What a productive year it's been for ICANN and the Internet community. In 2014, ICANN held its first quarterly stakeholder call and our meetings in Singapore, London and Los Angeles surpassed all previous meetings in terms of participation. The Global Domains Division tackled Name Collision and laid down a roadmap for addressing Universal Acceptance, as well as managing delegation of over 390 new generic top-level domains. We're excited to celebrate these accomplishments with all of you, and we look forward to working with you in the New Year to accomplish even more.
As we've done in previous years, ICANN will close its global offices over the holidays. This year, the office closure begins on 24 December 2014 and normal activities will resume on 5 January 2015. During this time, all processes initiated by ICANN's Global Domains Division staff will be suspended; customers and community members can expect the following services to be unavailable:
- Services for New gTLD Applicants
- Change Requests
- Application Refunds
- Contracting (invitations, executions)
- Services for Registries
- Pre-delegation Testing (scheduling and testing)
- Transition to Delegation (IANA token release)
- Registry Onboarding and TLD Startup Information
- Assignment Requests
- Registry Services Evaluation Policy Requests
- Two-Character Authorization Requests
- Registry-Registrar Amendment Requests
- Customer Service / GDD portal Cases
Critical operational services will function as normal during the holidays, including:
- IANA functions (reviewing and processing incoming root zone changes, etc.)
- Service Level Agreement monitoring
- Emergency Backend Registry Operator functions
- Trademark Clearinghouse
- Registry Reporting Interface
- Name collision report monitoring
Certain departments within the Global Domains Division will continue to support non-critical functions and requests on a case-by-case basis, depending on priority.
We wish you a safe and happy holiday season, and look forward to another productive year.
Happy Holidays!