As ICANN staff, it is hard to avoid the news when your organisation is the subject of a hearing held by the United States Congress. This week we saw another such hearing, where the House Judiciary committee discussed the future deployment of new top-level domains.
A number of people testified, including my colleague Doug Brent, but [...]

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I’ve previously written about the problem with IPv4 /8s which have been used to number IP networks in an unofficial and improper way.
The problem is that the unofficial usage makes it more difficult for ISPs to bring these addresses into use when they are officially allocated and so less desirable. But we have to allocate [...]

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Variant top-level domains (TLDs) and how they are managed is one of the most hotly discussed topics we are facing at the moment. What are variant TLDs, you ask? Well, that’s where the discussion begins…
ICANN’s staff is currently producing implementation plans for both the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process and the New gTLD Process. What [...]

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One particularly important aspect of ICANN’s launch of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) will be the availability of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) at the top level. That eagerly anticipated enhancement to Internet participation has also raised some issues.
For example, current practice dictates that gTLDs contain at least three characters – two-character Latin TLDs are [...]

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One of the consistent pieces of feedback I receive as ICANN’s Chief Financial Officer is that people want to know what it is that the organization is spending its money on. We have been been working hard to come up with ways of showing this clearly, especially so over the past year.
ICANN is [...]

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In the past few days, we have been receiving a large number of emails and phonecalls about the web address YouTubeIslam.com, and a dispute over its ownership.
Because we coordinate the domain name system, ICANN is sometimes wrongly seen as the ultimate authority over anything that happens with the domain name system. The reality is [...]

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This briefing note is also published on the Sydney meeting site at http://syd.icann.org and linked to on the front page of that site.
What was it?
ICANN’s 35th international public meeting is the first of three held annually to conduct policy development and outreach. It was hosted by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), [...]

What the devil is that?, you are asking.
Well it is a graphical representation of the different languages spoken by attendees to the Sydney meeting last month.
At registration, we asked all attendees to select which of six languages they spoke. It’s not going to be perfect – we didn’t capture all attendees; not all attendees [...]

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As many of you will hopefully be aware, we have new video software in place and most visible on our video webpage at, yes, http://icann.org/video/. Videos are uploaded and tagged and so more easily discoverable.
Each meeting’s videos are also archived on a video page on that meeting’s website e.g. http://syd.icann.org/video. And since we now have [...]

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