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ICANN Middle East – One Year in Review

23 August 2017
By
Baher Esmat

Baher Esmat

VP, Stakeholder Engagement - Middle East & Managing Director MEA

Baher Esmat is a leading voice on Internet policy and regulatory issues in the Middle East. In his role as Vice President, he is a keen facilitator of collaboration and dialogue between ICANN and the broader Internet community in the region.

Baher joined ICANN in 2006, and prior to that he held various roles with public and private organizations, and led efforts and projects aiming to advance telecommunication infrastructure and Internet services in Egypt and the Middle East.

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In July 2016, a community-led working group of over 50 members and observers began working on a three-year regional Middle East engagement strategy, along with a one-year implementation plan. Over the past year, ICANN has made significant progress on this strategy. The following are some of the highlights.

Key highlights

  • A variety of regional events and webinars on various ICANN-related issues were held for the regional community, which attracted a wide range of stakeholder groups, with over 350 participants attending from across the region.
  • Domain Name System (DNS) capacity building workshops were conducted in several cities throughout the Middle East. Key development in those programs is the participation of trained instructors from the region.
  • The DNS Entrepreneurship Center (DNS-EC) partnered with industry and academia to offer DNS capacity-building seminars to students and young community members.
  • The launch of a youth education initiative, in cooperation with Tunisia's Centre de Calcul Khawarizmi (CCK), to raise awareness within the local community about the Internet's system of unique identifiers.
  • The Task Force on Arabic Script IDNs made significant progress towards established Label Generation Rules at the second level and Universal Acceptance.
  • ICANN Fellows have become more active and engaged in ICANN's various groups, including in the Middle East Strategy Working Group (MEAC-SWG).
  • Thousands of ICANN-related news pieces were published in Middle East countries, with the UAE, Turkey and Egypt representing the largest share.

For a visual representation of relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from this period, see the infographic here [PDF, 286 KB].

What's next?

The second year implementation plan has been developed in consultation with the strategy working group and can be found here. Also, planning is underway for outreach activities in the lead-up to ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi. We look forward to seeing significant participation from the region.

For any questions or comments, or if you are interested in helping with regional strategy work, please reach out to us at meac.swg@icann.org.

Authors

Baher Esmat

Baher Esmat

VP, Stakeholder Engagement - Middle East & Managing Director MEA
Baher Esmat

Baher Esmat

VP, Stakeholder Engagement - Middle East & Managing Director MEA

Baher Esmat is a leading voice on Internet policy and regulatory issues in the Middle East. In his role as Vice President, he is a keen facilitator of collaboration and dialogue between ICANN and the broader Internet community in the region.

Baher joined ICANN in 2006, and prior to that he held various roles with public and private organizations, and led efforts and projects aiming to advance telecommunication infrastructure and Internet services in Egypt and the Middle East.

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