Last week I attended the “Second International Conference for ccTLD Registries and Registrars of CIS, Central and Eastern Europe”, held in the picturesque lakeside town of Bled, in Slovenia. Bled is one of the most beautiful places I’ve had the pleasure to visit and the conference, despite its rather cumbersome title, was similarly rewarding. I’ve [...]

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The Second International Conference for ccTLD registries and registrars of CIS, Eastern and Central Europe will take place on 7-8 September 2009 in Bled, Slovenia. The First International Conference for ccTLD registries and registrars from that region was held on 8-10 September 2008 and was initiated by the .ru ccTLD Coordination Center. The conference took [...]

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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.

For the first time at an ICANN meeting, we held a joint Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee chairs public meeting. The idea was to get the different arms of ICANN to cover the topics and areas that most concerned them and to have their different viewpoints on the same topics outlined and discussed.

During the Cairo meeting in general, 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 on the ICANN main site under the “Video” tab.

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This Briefing Note for the Cairo meeting was first published on the Cairo meeting site on 13 November (see: http://cai.icann.org/en/briefing-note). It was reprinted the following day in the November edition of the ICANN magazine (see: http://www.icann.org/en/magazine/archive/magazine-200811-en.html).

What was it?

ICANN’s 33nd international public meeting was the third held this year to conduct policy development and outreach. It was hosted by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and the Government of Egypt.

The meeting was opened by Dr. Tarek Mohamed Kamel, Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology. There were 1,702 attendees from 144 different countries. The participants engaged in a wide range of discussions about the Internet’s domain name system and related issues.

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This is a Response and Summary to the Cairo public forum that took place on 6 November 2008.

A PDF version of this document is available at: http://www.icann.org/en/participate/cairo-public-forum-response.pdf

Note from the Chairman:

One of the most significant features of ICANN meetings is the Public Forum, where members of the ICANN community are able to present their views on issues of concern to them to the ICANN Board, in public session. The fact that we rotate meetings through each of the geographic sectors of the world enhances the opportunity that people from every region to present their views to the ICANN Board, in the presence of Staff and the whole ICANN community.

As a long-time participant from the floor presenting views, in my case from the ccTLD community, I am well aware of the time, effort and expense that goes into the preparation of such statements. As a board member, I have valued hearing those submissions, from individuals, governments and constituencies. I am determined as Chair to continue this tradition, and to maximise the opportunities for information sharing it represents.

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One of the main IDN questions asked by end-users in the last few months, and that have been discussed during the ICANN Paris meeting in the recent week is as follows:

“If I have registered <domainname>.tld, then how will you ensure that I am also the registrant of <domainname>.<idn-tld>, for all languages.”

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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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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.

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