By Lesley Cowley, Nominet

Jay and I attended the latest ICANN meeting from 2-7 December in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

At the meeting, we joined the debate regarding the proposed ICANN strategic plan for 2007-2010. The plan, which was finalised and approved at the meeting, describes the challenges and opportunities that ICANN is likely to face in the coming years and outlines five strategic objectives for the ICANN community.

• Organizational excellence in Operations
• Organizational excellence in Policy Development
• Increase international participation in ICANN and the use of the Internet system of unique identifiers
• Increase participation in and efficiency of the ICANN multi-stakeholder environment
• Complete transition of technical coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers

This was the first meeting that we have attended as a member of the ccNSO (country code names support organisation). We presented to other country code managers on the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), sharing our view as a participant and encouraging other country codes to get more involved in the IGF. We also presented on the latest developments at Nominet - our customer research; the EGM; our mystery shopper work; and raising registrar standards.

We gave presentations to the ccNSO technical workshop on possible future trends in the ccTLD arena. A number of other registries expressed an interest in our thoughts and it was clear that some are also well advanced in their thinking. Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) remained high on the agenda, but are still to be resolved at the global level.

Other outcomes of the meeting included:

• The .biz, .info and .org registry agreements were approved by the ICANN Board following a public comment and review period.
• ICANN announced a series of further efforts to ensure transparency and accountability through a series of independent reviews.
• The .asia Registry Agreement was signed with the sponsor, DotAsia Organization
• Ecuador, Jamaica and Norway joined the ccNSO. This brings membership of the ccNSO to 57 countries.

ICANN is also a great opportunity for catching up with the latest happenings at the other ccTLDs and with some of our overseas registrars. It gave us a good opportunity to find out what is happening with respect to ENUM and other technological advances in other territories.

Finally, it will probably not have escaped your notice that the proposal for a .xxx top level domain is back on the table. If you’re unaware of the history of this hotly debated domain name space then take a look at this article which gives a good summary. ICANN has opened a further consultation on the revised proposals. Needless to say, this debate is likely to run for a while longer.

This entry was posted in January, 2007.
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