The ICANN 69 conference wrapped up last week. It took place on October 13 ̶ 22 online and was ICANN’s last meeting for 2020 as well as ICANN’s largest online conference ever with 1,616 participants from 157 countries registered. Five of the sessions, including the opening ceremony and the annual general meeting, were streamed on YouTube. Simultaneous interpretation in six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) was offered for several sessions.
Experts of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ took part in ICANN 69 sessions. The center’s Deputy Director Irina Danelia moderated the discussion in the online meeting of ccNSO members on COVID-19’s impact on the domain industry. The participants agreed that the pandemic generally encouraged the increase in new registrations, mainly from small and medium-sized businesses that had to change their business models and transfer their activities to the internet. The discussion also focused on the advantages and disadvantages of various ways to encourage registrations and support registrants, which have been tried during quarantine restrictions.
Moreover, Irina Danelia was the only European candidate for the ccNSO Council. She will assume office in 2021.
Among other things, ICANN 69 focused on the development of IDNs and the introduction of universal acceptance. The Coordination Center’s chief analyst Maria Kolesnikova gave a speech at the session called Outreach for Addressing Universal Acceptance, where the work of local initiatives and UA ambassadors as well as results and further plans were discussed. Maria Kolesnikova also talked about the UA initiative in the CIS and Eastern Europe involving representatives of IDN TLD registries and IT companies from seven countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Armenia, Georgia, and Serbia. She noted that this year a Russian working group on UA was established. It was comprised of representatives from Russian IDN registries, registrars and information security experts. Maria Kolesnikova also talked about Поддерживаю.РФ, a project to develop the infrastructure for IDNs and EAI, and the Coordination Center’s participation in international research on UA, in particular IDN World Report, UNESCO and EURid’s joint research on IDNs.
Maria Kolesnikova also took part in the sessions, Remediating Universal Acceptance Issues and Community Update on Universal Acceptance Readiness.
Many ICANN 69 sessions focused on DNS abuse, which proves once again that today information security remains one of the most important topics for the international community. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ is no exception, something that was stressed by its Director Andrey Vorobyev.
“We closely monitor the international agenda and adjust our activities at the national level accordingly. In particular, we plan to share the results of ICANN 69’s discussion with representatives of our accredited registrars and experts from related organizations at our working meeting on November 3,” Vorobyev said.
Although ICANN 69 was the organization’s last meeting in 2020, the discussion of the topics will continue at several other large international events scheduled before the end of 2020, as noted by Mikhail Anisimov, ICANN Head of Global Stakeholder Engagement for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
“A lot of topics were discussed at ICANN 69, from domains’ prospects to information security and from universal acceptance to personal data protection. The discussion of many of these will continue at upcoming regional events with respect to the specifics of the local market. The most interesting reports and reviews will be presented at https://eednsforum.org/ the Eastern European DNS Forum scheduled to take place online on November 18 and 19. You can register for it now. The forum program will be available in the next few days,” Anisimov said.
