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 [...]

{ 13 comments }

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 [...]

{ 4 comments }

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 [...]

{ 2 comments }

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 [...]

{ 6 comments }

Starting in Cairo in November 2008, the chairs of the different supporting organizations (SOs) and advisory committees (ACs) have held a joint meeting.

The idea was to find a formula for open communication that was more than a repeat of existing open microphone sessions. The chairs also wanted to create a forum that could break through the silos of discussion and communication in which ACs and SOs often operate. And, lastly, they wanted the opportunity to discuss topics of mutual interest and importance, and to have those topics suggested by ACSO members.

Click here to jump to the meeting agenda

Each time, feedback has been taken from the community and the session adjusted to reflect that. For Sydney, the decision has been taken to reduce the time taken on Monday to just one session of 90 minutes and to concentrate on a single topic (albeit with multiple arms).

{ 0 comments }

Depuis maintenant un peu plus de 30 jours, je suis au Conseil du GNSO. Que signifient ces quatre lettres ? Le “Generic Names Supporting Organization” est une des structures clefs de l’ICANN, puisqu’elle est en charge de l’élaboration des politiques liées aux extensions génériques. Le GNSO rassemble deux principaux groupes : les entités liées par contrat avec l’ICANN (les registres et les registrars) et celles qui n’ont pas ce type de liens contractuels (les fournisseurs d’accès à Internet (FAI), les utilisateurs commerciaux, et non commerciaux, et le secteur de la propriété industrielle).

Toutes ces entités sont regroupées en collèges afin de leur donner une représentation officielle au sein de l’ICANN.

{ 5 comments }

The July edition of the ICANN magazine is out, emailed to subscribers and available for review online.

Each issue covers the latest news and events, plus outlines how you can interact with the organization. This month, alongside the usual policy rundown, compliance summary, Board meeting precis, public comment digest, and blog complendium, is a briefing note for the recent Paris meeting and some early details about the Cairo meeting.

{ 4 comments }

The April issue of ICANN’s magazine is out. It was emailed to subscribers on Friday night and has been posted online today, Monday 14 April.

In it, we provide updates on three policy areas: translation, SSAC, and new gTLDs. It also provide summaries of all 2008 Board meetings so far; interviews with the CEO and NomCom chair Hagen Hultzsch; the history behind ICANN’s efforts to deal with domain tasting; and sections covering recent blog discussions, public comment periods, and other ICANN-related news.

{ 2 comments }

One topic that kept being misunderstood at the ICANN meeting in India was ‘what is the purpose of the IDN wiki’ – the example.test site that are actual IDN TLDs in the root. I’ll try to explain what is going on with the wiki and what it can and cannot be used for.

First some background and clarifying information. Having your script/language represented in the wiki is not a pre-requisite for eventually getting an IDN TLD in the root. These 11 languages/scripts are merely being used to evaluate usability of IDNs in applications. The “example.test” strings in the wiki were translated into the specified languages and then represented by the associated scripts.

{ 10 comments }