May 19, 2016

Hyderabad to host ICANN’s public meeting in November

Event originally scheduled to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and was moved to India due to the ongoing Zika virus outbreak.

In a big win for India, a global meeting of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN ) will be hosted in Hyderabad, the second time it will take place in the country.

Ravi Shankar Prasad , minister of communications and information technology, tweeted the above after an announcement was made by the non-profit corporation that manages domain names on the internet.

Over the past year or so, India has increased its representation at forums such as ICANN to ensure a greater say in internet governance standards. If an exercise to transfer stewardship of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ( IANA) functions from the US government to a multi-stakeholder model meets its September deadline, ICANN57 will assume more importance.

“ICANN57 is going to be a historic meeting as it will be the first public meeting of ICANN post-IANA transition. We are very pleased that ICANN has decided to host its 57th meeting in Hyderabad,” said Aruna Sharma, secretary of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, speaking to Economic Times.

“The meeting will bring the focus of the next billion new global internet users, of which 500 million would be from India, and link perfectly with the Digital India programme” she said.

ICANN, which is often called the phone book of the internet, matches domain names with appropriate IP address numbers. The body holds public meetings thrice a year, which are attended by government representatives, business managers, IT managers and consultants, DNS industry managers and experts, intellectual property managers and academics from over 150 countries. They work on issues that lead to the formulation of globally accepted internet policies and processes.

ICANN57 will be hosted at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre. The first ICANN meeting in India was held in 2008 in New Delhi.

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