 to present, Mok is a member of the Policy Advisory Board of Ireland-based dotMobi - also a voluntary position.
The DotAsia Organization: http://www.registry.asia/
HKIRC: https://www.hkirc.hk/
It is most regrettable that this matter was brought up recently again by some, purely putting personal political interests over those of the who industry, at the expense of damaging HKIRC as a public organization in charge of a critical public IT resource in Hong Kong, as well as hurting the Hong Kong IT sector and its international image.
2008.08.25 |
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