The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers concluded its 28th public meeting Friday. According to President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Twomey, it was one of the largest ICANN meetings in history, both in terms of attendance and scope.
Present at the meeting were more than 830 people from 81 countries.
"We’ve just finished one of ICANN’s busiest and most issue-intensive meetings, and it helped ICANN make substantial progress on numerous fronts," ICANN Chairman Vinton Cerf said during closing remarks.
Although the eventual rejection of dot-xxx was uppermost in the minds of many adult entertainment professionals, during the meeting ICANN also formalized three relationships with country code Top-Level Domain managers: dot-ly for Libya (administered by General Post and Telecommunication Company), dot-ci for Cote d’Ivoire (administered by Institut National Polytechnique Felix Houphouet Boigny), and dot-ru for Russia (administered by the Coordination Center for TLD RU).
In addition, a new working group to develop the recommendations of the Final Task Force Report on Whois Services was formed. The group will have broad and balanced participation and has 120 days to consider input and report back to the Generic Names Supporting Organization council, which subsequently will decide whether to recommend to the ICANN board of directors any changes in whois policy.
The de-accreditation of former domain registrar RegisterFly (against which ICANN filed suit in U.S. federal district court March 29) served as the impetus for discussion of Registrar Accreditation Agreements and how to improve them. According to Twomey, new policies may be conceived by the end of 2007.
Three new Regional At Large Organizations were created, giving Internet users from Africa, Europe, and Asia-Australia-Pacific direct input into ICANN.
The ICANN board accomplished a final rejection of the dot-xxx sponsored TLD application by ICM.
Sweden and Bulgaria presented information about the enhanced Domain Name System (IPv6) security enhancements in their respective TLDs. The two countries are the first to achieve IPv6 enhancements. ICANN also discussed moving to IPv6, concluding the root servers currently are capable of parsing IPv6 domain addresses. IPv6 will expand the number of IP addresses available to global Internet users and enable internationalized domain names to introduce non-Latin characters.
ICANN not only unveiled its new-and-improved website (which provides improved transparency and access to the organization), but also released One World Trust’s independent review of ICANN’s accountability and transparency. The review applauded ICANN’s transparency, noting that the organization shares a large quantity of information through its website, probably more than any other global organization. The report also identified areas that could use improvement. To that end, ICANN released an overview of its next steps in developing a set of management operating principles for accountability and transparency.
"ICANN is working hard to improve in the area of openness and transparency," Twomey pledged. "Public participation was a key aim at this meeting. If you couldn’t be physically present, you could participate through web-casting, chat rooms, and the ability to ask questions [of] speakers [via] our public-participation website. Even the board discussion was made available for the whole world to watch live."
Three public ICANN meetings occur each year, and the organization feels they are an essential part of efforts to consult the global community, Twomey averred.
"I want to thank our Portuguese hosts for their extraordinary efforts to make members of the Internet community across the globe feel welcome, and for ensuring every aspect of the meeting ran smoothly," Twomey said. "Portugal was one of the founding members of the Governmental Advisory Committee and will continue to be at the forefront of Internet issues when it assumes the presidency of the European Union during the second half of this year."
ICANN’s 29th public meeting is scheduled for June 25-29 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
