APAC Space web conference was attended by almost 30 participants from at-large community, governments, registries, and registrars in the ICANN APAC community.

In summary, the web conference focused on three topics:

  • ICANN Reviews – introduced by ICANN Org
  • Universal Acceptance (UA) / Email Address Internationalization (EAI) – Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) members Dr Ajay Data and Jiankang Yao served as panelists, moderated by community facilitator Edmon Chung
  • ICANN activity related to data protection/privacy – Holly Raiche provided an update on ICANN’s proposed interim compliance model

Key action items following the meeting are:

Links to the meeting recording and presentation slides can be found at the APAC Space Community Wiki webpage here: https://community.icann.org/display/GSEAPAC/APAC+Space.

Details of the session as follows:

Introduction to ICANN Reviews 

Sherwood Moore (ICANN Org) introduced ICANN Reviews and invited community members to participate. More information on ICANN Reviews can be found here: https://www.icann.org/resources/reviews

Reviews in ICANN take two forms: (i) Specific Reviews, and (ii) Organizational Reviews. ICANN Specific Reviews are topical in nature, such as the Registration Directory Service (RDS) Review; whereas Organizational Reviews are targeted at reviewing the work and effectiveness of ICANN supporting organizations and advisory committees.

At present, there are 11 active ICANN Reviews running concurrently – 4 Specific Reviews, and 7 Organizational Reviews. Responding to whether there was further discussion post-ICANN61 on streamlining ICANN Reviews in light of ICANN’s draft FY19 Operating Plan and Budget, Negar Farzinnia (ICANN Org) said that ICANN Org would soon present options to community for comment. 

Universal Acceptance (UA) / Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Universal Acceptance (UA) is the concept that Internet applications and systems treat all top-level domains (TLDs) in a consistent manner. This requires removing the technical barriers that might hinder a user from accessing or using any TLD in any web browser, email client, or other Internet application. The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) comprises community members dedicated to helping application and software developers, and website owners understand how to update their systems to be UA-ready.

Related to UA is Email Address Internationalization (EAI), which enables acceptance of emails with Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in the domain portion of the email address and/or Unicode (non-ASCII) characters in the mailbox name (“User ID” portion of the email address).

Dr Ajay Data (UASG member) introduced UA, and spoke about Microsoft’s implementation of EAI for Indian languages. Ajay stressed the importance of ensuring UA-readiness as it impacts the accessibility of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

Jiankang Yao (UASG member) spoke about China’s upcoming EAI outreach plans, specifically to local university networks. In terms of Chinese email service providers, currently only CoreMail supports EAI. There are plans to reach out to major email providers and application developers.

Further, community members expressed their interest to join the UASG. Details for joining are here: https://uasg.tech/subscribe

To a query on whether emoji domains will be part of UASG’s work, Edmon replied that IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards must first allow emoji characters in the Domain Name System (DNS) before these characters can be included in ICANN’s policy discussions. Read the advisory from ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) on the use of emoji in domain names to find out more.

 

Update on ICANN Activities Related to EU GDPR

In preparation for the EU GDPR 25 May deadline, Holly Raiche updated on ICANN’s interim model for compliance with ICANN agreements and policies. The interim compliance model is based on several models and comments offered by various ICANN stakeholder groups to answer questions on how WHOIS should be managed in light of GDPR.

Key elements of the current proposed model include amongst others: gated access to registration data, and possible accreditation programme for users/entities who require access to Thick WHOIS data.

The model is meant to represent an interim solution and does not replace the multistakeholder policy development processes. ICANN Board is expected to adopt a temporary policy during the Board workshop in Vancouver from 12 – 13 May 2018.

Track the latest announcements and updates on ICANN’s data protection/privacy activities from the following link: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/data-protection-announcements-2017-12-08-en\

AOB

  • ICANN62 Meeting. ICANN62 Policy Forum will take place in Panama City from 25 – 28 June 2018. Remote participation will be available.



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