ICANN Launches New Initiatives to Steward a Stable Global Internet

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (23 July 2004) – ICANN wrapped up its week-long meetings in KL during which the world-wide Internet community moved forward on a number of significant new initiatives directed at further stewarding a stable global Internet. The meeting was attended by more than 780 participants from over 78 countries from all regions of the world.

These new initiatives and developments include:

• implementation of next-generation IPv6 technology, enabling trillions more addresses to support the continuing growth of the global Internet
• acknowledgement of AfriNIC, the emerging African regional Internet address registry, and its request for commencement of an ICANN recognition process - a historical event in local control of African Internet resources
• creation of an advisory group to engage the global Internet community in the use of Internationalised Domain Names (also referred to as "IDNs") within the domain name system to further Internet growth in new languages and regions of the world
• the inaugural meeting of the Country Code Name Supporting Organization Council (ccNSO), ICANN's policy coordinating body for the world's country-code TLD's (top-level domain) communities
• reaching out to other Internet bodies to establish directives on the use of “Wildcards” in the domain name system
• recognition of ICANN’s successful completion of milestones under the MOU with the United States’ Department of Commerce toward full independent oversight of the ICANN Functions under its global structure and with its global community

ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit non-profit responsible for coordinating the ICANN Functions, which include 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.