John Demco
The meetings of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are taking place this week, June 21 – 26, 2009, in Sydney, Australia. As usual, there is a very diverse collection of participants and topics. Of particular interest is the prospect of the creation of a large number of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Several organizations have booths promoting registry services to prospective TLD applicants, and celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck is in town launching a bid for .food, and possibly for .restaurant and .wine as well.
There are many other topics on the agenda:
- the forthcoming expiry of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between ICANN and the U.S. government
- the fast-tracking of country-code domain names using international (non-Latin) character sets
- a tribute to outgoing ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey and the anticipated announcement of his replacement
- many technical and security-oriented items, including the prospect of scaling up the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS), secure DNS, and the need for internationalizing WHOIS registration data