ICANN’s Beckstrom, Crocker lead discuss on new TLD

Rod Beckstrom, CEO/President ICANN

The duo of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN’s) President Mr. Rod Beckstrom and its board chairman, Dr. Stephen Crocker, have been slated to lead discussion on the new Top Level Domains (TLD) in a Washington, DC, today, Wednesday.

Disclosing this, ICANN Director of Global Media Affairs, Mr. Brad White said that a news conference has been scheduled for today, January 11 to answer journalists’ questions on the eve of one of the biggest changes in the history of the Internet.

He noted that on January 12, ICANN would open applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), which have the potential to dramatically change the online addressing landscape. 

“The world of .com, .gov, .net and 19 other gTLDs will soon be expanded to include all types of words in all sorts of languages,” he told ITRealms Online.

 Pointing out that for the first time, the generic TLDs could include words in non-Latin languages and scripts, such as Cyrillic, Chinese or Arabic.

The new gTLD programme, he said, has been the subject of recent hearings by the United States (U.S.) Congress and has captured the attention of businesses, associations and governments around the world.

He said the press meeting would hold at Zenger Room, 13th Floor, National Press Club, 529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC.

Off-site access, he said, exist for journalists from around the world who wish to watch the news conference via a live webcast at http://www.icann.org/, even as they may also listen to the news conference and/or ask questions via telephone by dialing an access number obtained from this list www.adigo.com/icann.

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