The 50th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has opened in London today. With over 3,000 delegates from different countries, it is one of ICANN’s largest public meetings to date. The major topics on the agenda are the transition of IANA’s functions and the results of the first NETmundial meeting that took place in Brazil in April and brought together state authorities and net experts from different countries to discuss net globalization and net governance based on a multi-stockholder model.
In his opening speech, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé spoke about ICANN’s current and future projects. He said that the corporation is now at the beginning of a deep transformation and expressed hope that its core values of diversity, justice, creativity and transparency will remain unchanged for many years to come.
“Today, over 50% of the people on Earth use the Internet and almost half of net users live in Asia. By 2020, 63% of the world’s population will be connected to the net. At the same time, fewer people will be using Latin keyboards, which reflects how diverse our world is,” Mr. Chehadé said before turning to the New gTLD programme.
To date, over 300 new top-level domains have been delegated and 440 more await delegation.
The 50th ICANN meeting will run until June 27.
