More than 830 people from 81 countries gathered in Lisbon, Portugal for ICANN’s 28th Public Meeting.
« We’ve just finished one of ICANN’s busiest and issue-intensive meetings and it helped ICANN make substantial progress on numerous fronts, » said Dr Vint Cerf, Chairman of ICANN.
Considerations included:
* The formalization of three relationships with country code top level domain (ccTLD) managers: .ly – Libya (General Post and Telecommunication Company), .ci – Côte d’Ivoire (Institut National Polytechnique Felix Houphouet Boigny), and .ru – Russia (Coordination Center for TLD RU).
* The formation of a new working group to develop the recommendations in the Final Task Force Report on Whois Services presented to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GSNO) on 16 March 2007. The group will have broad and balanced participation and has 120 days to consider input and report back to the GNSO Council, which will then decide whether to recommend any changes on Whois policy to the ICANN Board.
* A discussion on Registrar Accreditation Agreements and how to improve them especially in the context of the enormous difficulties that registrants who have their domain names registered through the registrar known as RegisterFly.
* The creation of three new Regional At Large Organizations that will give Internet users from Africa, Europe, and Asia-Australia-Pacific direct input into ICANN.
* Rejection of the .XXX Sponsored Top Level Domain application.
* Presentations by Sweden and Bulgaria on the enhanced Domain Name System security enhancements in their respective TLDs.
* The launch of ICANN’s new website with better navigation and new features to increase ICANN’s transparency and accountability.
* Updates on moving to IPv6 to expand the number of IP addresses available to global Internet users and the process of introducing Internationalized Domain Names to introduce non-Latin characters to the root.
* The release of the One World Trust (http://www.oneworldtrust.org) independent review of ICANN’s accountability and transparency which stated that overall ICANN is a very transparent organization, noting that it shares a large quantity of information through its website, probably more than any other global organisation. The report also identifies areas for improvement. See http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-4-29mar07.htm
* The release of the next steps in the development of a set of Management Operating Principles for accountability and transparency.