We are eagerly anticipating joining the Internet community for ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi, which is being held from 28 October to 3 November 2017. World-renowned for its cuisine, arts scene, and architecture, Abu Dhabi is a breath-taking juxtaposition of history and modernity, of ancient culture and cutting-edge innovation.
The Global Domains Division (GDD) will be coordinating many sessions during ICANN60, and we highly encourage you to attend as many as you can. The full schedule can be found here, but these are a few to mark in your calendar:
On Monday, 30 October, the PTI: First Year Anniversary session will provide attendees with the opportunity to get an update on the fulfilment of the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group proposal one year later. It will be a chance to reflect on last year's historic moment, when the coordination and management of the Internet's unique identifiers was transitioned to the private sector.
The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) will also be presenting an update on their activities on Monday, 30 October. Universal Acceptance (UA) is a foundational requirement for a truly multilingual Internet, so be sure to visit their website for resources that will help you get your systems UA-ready.
On Tuesday, 31 October, come get an update on the Domain Name System (DNS) abuse study by attending Domain Abuse Activity Reporting, a session that will explore Domain Abuse Activity Reporting (DAAR) as a platform for studying domain name registration and reporting abusive activities across top-level domain (TLD) registries and registrars. The overarching purpose of DAAR is to report security threat activity to the ICANN community, which can use the data to make informed decisions, including those that are related to policy.
We are also hosting a session titled "Update on ICANN Domain Name Registrant Work" on Wednesday, 1 November. The GDD will provide an overview of activities that are currently being undertaken to increase domain name registrant knowledge and awareness of their rights and responsibilities.
Another important topic that we'll be exploring at ICANN60, and one where we still have much work to do on, is related to data protection/privacy issues, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On Thursday, 2 November, join us for a cross-community session on GDPR and its implications for ICANN. GDPR has been called the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years, so we encourage everyone to attend this valuable session.
Finally, there will be several sessions with generation panels for various scripts, which are developing root zone label generation rules to validate Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) top level domains (TLDs) and determine their variant labels.
For those who'd like to continue the conversation beyond the scheduled sessions, the GDD booth will be open with members of the Registrants and Operations & Policy Research teams available for meet-and-greets. Our Global Support team will also be on-hand to answer questions.
ICANN60 promises to be an informative and engaging week of discussions on issues affecting the Internet community. If you will be attending in person, we look forward to seeing you during the meeting, and we hope you enjoy your visit to beautiful Abu Dhabi. If you won't be making the trip, I hope you will join the discussion via remote participation.