Read the report in full here [pdf]

The report includes information on the three major initiatives ICANN undertook last year (and which continue this year): the process for introducing new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to the Internet; the introduction for the first time of internationalized domain names (IDNs); and an extensive Improving Institutional Confidence consultation, to enable the conclusion of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the United States government in September 2009.

Reports from the chairs of ICANN’s Supporting Organization and Advisory Organizations are included alongside detailed rundowns of each department by the organization’s staff.

Additionally, since it is 10 years since ICANN’s inception a brief history of the organization, split into its 33 international public meetings, is included, alongside a special memorial note to Jon Postel, one of the Internet’s pioneers, from former ICANN chairman Vinton Cerf.

Further contents include:

• Biographical details on each of the Board of Directors
• Highlights of the organization’s Strategic and Operating Plans
• An in-depth look at the New Delhi, Paris and Cairo meetings
• Messages from the CEO and Chairman
• The audit report for ICANN, 2007-2008
• ICANN’s compensation practices and salary structures for the corporate officers

Here’s what the chairman had to say in the official announcement: “I am delighted to announce the release of our third annual report,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN’s Chairman of the Board of Directors. “In this our tenth year ICANN and its community either accomplished or made significant progress toward many goals for the Domain Name System.”

“The Internet is growing and evolving at an accelerating pace,” Dengate Thrush continued. “The next billion users will demand more innovative products and services, will access the Internet largely through mobile devices, and will expect to be able to do so in their own languages and language scripts. ICANN’s efforts are geared towards developing policies and technologies that will satisfy this next-generation Internet.”

The complete annual report is available at: http://www.icann.org/en/annualreport/annual-report-2008-en.pdf.

Justement, comment prépare-t-on une réunion d’une telle importance ? A Los Angeles par exemple, pour la dernière réunion de l’année 2007, plus de 1 100 personnes avaient participé. On imagine donc les problématiques de logistiques pour parvenir à faire tenir dans un même endroit, pendant une semaine, autant de gens avec des besoins en électricité, en connexions Internet, en salles de réunion et tout un tas d’autres choses.

Pour y parvenir, l’ICANN a mis sur pied une équipe complète. On y retrouve Paul Levins (le vice-président de l’ICANN), Diane Schroeder (responsable des conférences), Michael Evans (coordinateur des réunions), Stacy Hoffberg (organisation des réunions), Steve Conte (responsable de la sécurité) et Tanzanica King (responsable de la communication). De nombreux autres salariés de l’ICANN participent à l’organisation des réunions, dont Kieren McCarthy (responsable de la participation publique) et Jason Keenan (responsable presse).

Bien entendu, les réunions ne sont pas planifiées à la dernière minute. Bien au contraire. “Nous avons commencé à travailler sur la prochaine réunion, celle qui se tiendra à Paris, l’été dernier,” dévoile Diane Schroeder. “Nous avons visité les différentes villes candidates, puis en septembre, le Conseil d’administration de l’ICANN a choisi Paris. Nous avons alors commencé à discuter avec l’hôtel, le Méridien Montparnasse.”

Ce sont habituellement Diane et Michael Evans qui visitent l’ensemble des endroits candidats à l’organisation d’une réunion ICANN. Steve Conte peut également y aller, pour évaluer des aspects plus techniques ou sécuritaires par exemple. Ils font ensuite un rapport au “comité des réunions”, qui lui fait une recommandation au Conseil de l’ICANN. Dès que ce dernier a pris sa décision finale, le vrai travail commence.

“J’ai eu plusieurs réunions avec le représentant de l’organisateur local pour Paris,” poursuit Diane Schroeder. “A Los Angeles pendant la réunion ICANN, à Rio pendant la réunion du Forum sur la Gouvernance de l’Internet… est d’autres réunions de travail de ce type ont également été organisées afin de se pencher sur les différents aspects de l’organisation lors de la réunion ICANN de New Delhi.”

