International Relations News 38th Meeting of the ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 38th Meeting of the ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
- 26/06/2010
The 38th meeting of the ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was held on 20-25 June 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. As usual, the 37th 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 GAC currently has 102 members (see list of GAC members), who jointly encompass more than 90% of Internet users geographically, and 15 observers (see list of GAC observers). 60 members and 4 observers took part in the meeting.
The main items on the agenda at the 37th GAC meeting were: proposal for a new GAC Secretariat; aspects related to enforcement of the law on abusive DNS use; adoption of generic names for top level domains (gTLDs) and questions regarding geographical place names, categories, and morality and public order in creating new gTLDs; DNS system security and stability; aspects regarding the execution of the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC) signed by ICANN and the US Department of Commerce (DoC); GAC operational principles; election of the Interim GAC President following the resignation of the President, Janis Karklins (see GAC Communiqué in Brussels).
Portugal is represented on the GAC by the President of The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and by the Head of International Relations at UMIC.
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, Pedro Veiga, who asked to be replaced at the end of 2008.
Since it was set up in 1998, the 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. It has taken 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 geographical map of Board members, map of meetings held, root servers 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).