ICANN Concludes Annual Meeting in South Africa

More than 735cparticipants from 91 countries successfully concluded the ICANN Cape Town Annual Meeting including industry and technical leaders, Internet users from Africa and around the world and Ministers and Governmental representatives this week.

- Africa's At-Large Internet Community members advanced their awareness and challenges and further integrated the African community in the ICANN process, creating a much deeper understanding of the Internet landscape in Africa, and what African stakeholders face.
- ICANN stakeholders held their third WSIS workshop to update the community on proceedings within the international discussions on Internet governance. They were addressed by a panel of African leaders in Internet governance who put forward many of the key issues of developing nation Internet communities. Also addressing the community were the newly appointed chairman of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), Nitan Desai, Special Advisor to the Secretary General for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) and Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator, Secretariat of the WGIG. ICANN constituency groups agreed to formulate and sign a joint resolution regarding Internet governance which will be included in a jointly prepared White Paper to be distributed widely in the Internet governance discussions.
- This was the 20th meeting of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). Many GAC members were present in Cape Town and of particular mention, the representatives of GAC present from the Africa region were from South Africa, Djibouti, Senegal, Sudan, the Gambia and Tanzania. Outcomes of this Regional Forum are included in the official GAC Communique which will be available on their website.
- The Country Code Domain Name Supporting Organisation (ccNSO) moved forward on discussions regarding its ccTLD Principles, and announced their intention to review the GAC paper regarding the Principles through its appropriate Working Group. Additionally, the CCNSO and the GAC have established a joint liaison group which will identify issues of common interest.
- A second IDN workshop successfully brought together experts on integrating local languages with the global Internet. With African languages as the focus, these experts explored the range of cultural and technical issues that must be overcome to bring the many local language forms to everyday use on the Internet. Participants identified topics for further discussion and plan to continue their work in future forums.
- Frank Fowlie, the new ICANN Ombudsman, was introduced to the ICANN community at the Cape Town meeting and he announced the posting of his framework document that can be found on the ICANN website. The appointment of Mr. Fowlie represents ICANN's further commitment to ensuring ICANN's accountability to the global Internet Community.
- ICANN's Board approved the finalisation of a Request for Proposals for designating a successor operator for the .NET registry. The current .NET Registry Agreement was signed in May 2001, and will expire on 30 June 2005. VeriSign is eligible to be considered for designation as the successor registry operator. The procedure for selecting the successor operator was developed through an open and transparent process incorporating opportunities for public review and comment at multiple stages. Completed .NET proposals will be due in January 2005. Proposals will be evaluated by an independent third-party, based on pre-established criteria developed through ICANN's bottom-up, consensus-based policy development system. The designation of the successful proposal is scheduled for March 2005.