Between June 25 and 28, Panama City hosted ICANN's 62nd public meeting, attended by a delegation of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/РФ. The meeting was held as a Policy Forum and lasted for just four days. While the advisory committees, tech working groups and supporting organizations including ccNSO and gNSO were center stage during the event, the meeting also provided a platform for discussing topics that are relevant for the entire community.
During the meeting, ccNSO’s Work Track 5 Group on geographical names proposed discussing the possibility of creating new two-character TLDs consisting of one letter and one digit. The initiative was received with mixed reactions as experts worry that such domain names as .T1 and .Tl, or .MO and .M0 would lead to numerous errors and be very confusing.
GDPR and Whois were also high on the meeting’s agenda. Participants in ICANN’s Cross Community Working Group discussed one more time the main challenges the industry is facing. Almost all the participants noted that law enforcement agencies face new challenges with the introduction of GDPR, since they cannot use Whois databases anymore to get the information they need, having to work with a number of different sources. One of the proposals voiced during the meeting consisted of revising the concept of anonymizing email addresses when dealing with law enforcement agencies. At the same time, experts believe that GDPR forced companies to adopt a more responsible approach to handling personal data. In addition, GDPR implementation led to a significant drop in spam targeting domain administrators.
The ICANN meeting also featured the presentation of the 2018 Multistakeholder Ethos Award. This year, the award went to long-time member of the ICANN community Stephane Van Gelder, who worked in ICANN governing and coordinating bodies including gNSO, NomCom and RySG, as well as contributed to the launch of the New gTLD program, served as the CEO of TLD Fastrack Limited, was a board member at AFNIC, and accomplished many other things in internet governance. Stephane Van Gelder died in a car crash in March 2018. His wife accepted the award on his behalf.
Launched in 2014 at ICANN50 in London, the Multistakeholder Ethos Award recognizes ICANN participants who have made the biggest contribution to developing the organizations’ model based on multistakeholderism and consensus-based solutions. The winners of the annual award are selected by a group of ICANN participants representing various supporting organizations and advisory committees.
