European regional registrar / registry meeting Amsterdam

Tomorrow morning I’m heading off to Amsterdam. I wish it was just to enjoy the city, to soak a bit of culture and to hangout with friends, but it’s for work.

ICANN is convening a regional meeting in the Dutch capital for registrars (companies like us), registries (think Neusta, Afilias or Verisign) and prospective domain registry operators.

The event takes place over the course of two days and has a pretty busy schedule. In common with a lot of “industry” events it’ll be as busy in the hallways as it is in the main conference rooms! I suspect quite a few of the European companies will be sending staff to Amsterdam 🙂

As Blacknight’s official representative I’ll be speaking on a panel on Friday morning on the rather touchy subject of “Whois and Privacy Issues”.

“Whois” has been much debated for years and there is no “simple” solution, though there has been a lot of progress in the last couple of years, with registries like .tel and .cat offering registrants the opportunity to register domain names without forcing them to share their personal data.

Other speakers on the panel will be Stephane Van Gelder, Nacho Amadoz from the .cat domain registry and Olof Nording from ICANN‘s European office.

On the main agenda:

  • IDN new TLDs – when the right of the “.” is an IDN ie. contains special characters, there are a lot of extra considerations both at a technical and policy level.
  • Policy updates – what’s going on, what’s likely to change
  • Contractual Compliance – the enforcement of both policy and contracts on both registrars and registries
  • New TLDs – what’s going on now, timelines, developments. This is going to be a very popular subject.

It’s going to be a busy couple of days, but hopefully we’ll also get a chance to see a bit of Amsterdam. I haven’t been there since the mid 90s!

(Original Image late medieval houses from Big Stock)

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