Another in-person ICANN meeting has bitten the dust with the coordinator of the internet’s naming system announcing last week ICANN71 will be held as a Virtual Public Meeting due to the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ICANN71 Policy Forum was scheduled to be held in The Hague, Netherlands, from 14-17 June 2021 and will be the fifth ICANN meeting in a row to be held virtually.
“Above all, the health and safety of the ICANN community, Board, and staff are the most important considerations for our Public Meetings,” said Maarten Botterman, ICANN Board Chair. “As of now, there are still too many uncertainties involved with hosting a face-to-face meeting – even in The Hague, the city where I was born and would have loved to see you all. The Board believes that this is the right decision, and it gives us ample time to plan a successful Virtual Public Meeting.”
Registration will be required to participate in ICANN71, and will open in late March. In the meantime ICANN70, which will also be held as a Virtual Public Meeting, is happening next week, from 22-25 March. This meeting was initially planned to be held in Cancún, Mexico. It would be unsurprising going by current events if ICANN72, scheduled to be held in Seattle, Washington, in October, was not also to become a virtual event.
One virtual ICANN meeting where registrations are now open is the seventh Middle East DNS Forum (MEDNSF), originally scheduled to be held last year. The event, organised by ICANN and hosted by the Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), will be held virtually from 5-7 April this year.
The Forum features presentations and panel discussions on topics ranging from the growing demand for Domain Name System (DNS) security, opportunities and challenges in the domain name industry, and the importance and benefits of using the Arabic script on the Internet.
ICANN’s Chief Technology Officer David Conrad will give a keynote on the “DNS of Tomorrow” discussing the current DNS landscape and ecosystem, emerging standards and challenges (including the DNS Over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT)), and other emerging technologies’ potential impact on the DNS.
To register and view the full agenda, please click here.
The Middle East DNS Forum (MEDNSF) was created to help support the regional domain name industry. This initiative was part of ICANN’s Engagement Strategy in the Middle East for 2013-2016, created by the regional community in 2013. The Forum is aimed at increasing regional stakeholders’ knowledge of the Domain Name System. Since its inception in 2014, the Middle East DNS Forum has been held in the UAE (2014), Jordan (2015), Tunisia (2016), Egypt (2017), Turkey (2018), and UAE (2019).