ICANN Concludes Busy 28th Public Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal

More than 830 people from 81 countries gathered in Lisbon, Portugal for ICANN's 28th Public Meeting.

"We've just finished one of ICANN's busiest and issue-intensive meetings and it helped ICANN make substantial progress on numerous fronts," said Dr Vint Cerf, Chairman of ICANN.

Considerations included:

• The formalization of three relationships with country code top level domain (ccTLD) managers: .ly - Libya (General Post and Telecommunication Company), .ci - Côte d'Ivoire (Institut National Polytechnique Felix Houphouet Boigny), and .ru - Russia (Coordination Center for TLD RU).
• The formation of a new working group to develop the recommendations in the Final Task Force Report on Whois Services presented to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GSNO) on 16 March 2007. The group will have broad and balanced participation and has 120 days to consider input and report back to the GNSO Council, which will then decide whether to recommend any changes on Whois policy to the ICANN Board.
• A discussion on Registrar Accreditation Agreements and how to improve them especially in the context of the enormous difficulties that registrants who have their domain names registered through the registrar known as RegisterFly.
• The creation of three new Regional At Large Organizations that will give Internet users from Africa, Europe, and Asia-Australia-Pacific direct input into ICANN.
• Rejection of the .XXX Sponsored Top Level Domain application.
• Presentations by Sweden and Bulgaria on the enhanced Domain Name System security enhancements in their respective TLDs.
• The launch of ICANN's new website with better navigation and new features to increase ICANN's transparency and accountability.
• Updates on moving to IPv6 to expand the number of IP addresses available to global Internet users and the process of introducing Internationalized Domain Names to introduce non-Latin characters to the root.
• The release of the One World Trust (http://www.oneworldtrust.org) independent review of ICANN's accountability and transparency which stated that overall ICANN is a very transparent organization, noting that it shares a large quantity of information through its website, probably more than any other global organisation. The report also identifies areas for improvement. See http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-4-29mar07.htm
• The release of the next steps in the development of a set of Management Operating Principles for accountability and transparency.

"ICANN is working hard to improve in the area of openness and transparency," said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN.

"Public participation was a key aim at this meeting. If you couldn't be physically present you could participate through webcasting, chatrooms, and the ability to ask questions to speakers with our public participation website. Even the board discussion was made available for the whole world to watch live."

These meetings, one of three held each year, are open to anyone interested in participating. They constitute an essential part of ICANN's efforts to consult the global community.

"I want to thank our Portuguese hosts for their extraordinary efforts to make members of the Internet community across the globe feel welcome, and for ensuring every aspect of the meeting ran smoothly," Dr Twomey added." Portugal was one of the founding members of the Governmental Advisory Committee and will continue to be at the forefront of Internet issues when it assumes the Presidency of the European Union during the second half of this year."

Full text of the Board resolutions from the Lisbon meeting will be available on the ICANN public participation website: http://meetings.icann.org/

The 29th ICANN Public Meeting will held 25-29 June, 2007, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

About ICANN:

ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit non-profit responsible for coordinating Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.

Media Contacts:

Jason Keenan
Media Adviser, ICANN (USA)
Ph: +1 310 818 9072
E: jason.keenan@icann.org

International: Andrew Robertson
Edelman (London)
Ph: +44 7921 588 770
E: andrew.robertson@edelman.com