ICANN public meetings are held three times a year. The most recent one was in Kobe, Japan and the next one will be kicking off this weekend in Marrakesh, Morocco.
As usual I’ll be there representing the company, while also sitting on the GNSO Council as one of the 3 representatives of registrars.
ICANN operates in whats called a multi-stakeholder system, which means that just about anyone who wants to can engage in the policy discussions and developments. Its not just governments or massive companies that are actively engaged.
So what’s on the menu for this meeting?
This is what’s called a “policy forum”, so there’s less of the pomp and frills that can sometimes come with an ICANN meeting. The focus is meant to be on ongoing policy work.
What does that mean in reality?
Well there’ll be quite a lot of talk about several key topics:
- Whois (no surprise there!)
- DNS abuse
- DoH – DNS over HTTPS
- New TLDs
- Universal Acceptance
Hopefully the discussions will be productive, though I suspect that some of them will be quite circular.