1,800 participants took part @ ICANN 45 meeting

A total of 1,800 participants may have taken part in the just concluded public meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Director of Global Media Affairs, Mr. Brad White, disclosed this to ITRealms, saying that people from around the world registered for the meeting, making it the second largest in ICANN history.

Over the years, ICANN has established market competition for generic domain name (gTLD) registrations resulting in a lowering of domain name costs by 80 per cent and saving consumers and businesses over US$1 billion annually in domain registration fees.

 ICANN implemented an efficient and cost-effective Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), which has been used to resolve thousands of disputes over the rights to domain names.

 Working in coordination with the appropriate technical communities and stakeholders, ICANN adopted guidelines for the deployment of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), opening the way for registration of domains in hundreds of the world's languages.

    Verisign, ICANN and NTIA jointly completed deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for the root zone in July 2010. These extensions make certain kinds of cyberfraud much more difficult to perpetrate. As of 30 June 2011, 70 TLDs had adopted DNSSEC, including two of the largest TLDs -- .com and .de.

    ICANN created the New gTLD Program, so that any established entity in the world can apply to operate its own top-level domain. Many of these new gTLDs will go online in 2013.

    The world broadly accepts ICANN as the place to work out Internet governance policies. As 2011 ended, the Governmental Advisory Committee represented 109 nations (plus the European Union and the Vatican). The Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) represented more than 120 country code domains. The At-Large Advisory Committee represented 134 At-Large Structures (ALSes) from all geographic regions.

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