ICANN in Puerto Rico – Day One Wrap

ICANN’s 29th international meeting kicked off on Monday (25th) in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Much warmer than it currently is in Sydney, it would be nice to be there! The serious business of this ICANN meeting has received widespread coverage from 2 sources – Associated Press and IDG. The Register through Burke Hansen is also there.AP notes topics scheduled for discussion include Internationalised Domain Names and new TLDs and the meeting is “likely to conclude with more questions.”IDG meanwhile also notes the agenda “includes the first General Assembly of the Latin American and Caribbean Regional At Large Organization, formed in March.” Another topic slated for discussion notes IDG is transparency, with the recent report by One World Trust. The report noted ICANN “is a very transparent organisation but that it can improve certain areas, including explaining better how it uses input from stakeholders when making decisions.” ICANN has responded to the report and released for discussion at the San Juan meeting a set of draft principles and frameworks for accountability.”ICANN wants to improve making it easier for people to find the vast amount of information on its Web site. ICANN also wants to be faster in posting information online about its meetings and initiatives”, says Paul Twomey to IDG.Issues such as the purported close ties with the US government through the MoU with the Department of Commerce will, as usual, linger over discussions. There will be those pushing for the breaking of those ties with the US government.Rarely one of ICANN’s fans, Burke Hansen writing in The Register says that while ICANN baffles up with the myriad of acronyms for its committees, “one of the best things ICANN has done the last few months is continue to make the once-inscrutable site more user-friendly. Kudos all around for that.” On IDNs, Hansen quotes Vint Cerf who says they’ve hit a few road bumps, and won’t be ready till first quarter 2008 at the earliest. There are a total of 65,000 characters – every character in every written alphabet in the world – that ICANN has to ensure will work with the DNS.The move to IPv6 is covered in Hansen’s article. There are around 4.3 billion distinct addresses available with IPv4, “and with a worldwide internet community that is now over one billion users and growing rapidly, the current system is on pace to run out of distinct addresses sometime around 2011.” IPv6 “will accommodate 430 trillion, trillion, trillion distinct addresses, and will operate in parallel with the current IPv4 standard”.Cerf says the reasons for the proliferation are internet-connected devices – everything Blackberries to household appliances (you could turn them on and off remotely, check what’s in the fridge – the list is endless). I remember some years ago the American military intending that every item of theirs would one day have its own IP address.ICANN also has daily meeting newsletters available from the meeting’s website here – sanjuan2007.icann.org/.For more coverage on what’s happened on day one of the ICANN meeting, at least for those who can’t be there, see the following stories:
ICANN to Tackle new Top Level Domains (IDG)
www.pcworld.com/article/id,133397-pg,1/article.html
computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9025724Internet agency to discuss domain name expansion (AP)
www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/06/26/1182623849118.html
www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/06/26/1182623849118.htmlICANN goes to the Caribbean (Burke Hansen)
www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/25/icann_san_juan_2007/