ICANN Rome Meeting

Yesterday saw the end of the ICANN meeting I had been attending. The meetings are held three times a year with the 2004 ones being in Rome, Kuala Lumpa and Capetown.

Most of the meetings are focused on domain name policies and operations. This is now a relatively sizeable industry with 60 million domain names generating around NZ$3 billion in primary retail revenue and a secondary market of several hundred million more.

Attending on behalf of InternetNZ, the .nz manager, the first three days were taken up with meetings of the country code managers covering a variety of topics from DNS security, to registration policies to internal ICANN structure. The biggest topic is the ongoing discussion with the Governmental Advisory Committee as to the roles and relationships between Governments and country code registries. In most countries the registry is not selected by the Government but historically was delegated the role before Governments took much interest in the matter. Nowadays the issue is on the UN, ITU and WSIS agendas.

The next two days were public forums on current issues. Most of these were to do with generic top level domains such as .com, .info, .net etc. The final day was the ICANN Board meeting where final decisions were taken on a number of issues.

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