International Relations News 35th Meeting of ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 35th Meeting of ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
- 30/06/2009
The 35th meeting of the ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was held in Sydney, Australia, on 19-26 June 2009 and was attended by more than 1050 participants from over 100 countries. As usual, the 34th meeting of the GAC - ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee was held concurrently. 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 CAC currently has 88 members who jointly encompass more than 90% of Internet users geographically, and 12 observers (see GAC composition). This meeting marked China's return to the GAC of the ICANN. 40 members, 2 observers and one guest country took part in the meeting.
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, information from the SSAC – Security and Stability Advisory Committee and the RSSAC – Root Server System Advisory Committee, mainly on the transition to DNSSEC and root server signatures, the Root Zone scaling study and problems linked to the use of wildcards (see Press Release from the GAC in Sydney).
Portugal is represented on the GAC by the President of The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) .
Photographs of ICANN Meetings>>
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, together with 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 location of Board members map, map of meetings held, root server map).
The 28th ICANN Meeting 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 intervention by Minister José Mariano Gago).