Welcoming the ICANN Community Back to Dublin After a Decade

We’re absolutely delighted to welcome the ICANN Community back to Dublin this month. It’s been 10 years since they last held a meeting in Ireland, so it’s great to see them coming back.

If you’re not a “regular” ICANN attendee and are considering going, I tried to convince the members of INEX at the most recent meeting to attend.

So what’s the scéal (story)?

ICANN’s 84th public meeting and the 2025 AGM is being held in Dublin’s Convention Centre from October 25th until October 30th. As it’s the AGM it’ll also be the meeting during which several people will leave various boards and committees, while their replacements will take up their roles.

Back in 2015 the focus was on “new TLDs” as the various new entrants were launching new domain name extensions into the world. It was also a time of quite tense discussions around the “IANA transition” (TLDR – it happened and the Internet is still working just fine).

Fast forward to 2025 and the “hot topics” have changed quite a bit. ICANN finally started taking privacy and human rights seriously, so registrants’ personal details aren’t spread as easily across the ‘net. Online has, of course, become more and more important in all our daily lives and with that it has also, sadly, become an even more appealing attack vector for nefarious types. So “abuse” is getting a LOT of attention. And in 2026 ICANN will be opening a new application window to further expand the range of top level domain extensions.

If you’d like to attend, either in person or online, you can do so for free. However you will need to register by October 23rd.

The full schedule for the meeting is available here and uses Sched, so you can easily access your personal schedule and manage it via their app or by exporting it into your own calendar app.

Blacknight team members will be attending throughout the week so if you’d like to talk about hosting your data within the EU, domains, fibre broadband or anything else we’ll be there!

Back in 2015 INEX put together one of the most memorable evening events that I’d ever attended “That Night in Dublin” and we made a video.

For the 2025 event you can expect more of our famous Irish hospitality, so if you’re attending do make sure to come along to the evening event on Monday October 27th in EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. The event is open to all registered attendees of the ICANN meeting, but you’ll need to pick up a wristband from the ICANN desk to get in. Details here.

Blacknight is sponsoring the entertainment for the evening and we think you’ll really enjoy it!

We won’t reveal what’s being cooked up to entertain and engage attendees, but we can reveal the logo for the evening shenanigans “This Time in Dublin”:

Thanks to Patricia and Eileen in INEX for all their work on putting the evening event together – we know it’s going to be absolutely fabulous, but nothing happens without hard work from dedicated people like the INEX team. On the Blacknight side I’d be remiss not to give a shout out to Chloe, Alicia and Stephen who have been working away on a load of things in relation to the events this month. Thanks guys – I really appreciate all the hard work you’ve put in.

So will we see you in Dublin?