Avant même la fin de cette réunion, la première de l’année 2008, l’équipe de l’ICANN et celle de “l’hôte”, c’est-à-dire l’organisateur local, travaillaient déjà sur la suivante. “Depuis l’Inde, nous avons des conférences téléphoniques chaque semaine,” ajoute Diane Schroeder.

En plus de l’organisation, l’infrastructure et l’accueil sont de véritables défis. Ainsi par exemple, dans le cadre de l’aide que l’ICANN apporte aux participants pour se rendre aux réunions, des lettres d’invitation sont souvent nécessaires pour leur permettre d’obtenir un visa. A chaque demande de ce type, l’ICANN doit répondre avec un courrier postal. Parfois, ce courrier doit même être accompagné d’une confirmation écrite de l’hôte. Pour la réunion de Los Angeles, 240 lettres de ce type ont été envoyées par l’ICANN. Et 520 pour New Delhi !

Au niveau équipement, si certaines choses (agrafes, post-it…) peuvent être achetées sur place, les équipes de l’ICANN doivent bien entendu en amener une grosse partie. Pour l’Inde, 14 containers ont été envoyés ! Dedans, on va trouver de tout, de la prise électrique à l’équipement dédié au webcast.

Rien que les prises, ces petites choses anodines, prennent une dimension toute particulière lors d’une réunion ICANN. Il faut en avoir assez pour couvrir les besoins de la plus grande des salles utilisées pour les réunions sur place. Pour l’Inde, cela voulait dire plus de 1000 prises. Et forcément, une telle consommation d’électricité dépasse souvent les capacités des hôtels dans lesquels se déroulent les réunions ICANN. Ainsi, pour les réunions de Lisbonne et de Sao Paolo, les hôtels avaient installé des générateurs supplémentaires pour pouvoir fournir toute l’électricité nécessaire. C’était le cas également à Delhi, où les générateurs ont aussi permis de prévenir d’éventuelles coupures d’électricité en prenant le relais toutes les 30 secondes.

En fait, lors d’une réunion ICANN, c’est presque l’équivalent d’une petite ville qui arrive sur les lieux. Ainsi pour la réunion de San Juan, l’hôte a estimé que la réunion avait apporté US 2,8 $ millions à l’économie locale. Et à Lisbonne, les bars de l’hôtel dans lequel se déroulait la réunion ont enregistré le plus gros chiffre d’affaire hebdomadaire de leur histoire.

C’est que tout ce travail donne soif

While lots of valuable input came from that meeting, I made a commitment to host an online forum to collect further input. While this is not a formal ICANN process, input is being sought and will be used in the spirit of ICANN’s commitment to openness and transparency.

That forum is now open and will be open for comments until 17 April 2008.

Though more of a discussion vehicle than articulating any particular views, the PowerPoint presentation [pdf] from the Delhi session, which includes the budgetary impact of various support options, is available online, as well as a transcript of the session.

Please share your thoughts and help ICANN update current policies, develop a consistent approach to participation and travel support, and determine what is sustainable and reasonable in terms of the budget.

Thanks!

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.

There are no other strings but the one for “example” in each of the zones. To answer another question that often comes up — there are no registrations available and there is also no associated registration policies, nor are there variant tables. Variant tables across scripts can be quite a challenge to develop, especially when there are similarities with other scripts supported under the TLD (mixed or not). For more on this, see for example all the work related to Indian languages and scripts at http://del.icann.org/node/88 (the presentations will be posted asap).

What this all means is that having clear rules for how these tables and policies should be developed are very important factors as we move towards introduction of IDN TLDs. While the IDN Guidelines provide an initial overview of this, the details of it will be important in the implementation of the processes and policies related to the introduction of IDN TLDs (regardless of it being on the ccTLD or gTLD side).

So in other words, inclusion in the wiki does not indicate whether or not a script/language combination is safe to deploy and as such can be used directly in the root.

