ICANN 63 Barcelona: What’s coming up at the Annual General Meeting

ICANN’s next meeting will be held in Barcelona from 20 – 25 October. Key highlghts of the agenda include the working sessions of the Policy Develoment Processes dealing with issues around future releases of new gTLDs and rights protection mechanisms.

We also anticipate there to be much focus on WHOIS and data protection as ICANN’s Community tries to develop a longer-term solution to address the impact of GDPR.

With this being the AGM, it includes some formalities such as the replacement of some of the Board members, and we will also see an election for the new Chair of the GNSO Council.  On Monday 22 October there will be a High Level Government Meeting, being chaired by Nadia Calviño, Minister of Economy and Business for Spain.  These meetings for senior government officials occur approximately every two years.

Subject areas which we think will be of most interest and relevance are:

  •     New gTLD Subsequent Procedures (SubPro) PDP and Future New gTLD Issues
  •     Work Track 5 and Geographic Names at the Top Level 2
  •     Country Codes as Second Level Domains
  •     GDPR, WHOIS and the EPDP
  •     Review of all Rights Protection Mechanisms in all TLDs PDP (RPMs PDP) 
  •     Second Review of the Security, Stability and Resiliency of the DNS (SSR2) 
  •     Name Collision Analysis Project (NCAP)
  •     Opportunities for ICANN Staff Interaction
  •     Board and Other Leadership Changes
  •     Brands and Domains Conference
  •     High-level Government Meeting

As usual, the Valideus team will be attending the meeting to ensure we cover the sessions for our clients.  If you’re around and want to catch up – do let us know experts@valideus.com