At the opening ceremony of the 47th meeting of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which ran from 14th to 18th July 2013 in Durban, the first four Registry Agreements for new gTLDs were signed with the applicants. In addition, CEO Fadi Chehadé announced a five-year strategy which is to be fleshed out on the basis of ideas from five high-level strategy panels. Representing eco was Board Member Prof. Michael Rotert, on location in South Africa.
The strategy panels, which will operate independently of ICANN, were instigated by Chehadé. They will consist of 6 – 8 members, and should begin their work in September 2013. Planned themes are:
- Strategy Panel on Identifier Technology Innovation
- Strategy Panel on ICANN’s Role in the Internet Organization’s Ecosystem
- Strategy Panel on ICANN Multistakeholder Innovation
- Strategy Panel on the Public Responsibility Framework
- Strategy Panel on the Role of ICANN in the Future of Internet Governance
Under pressure from several Amazonian nations, the ICANN Board of Directors agreed not to assign the new Top-Level-Domain “amazon” to the online retailer of the same name. The cultural importance of the name for the Latin-American countries was the justification given for rejecting the application.
Data Protection
Hubert Schöttner, Representative of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology on the ICANN Board of Directors, sent a reminder on weighing up the interests of law enforcement agencies and the need for data protection. At the introduction of the new registrar contracts, he enquired about exemptions for European registrars. With regard to EU Data Protection Law, these registrars had fought for special provisions in the blanket data retention for domains.
As a compromise in the dispute over the whois database, the Expert Working Group on gTLD Directory Services (EWG) suggested a future centralization of all domain registry data in the Aggregated Registry Data System (ARDS). The authorized parties would then gain graded access to the mega-database for each respective purpose.
