The 46th ICANN meeting has started in Beijing, China. With more than 2,600 attendees, the event is largest in the history of ICANN meetings so far. At the opening session, ICANN's president Fadi Chehade has announced the opening of three new offices.
While delivering his speech at the ICANN meeting opening, Fadi Chehade, president of ICANN, has mentioned that the center of gravity of ICANN is to shift to global operations with new hubs to open in Singapore and Istanbul, and the first engagement center in Asia to open in Beijing. The new offices will be working alongside ICANN headquarters in Los Angeles.
Hubs and engagement centers are ICANN's another step to becoming truly international: earlier on, the corporation has appointed four vice presidents to engage stakeholders worldwide, with each responsible for a certain region. At the moment, ICANN has four offices, three of them US-based, as well as an office in Brussels.
Shang Bing, vice minister of the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information, has also delivered a speech at the opening session, saying that "the Internet has become key infrastructure for development in information age […] and we will improve all the monitoring, the security, the user rights and fair, honest market environment". ICANN meetings are major industry events that are conducted three times in a year. The experts from the Coordination Center and the Technical Center of Internet traditionally attend the meetings. The Beijing discussions will revolve around DNS, security and IPv6, as well as new gTLD program, specifically the registry agreement.
