Global Internet community to gather in Sydney

Global Internet community to gather in Sydney

Media Release 21 May 2009

InternetNZ (Internet New Zealand Inc) encourages all New Zealanders with an interest in global Internet governance to attend a meeting of ICANN being held next month in Sydney.

ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers) is the US-based organisation that globally coordinates the Internet’s unique identifiers. ICANN meets three times a year in geographically diverse locations and is meeting at Sydney’s Hilton Hotel from 21 – 26 June. Registration for the event is free.

This is the third time that ICANN has met in Australasia. The organisation is currently chaired by longstanding InternetNZ member Peter Dengate Thrush.

InternetNZ Executive Director Keith Davidson says InternetNZ has been a supporter of the ICANN model since its inception in 1998, and in 2006 hosted an ICANN meeting in Wellington at which over 700 people attended.

“The core of the Internet requires global coordination to make it work. These meetings provide a valuable forum for communities of interest associated with ICANN to share their views and develop policy.

“Almost 200 New Zealanders attended the Wellington meeting and gained insight into ICANN’s functions. We strongly encourage more New Zealanders to use the close proximity of the Sydney meeting as an opportunity to experience ICANN," says Davidson.

Significant issues scheduled for discussion will include ICANN’s independence from the US Government, new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and a fast track process for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

"ICANN has opened up the process for applications for new gTLDs and is finalising policies and procedures. This could see potentially many thousands of new top level domains, for example “.shop” or “.news” being deployed on the Internet. Many global corporates are also interested in acquiring their names as gTLDs.

"In recognising the need to globalise the Internet, ICANN is also in the process of creating IDN domain names, which will allow for resolution of domain names in languages and scripts other than that currently allowed and very limited ASCII character sets. This will potentially allow resolution of domain names in Chinese or Arabic scripts."

You can register online and view the full event programme at: http://syd.icann.org .

ENDS

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