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The Three Pillars of ICANN’s Technical Engagement Strategy

21 March 2017
By
Adiel Akplogan

Adiel Akplogan

VP, Technical Engagement

Adiel A. Akplogan is Vice President for Technical Engagement at ICANN. With more than 25 years’ experience in the ICT industry (20 specifically in the Internet Technology Industry), Adiel has previously worked as CEO for AFRINIC (The African Network Information Centre), IT Director for Symbol Technology in France (2001-2003) and Director of New Technology at CAFÉ Informatique in Togo (1994-2000). Recognized as one of the Internet technology pioneers in Africa, he has contributed to technical capacity building and deployment of some of the first private Internet Service Providers in Africa from 1996-1999.

During his career, Adiel has served on the Boards or Advisory Committees of many global & international organizations such as the UN Internet Governance Forum Multistakeholder Advisory Group (IGF-MAG from 2006-2009), the Technical Advisory Committee of the United Nation Economic Commission for Africa (ATAC/UNECA from 2005-2006), the Executive Council of the Number Resource Organization (NRO – 2005-2015 as Chair, Secretary, and Treasurer), ICANN's Strategic Panel on its role in the Internet governance ecosystem, the African Union's AXIS program Steering Committee (2012-2015), the African Network Operators Group and the Africa Internet Summit's Administration and Program committee (AFNOG/AIS – 2000-2015) and the Organisation International de la Francophonie (OIF) Expert Group on Internet Governance (since 1999).


Passionate about Internet technology and its impact on human development, he has actively contributed to the setup of several technical coordination bodies in Africa such as the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG), the African ccTLD Managers Association (AfTLD), AfricaCERT, and the Africa Internet Summit (AIS).


Adiel Akplogan has a graduate degree in electrical engineering and holds a master’s degree in E-Business and New Technology Management from Paris Graduate School of Management. He lives and works from Montréal, Canada.

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ICANN's technical engagement team was established two years ago. Since then, we have made a great deal of progress in better engaging with our peers throughout the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship transition proposal process and currently during the implementation phase. Over the past few months, the Office of the CTO has been reinforced with a dedicated research team composed of experienced Internet technologists. These experts are working hard to raise the level of ICANN engagement on Internet identifiers technology usage measurement, its evolution, and are collecting and sharing data that can further support the community in its policy development processes. They are also focusing on helping to build bridges with other relevant technical partners.

Our overall strategy for technical engagement is based on three pillars:

  • Continue building trust with our technical partners and peers within the ecosystem.
  • Expand our participation in relevant forums and events where we can further raise awareness about ICANN's mission, while encouraging more diversity in participation in our community policy development processes.
  • Continue contributing ICANN's positions on technical topics discussed outside our regular forums, but ones affecting our mission, keeping the focus on our shared responsibilities and effective coordination.

We can highlight in this blog some ongoing activities toward each goal:

Expanding Participation in Technical Forums

To continue building a sustainable relationship with our peers, we have increased, in number and in quality, our participation and contribution to various technical forums led by our partner organizations, including:

  • Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
  • Regional Internet Registries (RIRs): African Network Information Center (AFRINIC), Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), Latin American and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC) and Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC)
  • Regional country code top-level domain organizations: African TLD Organization (AFTLD), Council of European National TLD Registries (CENTR), Asia Pacific TLD Organization (APTLD), Latin American and Carribean TLD Organization (LACTLD)
  • And many others …

Encouraging Diversity of Participants

As a community, we face the challenge of strengthening the bottom-up, multistakeholder policy development process, while at the same time ensuring that participation becomes more diverse. Looking beyond regional and gender diversity, we must also achieve technical diversity. For example, when we work on domain name policies that affect online services, how do we ensure that we have Internet service operators, application developers and software designers around the table to give their operational perspectives? And as mobile technology becomes an increasingly prevalent way of consuming Internet services, and mobile operators are important players in that sector, how do we ensure that they engage with and contribute to our policy development processes?

We have also seen a growing interest from the Internet services abuse mitigation community in understanding and engaging more actively in our community-led policy development processes. As a result, the output of these processes is taking their needs into consideration. Our Security, Stability and Resiliency (SSR) and Global Stakeholder Engagement (GSE) teams have worked together to provide capability-building programs dedicated to this community. We are exploring ways to cover more ground (particularly in emerging regions). Our recent participation in the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) Public Safety Working Group's workshop in Nairobi has confirmed this need. A follow-up mechanism is under discussion to make sure our engagement efforts meet these needs.

Engaging in Technical Topics that Affect Our Ecosystem

Finally, within our technical scope, we have launched an Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) initiative to refine ICANN's position on IPv6. The initiative defines actions that will ensure that, as organization, we do our part to provide online services that our community can transparently access over both IPv6 and Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). Read more about our IPv6 initiative.

Authors

Adiel Akplogan

Adiel Akplogan

VP, Technical Engagement
Adiel Akplogan

Adiel Akplogan

VP, Technical Engagement

Adiel A. Akplogan is Vice President for Technical Engagement at ICANN. With more than 25 years’ experience in the ICT industry (20 specifically in the Internet Technology Industry), Adiel has previously worked as CEO for AFRINIC (The African Network Information Centre), IT Director for Symbol Technology in France (2001-2003) and Director of New Technology at CAFÉ Informatique in Togo (1994-2000). Recognized as one of the Internet technology pioneers in Africa, he has contributed to technical capacity building and deployment of some of the first private Internet Service Providers in Africa from 1996-1999.

During his career, Adiel has served on the Boards or Advisory Committees of many global & international organizations such as the UN Internet Governance Forum Multistakeholder Advisory Group (IGF-MAG from 2006-2009), the Technical Advisory Committee of the United Nation Economic Commission for Africa (ATAC/UNECA from 2005-2006), the Executive Council of the Number Resource Organization (NRO – 2005-2015 as Chair, Secretary, and Treasurer), ICANN's Strategic Panel on its role in the Internet governance ecosystem, the African Union's AXIS program Steering Committee (2012-2015), the African Network Operators Group and the Africa Internet Summit's Administration and Program committee (AFNOG/AIS – 2000-2015) and the Organisation International de la Francophonie (OIF) Expert Group on Internet Governance (since 1999).


Passionate about Internet technology and its impact on human development, he has actively contributed to the setup of several technical coordination bodies in Africa such as the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG), the African ccTLD Managers Association (AfTLD), AfricaCERT, and the Africa Internet Summit (AIS).


Adiel Akplogan has a graduate degree in electrical engineering and holds a master’s degree in E-Business and New Technology Management from Paris Graduate School of Management. He lives and works from Montréal, Canada.

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