Hands down, the most common question I get at an ICANN meeting is “Where are the restrooms?” A close second is “How many top-level domains are there?” Occasionally they are more specific — how many are there of a certain type.
Here is the current answer to all of those questions.

Restrooms are just past the elevators [...]

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Every year there are new world events that see possible border changes and a restructure to the way the world’s countries and territories are configured. Think back to 50 years ago, and the world’s map was very different. There are literally a hundred countries that exist today that did not exist a hundred years ago. I wonder what country code the Ottoman Empire would have?

As these events occur, ICANN invariably receives requests to recognise new sovereign entities. In some cases we see very inaccurate press reports by “experts” on how country codes will be assigned. Thankfully, we have a very clear process for this that it is worth repeating.

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It is sometimes said that ISPs do not offer IPv6 transport and equipment vendors offer just partial IPv6 support because there is no customer demand. The counter argument is often made that consumers can only buy what is on offer so people prefer to buy production quality services and equipment.

Unfortunately, even when production quality IPv6 transport and network infrastructure are available it is not always possible to deploy a completely IPv6 accessible network. One problem is the difficulties domain name registrants have when they ask their domain name registrar to include their IPv6 glue in the DNS. Not many domain name registrars support glue registration for IPv6 addresses. This limits their ability to provide an IPv6 DNS service.

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Tonight on American television quiz show Jeopardy, a piece of IANA-esoterica was the “Final Jeopardy” question of the night:

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ICANN hears this question all the time at meetings, events, in different online forums, on the idn.icann.org wiki, and in emails and phone calls. The great challenge is it the answer isn’t the specific “as of this date” answer so many people want to hear. Because of the nature of some critical functions that still needs to be finalized, such as for example the policy process, we’re only able to provide an estimate.

Right now both the GNSO and the ccNSO are taking a look at how IDNs can be introduced or delegated at the top-level – how you can get, say, all-Arabic-cahracters after the dot in a domain name. ICANN have processes for delgation of ccTLDs and there have been a couple of rounds in the past years for introduction of new gTLDs, but none of these included IDN TLDs.

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ICANN made a little piece of history in three countries a few days ago when it approved the delegation of the .KP domain for North Korea, the .RS domain for Serbia, and the .ME domain for Montenegro. For the former it marks a further step in their efforts to connect their country to the Internet. [...]

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The GNSO is currently conducting fact-finding on domain tasting. ICANN posted a Request for Information on 10 August, and information may be submitted through 15 September 2007. Comments may be submitted to rfi-domaintasting@icann.org and viewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/rfi-domaintasting/. Answers and information can also be submitted to the survey at https://www.bigpulse.com/872i.
For background, please see the Issues Report [...]

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This is a reminder that the deadline for the 2007 ICANN Nominating Committee to receive Statements of Interest from candidates for the ICANN Board of Directors, GNSO Council, ccNSO Council and At-Large Advisory Committee is 1 May 2007 23:59 UTC. Potential candidates have two weeks to submit completed Statements of Interest to nomcom2007@icann.org.
The 2007 Nominating [...]

It was interesting to see discussions start on the blog around “What does it take to run a registry”. Jacob Malthouse (Liaison for Canada and the Caribbean) and I (John Crain, CTO) have just returned from Georgetown, Guyana.
With us in Georgetown, locked into a classroom for four days, were various others with expertise in networking [...]

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