I’m currently in LA for the ICANN meeting where around 1,000 people registered for this week’s meeting. The meeting will be most remembered as Vint Cerf’s last meeting as chair as he is obliged to step down having served the limit on the number of terms he is allowed to serve.

But there are other issues up for debate, probably the major one being changes to Whois and the display of personal information.

On Sunday there was a joint ccNSO/GAC meeting that discussed the impact and policy that extending the DNS to thousands of languages may have on those running different registries. The model developed so far for IDNs assumes that every country only possesses a single formal language. So the issue was raised of how this will cope with India with a range of languages.

There was also an IPv6 workshop with presentations by Paul Wilson of APNIC, Mark McFadden of BT on behalf of ETNO and Joel Jaeggli of Nokia. One of the key discussions here was the depletion of IPv4 addresses and possibility of a trading of IPv4 IP addresses. While I wasn’t attending any of these sessions on the Sunday, apparently there was plenty of vigorous discussion taking place.

Another session looked at the technical issues seen in IPv4 deployment. Presentations were given by Takashi Uematsu of NTT West, Jay Daley of Nominet and Dave Piscitelloof ICANN’s SSAC. The discussion focussed on issues surrounding IPv6 deployment, particularly security issues.

The joint GNSO/GAC meeting saw presentations from the GNSO on ongoing work regarding dispute resolution for international inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) and domain tasting, while the GAC updated the GNSO on their discussion on the way conflicts between Whois and national laws will be addressed, clarifying matters in respect to this.

More information on the ICANN meeting in LA can be found at losangeles2007.icann.org/ including the daily newsletters from which most of this was based.