So back to the original question – what does the wiki then do? It is an online tool so all interested users can try out fully localized domain names (IDN both before and after the dot) in, for example, web addresses or email addresses. Interested users could be registrants, general users of domain names in some capacity, registries or companies that are thinking about becoming IDN TLD operators, application developers who either have or are going to implement IDNs for use in their products. As such there can be many different reasons for participating in the wiki. But in general it should provide a good overview of what IDNs solve and what the difficulties are around usage – the problems that users face. They will also help highlight other limitations in solutions (keyboards or software to type and also to display scripts, application support and difference in implementation, content, etc).

Historically, when new TLDs have been included in the DNS, there have been some cases with some usability problems. The hope is that the wiki in addition will demonstrate to any potential IDN TLD operator what some of the acceptance or usability problems are around IDNs. As such this will give a good up front indication of what user complaints may arise when the day comes that IDN registrations are purchased and moved into operation (under IDN TLDs).
The wiki provides some suggestions about how participants can test along with other IDN relevant IDN information. It can be accessed at http://idn.icann.org and functions like any wiki where you can set up an account and create pages and participate in discussion forums.

Note: while much of this work is related to IDN TLDs it is important to keep in mind that a lot of the experience and knowledge we have today to supply at the TLD level is coming from the implementations at the second level. IDN at second level have been around since 2001.

As soon as the technicians have sorted out the problem, we will come back with an explanation and update this post with details.

Update:

[This has come from the technical staff to explain the issues there have been over the past few days]

We have been faced with many challenges here.

The week before the meeting there were a total of five undersea fibre cuts in the Asia Pacific region. Because of this, a lot of the traffic of the region has been aggregated and is all traveling through the remaining fibre paths (all at capacity at the moment). As the fibres are replaced, it will certainly impact the region (in a positive way!) but unlike when your computer crashes at home, deploying the “tech support” to a cut undersea fibre can take up to a week to arrive at the destination.

We’ve run into some hurdles with the local transit as well in the way of trying to get them to sort out our AS number and properly announce (and transit) our traffic.

We have also had a challenge with stable power in the hotel. There have been a number of power outages (either partial or full) and blown circuits. Some of these have directly impacted the ability to feed power to the routers we are using to egress the hotel. Though we have UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), we’ve found a number of them have been mis-wired ore plugged into the hotel UPS, which can cause a “blowback” and cut the power.

Although service has not been stable, the team that is here locally has done an amazing job of adapting to each new challenge and providing a solution in the most timely fashion that they were able to.

We apologize for any inconvenience and assure you we are doing everything within our power to try to keep the services running so that the meetings can be effective. It should also be noted that the local staff have provided incredible support dealing with multiple challenges.

Places to see:
The Friday Mosk, the President’s Palace, the old city, Humayun’s Tomb, Qutub Minar. There are many more, but these are some of the ones you will not miss.

Restaurants and bars:
Threesixty at the Oberoi Hotel,
Veda Delhi restaurant at H27 Connaught Place
Baci restaurant and bar at 23, Sunder Nagar Market, Sunder Nagar
and of course, the Bukhara at the Maurya ITC hotel (300 meters from the meeting venue)
It’s recommended that you make reservations for each of these places, just to be on the safe side.

Art Galleries: the Delhi Art Gallery is for old Indian artists, established ones, and it is pretty expensive. The one really to not miss, if you are interested in modern Indian art, is the Art Alive, which is an impressive gallery of modern Indian artists. You can visit them at S-221 Panchsheel Park in New Delhi, and their phones are (+91-11) 41639000 or (+91-11) 41638050. It is not easy to find it, but it is definitely worth the efforts. It has a great number of artists’ work there.

Tips and tricks:
For cars, arrange a black-and-yellow taxi from the hotel, waiting time for 1 hour is approx. Rs 30-40 (less than USD 1), so it’s worth having the taxi waiting for you, if you are going out for dinner. Usual tip: Rs. 40; for food – 10 % tips are OK, but no less than Rs 40)
For people with respiratory problems – the air is quite polluted, so wear masks, if you can, and bring some medicines, if you need such under normal conditions (asthma), you will need it for sure in Delhi.

General observation: people are extremely friendly, service is excellent. India is a beautiful country.

