With the participation of over 600 delegates from 80 countries, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held its 22nd International Public Meeting and its 2005 Annual Meeting in Mar del Plata, Argentina, April 4-8, 2005, ICANN.org reported.
These meetings constitute an essential part of ICANN’s global Internet community consensus-development and outreach efforts. ICANN conducted a series of important workshops on Domain Name System (DNS) Security, domain name hijacking, and the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), and coordinated further discussions on Whois policy development as well as Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) implementation.
During the meetings, ICANN’s Board of Directors approved the full recognition of AfriNIC as the fifth Regional Internet Registry, dedicated to the allocation of numbering resources for the Africa region, in addition to the formal adoption of a global policy on Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Allocation of IPv4 Blocks to Regional Internet Registries developed by the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) and the Number Resource Organization (NRO).
Moreover, the ICANN Board approved the designation of two new sponsored Top-Level Domains (sTLDs): .JOBS & .TRAVEL.
As the process for selecting new sponsored Top Level Domains (sTLDs) continues from a pool of ten applications, ICANN has already entered into commercial and technical negotiations with the following additional candidate registries, .CAT, .POST, and .MOBI. Discussions continue among ICANN board and staff regarding the evaluation of five additional proposed sponsored Top Level Domains (sTLDs): .ASIA, .MAIL, .TEL, .TEL, and .XXX.
Present at this meeting were 33 members of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, business leaders, registrars, intellectual property holders, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from across the region and the world.