AGIP Participates in ICANN's 28th Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal
30-Mar-2007
AMMAN - Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property (AGIP) Deputy Chair Samar Al-Labbad and the Regional Office Executive Director, Charles Sha’ban, participated in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 28th Public Meeting held in Lisbon, Portugal, March 26-30, 2007.
According to 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 March 16, 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.
• 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.
“What is different in this year’s meeting is the addition of the following two sessions: ‘ICANN Operational Plan’ and ‘the Middle East Region Perspective’. Such sessions were designed to hear from the Internet community of the Middle East on how they see the participation in the ICANN process: its benefits, challenges, improvements and the way forward,” Sha’ban said.
Sha’ban discussed regional overviews related to the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) and the country code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO). Manal Ismail, Internet Technical Affairs advisor at the National Telecom Regulatory Authority/Egypt discussed the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) Participation in ICANN, while Siavash Shahshahani, director of IRNIC, ccTLD Registry of Iran, gave a general overview on At-Large.
Sha’ban also added that the sessions focused on the Middle East priorities and enhancing its role and participation in ICANN.
The 29th ICANN Public Meeting will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 25-29, 2007.