Note: You can see pictures from Delhi, Agra, Taj Mahal and Jaipur (visit all these places, if you can!) at my flickr.

Right now both the GNSO and the ccNSO are taking a look at how IDNs can be introduced or delegated at the top-level – how you can get, say, all-Arabic-cahracters after the dot in a domain name. ICANN have processes for delgation of ccTLDs and there have been a couple of rounds in the past years for introduction of new gTLDs, but none of these included IDN TLDs.

For the GNSO this is a matter of the general process for introduction of new gTLDs. There is lots of information on this at: http://gnso.icann.org

The ccNSO is working on two processes right now – the overarching policy development process (PDP) for having IDN equivalents of the country-code top-level domains, and a fast-track process to find a way to introduce a limited number of “IDN ccTLDs” to represent territory identifications in characters from their their local languages in operation as ccTLDs as quickly as possible in the areas of highest need, without impacting the long-term policy process for the full implementation of IDNs.

The first draft report for the fast-track work has just been posted for public comments and will be discussed further during the ICANN meeting in Delhi. All IDN interested parties are urged to provide their comments on the report. The announcement and comment forum can be found here: http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-01feb08.htm

But back to the question. While both the fast-track and the process for introduction of new gTLDs are aiming at being available by mid- or late-2008, it will still take time to see IDN registrations because the next step will need to happen. IDN TLD operators need to step forward, get approved/delgatons need to take place, and start operating with registry operator going through any launch phase that they may have determined provides the best service to the community they are intending to serve.

Simply, even though processes are underway together with the rest of the IDN related work, it’s impossible to give a final or specific date for end users to get through all of those steps. That said, everyone working on this understands the incredible desire in the community and across the globe to have the first registrations under IDN TLDs. We are going to get there together.

Le JPA, un point clef pour l’avenir de l’ICANN, sera bien entendu au cœur des discussions. D’autant plus que la fin de la période d’appels à commentaires sur ce dossier coïncide avec la fin de la réunion de New Delhi.

Deux autres sujets seront également très suivis : 1) le système de mise en route rapide (“fast track” en Anglais) des noms de domaine internationalisés (IDN) sur les extensions nationales (les “points pays” ou “ccTLD”) et 2) le lancement de nouvelles extensions génériques.

Un atelier sur la politique de traduction de l’ICANN sera organisé à New Delhi. Les participants pourront y échanger sur les solutions les plus aptes pour permettre à l’ICANN de proposer ses documents et son contenu en plusieurs langues. Il est question de la traduction de documents officiels, mais aussi de traductions simultanées lors de réunions ou conférences pour faciliter les échanges entre toutes les communautés, ou encore d’ouverture vers d’autres langues que l’anglais pour les sites de l’ICANN (à l’image du contenu français proposé sur ce blog)… Tout cela devant tenir compte des réalités budgétaires de l’ICANN.

A propos de budget, un nouveau type d’atelier sera inauguré à New Delhi : l’atelier budgétaire. L’idée est de permettre à la communauté de donner son avis sur le fonctionnement budgétaire de l’ICANN. Plusieurs options seront proposées pour tenter de répondre à des questions comme : sur quoi l’ICANN devrait dépenser, et combien ? Les réponses seront prises en compte dans le processus budgétaire de l’ICANN.

Bien entendu, ce ne sont que quelques uns des éléments qui seront traités du 10 au 15 février en Inde. Il y en aura beaucoup d’autres. On parlera par exemple des façons de faire face à la faillite d’un registrar… L’ensemble des comités, organismes de soutien et autres structures qui forment l’écosystème de l’ICANN tiendront leurs réunions habituelles… Le “Public Forum” donnera l’occasion à tous de s’exprimer devant le Conseil d’administration, et la semaine de New Delhi se terminera par la traditionnelle réunion de ce Conseil…

Pour rappel, les réunions ICANN sont ouvertes à tous et sont gratuites. Il est possible de se pré-enregistrer sur le site dédié de la réunion, ou bien de s’enregistrer directement sur place.

Au plaisir de vous retrouver à New Delhi.

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