By Adrian Kinderis

As previously mentioned on this blog, AusRegistry International attended the ICANN Global Consultation meeting in Hong Kong last week.

It was an informative event that was very well run and attended by almost 200 people from around the region discussing all things new gTLD and IDN.

Presentations from ICANN’s Doug Brent (COO) and Karla Valente (Director of Communications and Product Services) gave an overview of the program and outlined many of the elements required in order to obtain a new gTLD.

Given the “high level” nature of the discussion and the fact that many in the audience was somewhat new to the ICANN process, there is no specific updates as such for those that have been closely following the gTLD program.

However, major outcomes/discussions from the meeting were that, specifically;

- New gTLD timelines were presented as they were in Sydney – no change which is good news
- ICANN encouraged the community to provide feedback on ensuring that all new gTLD Registries were technically certified by ICANN rather than the current ‘self-certification’ proposed for many requirements
- ICANN confirmed that work was being done by staff into two of the outstanding IDN topics raised by the community, namely 2 character names and the requirement for variants in the root for many scripts
- ICANN couldn’t provide any further information regarding another hot topic in gTLDs, the Registry/Registrar separation but suggested that clarity may be provided in Draft Application Guidebook version 3 which is due out in September.

Also at the meeting, Liz Gasster and Marika Konings (ICANN Policy Staff) gave the community some great insight into current policy discussions such as the Fast Flux and Domain Transfer processes that are currently being worked on by ICANN.

Special thanks to ISOC–HK for putting on the event and also to our friends at HiChina who provided an entertaining evening after the conference.

Stay tuned for more information from AusRegistry International when we attend the next ICANN Global Consultation in Abu Dhabi on August 4.

For those of you who would are unable to make the Abu Dhabi event, you can view it via webcast here: https://admin.na3.acrobat.com/_a819976787/outreach