International Relations News 34th Meeting of ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 34th Meeting of ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
- 06/03/2009
The 34th meeting of the ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was held in Mexico City on 1st – 6th March 2009 and was attended by more than 1,200 participants from over 100 countries. As is customary, the 33rd meeting of the GAC – ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee took place in parallel. The GAC comprises representatives from governments of countries and public authorities from regional economies and intergovernmental organisations, and covers public policy matters related to the ICANN's activities. The GAC currently has 80 members and 12 observers (see GAC composition (in Portuguese)).
The main items on the agenda at this GAC meeting were: the process of adopting internationalised domain names (IDNs) in terms of top domain country codes, the process of adopting top generic domain names, the role and functioning of the GAC, analysis and contributions for the PSC - President’s Strategic Committee report, GAC interaction with ccNSO - Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the ICANN Board.
Portugal is represented at the GAC by the President of Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and its Head of International Relations.
Photographs of the Public Forum at the 34th ICANN Meeting >>
Videos of various parts of the 34th ICANN Meeting >>
Portugal was one of the first countries to become a GAC member. It has taken part in this committee since its 2nd meeting, which was held on 25th May 1999, slightly over two months after the 1st GAC meeting. Portugal was represented from 1999 to 2008 by the President of the FCCN – Foundation for National Scientific Computation, who asked to be replaced at the end of 2008.
Since it was set up in 1998, ICANN has made the way it operates more open and transparent, based on the participation of multi-stakeholders and a large number of public and private organisations, and non-governmental organisations of different types and from different continents and countries, taking on a global character, becoming one of the clearest examples of the new organisational concepts that are deeply rooted in the paradigm of the online society that the Internet itself has brought us and its social values of freedom, openness and inclusion.
The different stakeholders that participate in the ICANN include: civil society and Internet users, governments and governmental agencies, enterprises and entrepreneurial associations, the technical Internet community, Internet service providers, registrars, registries and registrants.
The ICANN is one of the most advanced global organisations in terms of involving stakeholders at the global level and one of the organisations that has most tangibly introduced a new model of open online global governance (see Board and employee location map, map of meetings held, root servers map).
The 28th ICANN Meeting (text in Portuguese) took place in Lisbon in March 2007 with an opening session chaired by the Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education, José Mariano Gago (see Minister José Mariano Gago's intervention).