APAC Space at ICANN63 was attended by 33 participants in Barcelona and 18 remote participants, including at-large community, governments, registries, and registrars. Edmon Chung (CEO, DotAsia) was the APAC Space Community Facilitator for this session.
Key action points following the meeting are:
- Attend the ICANN64 Meeting in Kobe, Japan from 9-14 March 2019. Stay updated on capacity-development initiatives in the lead up to ICANN64 Kobe. More information will be available at https://icann64.jp/.
- Attend the ICANN GDD Industry Summit 2019 from 6-9 May in Bangkok, Thailand. More information is available at https://www.icann.org/gddsummit.
- Volunteer for Thaana or Tibetan script Generation Panels. Write an email to IDNProgram@icann.org.
Links to the meeting recording and presentation slides can be found at the APAC Space Community Wiki webpage at https://community.icann.org/display/GSEAPAC/APAC+Space.
Details of the session are as follows:
Welcome Remarks
Jia-Rong Low, VP of Stakeholder Engagement and Managing Director — Asia Pacific, ICANN, gave his welcome remarks. After a round of introduction by the newcomers, Jia-Rong introduced the ICANN APAC 5th Anniversary report which details the growth of the ICANN APAC community in the past five years since the establishment of the ICANN APAC Regional Office. The APAC community has grown tremendously, with many taking up leadership positions within the ICANN community. The office has also grown from 2 to 29 staff members.
Key Events in 2019
GDD Industry Summit
The next GDD (Global Domains Division) Industry Summit will be held from 6-9 May 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand. In this regard, Sophia Feng, Director of TLD Business Division, ZDNS Co., LTD shared her experiences in past GDD Industry Summits. She encouraged community to participate as this is the first GDD Summit to be held in the APAC region. The Summit enables the domain name industry to engage and address policies that impact registries and registrars, and to share operational best practices. Edmon encouraged everyone to attend the Summit to participate in the discussions and to support having more of such events in the APAC region.
ICANN64 Kobe
As part of the ICANN64 Local Host Committee, Akinori Maemura, in his capacity as General Manager, Internet Development Department at Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC), introduced details about the ICANN64 meeting to be held in Kobe, Japan from 9-14 March 2019. In addition, he gave a general overview on what to expect in Kobe and introduced the Local Host Committee.
Kobe holds historical significance in Japan’s Internet development, having hosted the INET meeting in 1992, which was also the Internet Society’s (ISOC) inaugural Annual General Meeting. The Internet Protocol Next Generation (IPng) project was also launched at INET’92, the project which eventually led to the development and adoption of IPv6.
The Local Host Committee consists of the multistakeholder Internet community in Japan such as GMO Internet and Japan Registry Services (JPRS). The committee is chaired by Professor Jun Murai, Founding Director of the Widely Integrated Distributed Environment (WIDE) Project, and former founding ICANN Board member in 1998. The meeting has also garnered support from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and the Kobe Tourism Bureau.
Community Discussion on 2019 ICANN Events in APAC
The community discussion as led by Edmon was as follows:
- In response to a community member’s query on coordinating outreach activities to the at-large community, Jia-Rong said he will be the contact point as the APAC Regional Office works closely with APRALO. Akinori also offered the Local Host Committee’s help, and said Rafik Dammak (NTT Communications) and Adam Peake (ICANN Org) were other key contact points who are familiar with Japan.
- Don Hollander called for further engagement of developing economies, specifically the communities from the Pacific islands.
- Satish Babu (APRALO) highlighted a high level of interest in Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)-based New Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) in India. He suggested that IDN-based new gTLDs, specifically regarding applicant support, would be a good topic to discuss during ICANN64. Edmon added that it may be possible to invite the working group’s leadership to APAC Space to discuss the topics of IDNs and applicant support. On this note, another community member highlighted interest to hear about success stories and challenges of operating ccTLDs and IDN ccTLDs in the APAC region. He further suggested including the topic of multistakeholder practices in APAC. Edmon agreed that it would be a good idea to invite a few IDN ccTLDs to share their experiences.
- On capacity-development initiatives for youths and university students, Jia-Rong responded that these initiatives are currently being worked on. The Japanese community has been requesting for targeted engagement to local and regional youths. More details will be shared when available. In terms of general youth capacity development activities, Edmon highlighted ICANN’s NextGen and Fellowship programmes, and DotAsia’s NetMission programme amongst others.
IDN Program- Root Zone Label Generation Rules Updates
Pitinan Kooarmornpatana, IDN Programs Manager from ICANN APAC Office, gave a brief introduction to the IDN Program and provided updates to the Root Zone Label Generation Rules projects in APAC. The objective of the IDN Program was to enable the use of local languages and scripts in the deployment of domain names. To prevent character confusion across the different language scripts, rules for visually similar characters known as variant labels need to be created. The volunteers from the various languages form Generation Panels (GPs) to create these rules.
The leaders from recently-formed GPs were introduced to the community, namely Thin Zar Phyo (Myanmar GP Chair), and Harsha Wijawawardhana (Sinhala GP Co-Chair). Pitinan announced that the IDN Program is looking for volunteers to form the Thaana and Tibetan script GPs and for anyone interested to contact her.
A community member raised that the .com domain allows cross-script labels, which may lead to phishing and security issues. Pitinan responded that currently, registries are responsible for policies on second-level domains. The IDN Implementation Guidelines will address this issue by providing recommendations to cross-script use in second-level domains. The guidelines are awaiting ICANN Board approval. Edmon added that while the IDN Implementation Guidelines are currently being developed, the APAC community should familiarize themselves with the guidelines and encourage ccTLDs and gTLDs to abide by them.
Universal Acceptance
Don Hollander, Secretary General of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), introduced the topic of Universal Acceptance (UA) and the UA Ambassadors from the APAC region. UA is a community initiative to promote system acceptance of all domain names and email addresses regardless of language script or extension. The UASG is strongly supported by ICANN and seeks to engage software developers and website owners to enable UA in their systems.
Don introduced the following UA Ambassadors (amongst others):
- Ashish Modi, based in Jaipur, India
- Harish Chowdhary, based in Delhi, India
- Dr. Ajay Data, based in Jaipur, India
- Ashwin Rangan, ICANN Senior Vice President Engineering & Chief Information Officer
Regarding a community member’s question on the difference between IDNs and UA, Don explained that UA covers all domain names including new gTLDs, whereas IDNs cover specifically non-ACSII domain names.
Ashish Modi called for the APAC community to continue supporting the UA Ambassadors in their engagement work. He added that their ongoing work includes engaging governmental, academic and private organizations on UA, and speaking at various platforms to raise awareness.
