If you are a regular ICANN community member, it is likely you are currently feeling overwhelmed by the amount of material that has appeared in the past week. So here is a quick guide to help make sense of it all.
Sections are:

JPA/Affirmation
Applicant Guidebook/new gTLDs
Fast Track/IDNs
Public comment periods
Seoul meeting
And the remainder

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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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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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قامت آيكان على مدار الأيام القليلة الماضية بنشر مجموعة من المستندات في إطار الاستعداد لاجتماع سيدني (٢١-٢٦ يونيو
٢٠٠٩) تمهيدا لمناقشتها خلال الاجتماع. وتشمل هذه المستندات ما يلي
المسار السريع لأسماء النطاقات الدولية لرمز الدولة: تم نشر الإصدار الثالث لمسودة خطة التنفيذ، ونسخة معدلة لاقتراح وثيقة المسئولية، وكذلك التفاصيل الخاصة بالمساهمة المالية المقترحة لدعم تطبيق أسماء [...]

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Over the weekend, we published quite a bit of material. It was published now to meet a request by the Board and the community that we post three business weeks prior to the start of a meeting; these series of postings ensure that the bulk of materials being considered during Sydney will meet this goal.

With Sydney opening on Monday 22 June, we strived to have this information up before this morning, Monday 1 June.

As such, it is probably as comprehensive a set of documents as ICANN has published for any meeting – addressing hard issues on IDNs, an important report on intellectual property issues as related to domain names, another huge piece of comment and analysis related to new TLDs, new financial analysis, more on community travel (which is coming), and other areas. I’m also pretty confident that this is the earliest (relative to an ICANN meeting) that this kind of material has been available.

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Since signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Institute for Information Security Issues (IISI) last year, the relationship between ICANN and Russia continues to strengthen.
At a meeting in Garmisch, Germany, Russian high-level officials dedicated a whole day to relations with ICANN. The Third International Partnership Among State, Business Community and Civil Society in Ensuring [...]

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In the build up to every ICANN meeting, there is always a glut of public comment periods as reports are finished in time for the community to review them before discussing them in person.

Mexico City is no exception. Although this time, it is very much easier to get a quick overview of what is out from public comment from the front page of the ICANN website (the third box down on the right). Just to present you with another avenue to finding out about these public comment periods however, there are all listed below with quick explanations of what they are and the dates when they close.

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During the Cairo meeting in, ICANN together with Domaine.info produced a number of videos covering the main sessions and topics, with each video fronted by a member of either the staff or a chair of the relevant supporting organization or advisory committee.

You can find all of those videos posted on the Cairo site at http://cai.icann.org/video, and we also post ICANN videos on the main site under the main tab “Videos”.

This video features two of ICANN’s project managers – Tina Dam and IDNs, and Karla Valente and new gTLDs – talking about the sessions they were due to run on the first day of the conference where introductions were given to their two topic areas.

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One of the main IDN related topics from the just-finished ICANN meeting in Cairo that I think deserves some additional attention was:

Why Compliance with IDN technical requirements are a necessity on a global scale

Overall compliance with technical standards are important for TLD registry operators in order to keep their TLD stable and secure and in that way function and work well for their consumers and communities. Per ICANN Bylaws, interoperability of the Internet is a core value, which requires that technical standards are complied with. In some instances failure to comply with technical standards will only affects the corresponding TLD in isolation and does not interfere with other TLDs – when moving to the topic of IDN TLDs however this fact changes very quickly.

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