61st ICANN Corporation conference started on 11 of March in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Development of corporation’s strategy and discussion of the budget for the next five years, two-letter second-level domains that coincide with the designation of countries and territories, and new European legislation in the field of personal data protection (GDPR) were among the most critical issues discussed at the conference.
ICANN Board Chair Cherine Chalaby opened the conference; his presentation was dedicated to the ICANN’s strategy and organization’s budget. According to him, several areas will remain the central items of the strategy: support for root servers, the formation of a successful financial model, geographical presence in different regions of the world, support for human rights, working with volunteers, maintaining flexibility of management in unpredictable and rapidly changing economic and political conditions in the world and many more.
The budget of the international corporation will also undergo significant changes. As Cherine Chalaby said, ICANN earnings had been steadily growing over the last several years but at the same time the expenditure increased by almost 60% per year as well. At the moment, the income growth curve has reached its plateau, while the spending keeps growing. This is why in the upcoming years some projects will see cuts in budget and scale: in particular, the reduction will affect the Fellowship and ICANNWiki projects, staff costs for travel will also be cut.
Another issue that caused serious discussions among the participants was the situation with two-letter second-level domains that coincide with designations for countries and geographic territories in the new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). We remind that it was suggested earlier to give priority rights for registration in these domains to the corresponding states; however, it turned out that some of these domains had already been registered. ICANN proposed the following mechanism to solve this situation: the office of the chief technical officer (OCTO) should create a list of all domains that coincide with the designations of countries and territories and give it to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). From there the lists will go to governments of different countries that would be able to challenge the registrations if they consider them offensive or misleading.
ICANN spokesperson said that after the lists had been transferred to GAC there hadn’t been a single complaint from the governments. The Brazilian representative said that if no complaints were filed that didn’t mean that there were none. According to him, the analysis of these lists requires a lot of work being done and only after it’s over we can say whether the participants of the process are happy with this mechanism. Russian representative in GAC Yulia Yelanskaya commented on the situation: “We are ready to discuss any proposed mechanisms, because it’s already clear that it won’t be possible to go back to old models. The discussion of the two-letter second-level domains’ registration has got off the ground. We would like the mechanism of collection, analysis and transfer of information to be more transparent and take place in a more understandable transparent environment”.
