The 57th ICANN meeting is taking place on November 5-8 in Hyderabad, India. This is the first meeting in the history of the international corporation held in the new expanded format: the program features two public forums and a Tech Day with technical workshops. This is also the first meeting after the IANA Stewardship transition.
Participants in the conference focused on the issues of the IP address assignment system regulation. Thus, a section dedicated to the WHOIS service involved discussion on improving the requirements for domain name administrators’ data to increase its reliability.
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev said that these issues were touched upon at the limited attendance section of the Netoscope project that took place on November 2 during Russian Interactive Week. “Valid data about the owners of domain names that are used for illegal actions will allow for cutting the investigation time very significantly,” he said. “ICANN is currently recruiting volunteers to conduct a series of research on the current format of providing information about the domain name administrators in the WHOIS services in terms of accuracy and validity and the security of the provided data. Participants in research and technical cooperation agree that quicker and more reliable access to information about domain name owners would significantly cut the response time to crimes on the net.”
Participants in the conference also discussed the role of domain name registries and registrars in the fight against illegal content that violates copyright, national laws and social and cultural norms. A section dedicated to this issue took place on November 6 with the participation of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), copyright owners, ICANN’s Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) and other interested parties. They agreed that the issue requires further study because significant differences in the legislative approaches of various countries are one of the main obstacles in the introduction of a common approach to fighting against illegal content.
