[kictanet] ICANN's 29th International Meeting Opens Monday in San Juan

[Wanjira, Alice Munyua]

ICANN's 29th International Meeting Opens Monday in San Juan

25 June 2007

SAN JUAN , Puerto Rico: The future of the Internet will be front and center as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opens its 29th International Public Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Monday, 25 June 2007.

"If you are interested in the domain names that can be used on the Internet, if you want to make sure there are enough numbers to allow the Internet to expand, if you care about how the Internet evolves and want to have a say, ICANN meetings are the place for you," said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN. "The San Juan meeting gives us an opportunity to talk face to face within the global Internet community, listen to ideas and input, and make sure policies promote the Internet's security and stability. Even if you can't be here in person, you can be part of the meeting with our remote participation website, meeting blogs, and webcasts."

Attendees and on-line participants can be part of more than 30 sessions and workshops, and will help ICANN continue improving the global coordination of the Internet's unique identifiers.

"ICANN's task is unique and these meetings help us make sure we're on the correct path and continue to move forward," Dr Twomey added.

The San Juan meeting is the second of the three public ICANN meetings in 2007. These meetings are crucial to because ICANN's polices are created through a bottom-up, transparent process involving Internet Community.

Some issues and events at the meeting include:

    * Progress on a creating a policy to introduce new generic top-level domains (the part of web addresses after the dot -- like .com or .info)
    * Update on the testing process of introducing Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) to the Internet.
    * A tutorial on IPv6 -- a major expansion of the Internet Protocol address space so that the number unique addresses available globally is increased dramatically (from about 4.3 billion available with the current IPv4 to about 340 trillion trillion trillion).
    * Further discussions of ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreements (RAA) and the Accreditation process, arising out of the RegisterFly collapse.
    * The completion of the creation of the global Regional At Large Organization (RALO) structure with the signing of the fifth and final RALO agreement -- this one with the North American region. RALOs are the main forum and coordination point for public input to ICANN on a regional basis.
    * The first General Assembly of the Latin American and Caribbean RALO, which was formed at the ICANN meeting in Lisbon, Portugal in March. 

"We are all looking forward to a successful meeting in San Juan and thank the local hosts, the .PR top-level domain of Puerto Rico, and the event sponsors, for their efforts," Dr Twomey said.

The complete schedule for ICANN's San Juan meeting, as well as links to webcast sessions and our public participation website, can be found at: http://sanjuan2007.icann.org/


ICANN Maps

25 June 2007

In further improvements to transparency and accountability, ICANN has commenced the process of illustrating some basic data in geographical maps.

The data includes:

    * the number of accredited registrars there are and the countries in which they are located;
    * board and staff representation by nationality;
    * ccTLD agreements;
    * ccTLD financial contributions;
    * the countries in which the 29 ICANN meetings have been held so far;
    * the global areas that the Regional Internet Registries cover;
    * the general location of root servers based on publicly available information;
    * root zone Whois information;
    * support for IDNs at TLD registries;
    * registrations for the current San Juan meeting.

"This is a further example of making information about ICANN more accessible so that people can understand clearly how, why and what we do." said Paul Levins, Executive Officer and Vice President Corporate Affairs.

"Accessibility and transparency measures help people to hold us accountable."

"It joins the list of initiatives that ICANN has introduced to assist accountability and transparency including better board minutes, comprehensive Strategic, Operating and Budget plans, an annual report, a community blog, an improved website that clearly explains our processes, an independent review of transparency and accountability, newsletters and the posting of all in-bound and out-bound correspondence, amongst other things."

"We have also released a set of frameworks and principles for accountability and transparency that is open for consultation with the community and we look forward to feedback" Mr Levins said.
Protecting Registrants Focus of ICANN Workshop

Session discusses ideas on data escrow, revising Registrar Accreditation Agreements

25 June 2007

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: Strengthening the protection of registrants and their domain names was the focus of a key workshop at the 29th International Public Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in San Juan today.

"In March I said that there must be comprehensive review of major review of our Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and the Accreditation process. The results of that review are driving this workshop," said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN. "We are going to keep this discussion going, get input from the wider community, and then we will make the changes needed to protect registrants and domain names."

Some of the topics discussed in the workshop include:

    * The implementation of the registrar data escrow program for generic top-level domains by the end of 2007,
    * Potential amendments to the RAA and a process for implementing changes,
    * Development of registry failover plan, which lays out ICANN response plan if a registry suffers a financial, technical or business failure, or is prevented from operating by outside factors like a natural disaster,
    * Recent work done by ICANN's Contractual Compliance function. 

"When ICANN introduced competition to the domain name market in 1998, there was one registrar. Today there are more than 890 – so it's obvious that a lot has changed since the first Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) was introduced in a much smaller and radically different marketplace," Dr Twomey added. "We also learned valuable lessons from the RegisterFly situation and ICANN is turning those lessons into plans and policies to protect registrants and their domain names."

One change to the RAA being looked at is introducing graduated enforcement tools. Right now, ICANN's only tool is to terminate accreditation – a step that has been avoided in the past for anything other than flagrant, repeated failures to cure material breaches of the RAA, because termination is viewed as an extreme remedy, with negative consequences to registrants. A graduated sanctions scheme based on the nature and seriousness of alleged breaches will give ICANN more tools to effectively enforce the agreements.

Another change being examined deals with resellers – businesses that sell domain name registrations on behalf of Registrars, who act as wholesalers. ICANN has no contractual relationship with resellers, and cannot directly address consumer complaints about reseller practices. ICANN is discussing changing the RAA so Registrars have specific responsibilities with regard to their relationships with resellers.

About ICANN:

ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers like domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .uk) and the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols that help computers reach each other over the Internet. Careful management of these resources is vital to the Internet's operation, so ICANN's global stakeholders meet regularly to develop policies that ensure the Internet's ongoing security and stability. ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit non-profit company. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.


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