ICANN Corporation has officially announced relocation of its 52nd meeting. The ICANN Board voted for this decision. 52nd meeting was supposed to take place in Marrakesh (Morocco) 8-12 of February of 2015. Now as the official web page of the corporation reports the meeting will take place in Singapore on the same dates.
The reason was epidemic spread of Ebola haemorrhagic fever. Because of it, moving between many African countries is limited. This can prevent representatives of African countries to participate in the event, which is very undesirable, since there are many important topics of the agenda including IANA Stewardship transition to the Internet community.
At the same time, ICANN highlights that it considers African continent to be one of the key regions in the process of Internet globalization. This is why ICANN meetings in Africa will be held in the future. It is supposed that Morocco in particular will hold the first ICANN meeting planned for 2016.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet, believes that changing the venue for the upcoming ICANN meeting is a right decision: “Singapore has already hosted ICANN events, the receiving side has a vast experience in holding such events. This allows to expect that 52nd ICANN meeting will be conducted on a high level as it always is.”
