As we approach the new Financial Year in July 2020, the Asia Pacific (APAC) regional office is working to align its focus areas and activities to the ICANN FY21-25 Strategic Plan. We are currently seeking the APAC community's feedback and input on our draft APAC Regional Plan for FY21-25.
Our regional engagement efforts have always been aligned with the ICANN Strategic Plan, and the past five years have been guided by the FY16-20 Strategic Plan. Highlights from FY2019 are available in the APAC section of the ICANN Annual Report.
For background, the FY21-25 ICANN Strategic Plan was developed through an extensive strategic planning process which ensured the continuous participation of the ICANN community. The adopted Strategic Plan consists of ICANN's mission, vision, objectives, and goals over a five-year time frame.
For our APAC Regional Plan, our aim is to map our focus areas and activities against the strategic objectives and goals. When providing your input, it is noteworthy that not all of the strategic objectives and goals are within the capability of the APAC regional office. We also have limited resources, and will need to take a targeted and focused approach in order to achieve substantive outcomes.
Feedback/Input Needed
Feedback and input from you, our APAC Community, is important and not just because of our multistakeholder process. Together, we can work to identify priorities and find new ways to collaborate in the implementation process.
Here are a few examples from the draft plan:
ICANN Strategic Objective: Strengthen the security of the DNS and the DNS Root Server System.
One of our proposed focus areas is to partner the APAC community in technical projects such as the Identifier Technology Health Indicators (ITHI) and Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR).
These key technical projects are driven by the ICANN CTO Office, and we hope to increase your participation in them. This can include direct participation or the recommendation of technical partners in your local networks that might be interested. Let us know if you would like to get involved.
Another focus area is to continue to encourage and promote the deployment of DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) through capacity development. In addition to raising awareness of DNSSEC, we've previously focused on supporting country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) to sign DNSSEC. Going forward, we also aim to work with network operators – particularly Internet service providers (ISPs) – to enable DNSSEC validation.
ICANN Strategic Objective: Evolve the unique identifier systems in coordination and collaboration with relevant parties to continue to serve the needs of the global Internet user base.
A proposed focus area is to promote Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) and Universal Acceptance (UA). Raising awareness with different stakeholder groups – particularly in the vast and diverse APAC region – is a challenging endeavour. If IDNs and UA are to help contribute to a truly multilingual Internet and bring the next billion users online, we will need to partner with the wider APAC community. If you'd like to partner us or have additional ideas, let us know.
In addition to the above, we welcome your input into any other potential focus areas and partnerships to be considered in the APAC Regional Plan for FY21-25. The draft APAC Regional Plan is presented in a matrix format for easy viewing and commenting. Please comment directly on the draft Regional Plan page, or contact us at apachub@icann.org. In the coming months, we will also be conducting a number of consultations to gather your feedback at APAC Space and ICANN readouts.
We look forward to hearing from you.
