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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An online question box where community members can ask questions directly to the ICANN Board and staff has opened today.
The question box will take questions from Wednesday 27 May until Wednesday 17 June in preparation for the public forum at ICANN’s international public meeting in Sydney on Thursday 25 June.
Questions are limited to two per [...]

An official update on the new gTLD program / Applicant Guidebook process has just been published. Most of you reading this will immediately know what that means but I’m going to use a third label which isn’t ICANN-world terminology to talk about it: Internet extensions.

ICANN has been working on a process for opening up the Internet space for a number of years. As that process has got closer to reality, people have started paying it more and more attention. The “new gTLD program” envisions a very significant increase in the number of “generic top-level domains” – or Internet extensions like dot-com, dot-net, dot-info etc. At the moment there are 21 of these extensions of three characters or more: the gTLD program is estimating a further 500 within the next two years. It’s a huge change in the Internet’s domain name system.

The “Applicant Guidebook” is what it says it is – a guidebook for those that plan to apply for a new Internet extension. In it, all the rules, procedures and processes are outlined in some depth. And currently ICANN is running an extensive and ongoing public comment and review process using that guidebook as the focus for discussion.

Which leads to the question of this blog post: so where are we up to with these new Internet extensions?

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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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So, no doubt you have all been wondering what exactly ICANN and its staff have been up to over January with respect to the Applicant Guidebook and the reams of comments covering the new generic top-level domain process.

In order to provide some answers and perspective, ICANN’s most senior executives dealing with the process – the CEO Paul Twomey, the COO Doug Brent and the Senior Vice President for Services Kurt Pritz – have done a video update on where we are now and where the process is going.

You can see it on the right-hand-side of this post. Enjoy.

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The first public comment period on the Draft Applicant Guidebook for new gTLDs has closed. The period opened on 24 October 2008, and was 76 days long after it closed 7 January to account for later publication of the Guidebook in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. ICANN continued to receive and accept English comments received until the January 7 deadline considering the end of year holidays.

The comment period received over 300 comments from participants from 24 different countries. Among the many participants were individuals and organizations representing intellectual property interests, brand owners, business owners, ICANN supporting organizations, domain name industry players, and governments.

“This level of interest and feedback to the Draft Guidebook shows that the comment process is working. All the comments and concerns will be considered and a response will be provided” said Paul Levins, Executive Officer and Vice President Corporate Affairs.

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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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The first comment period for the Applicant Guidebook has now closed for English speakers, and will close on 7 January for those responding in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish.

The responses sent in will now be carefully compiled and summarized. In the New Year, this summary will be published and soon thereafter, suggested alterations to the Guidebook based on that feedback will be put back out to the community.

The revised Guidebook will then be put out to a second comment period in order to enable fine tuning.

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Last week IANA processed a request to add AAAA records for one of the thirteen DNS root-servers.

L.root-servers.net, operated by ICANN, became the seventh of of the root servers to have it’s IPv6 address records (AAAA) added into the DNS root-zone. The addition of IPv6 service is part of ICANN’s ongoing commitment to act as a leader in enabling IPv6 services throughout the DNS.

The new IPv6 address is 2001:500:3::42

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