IT and Society: Meeting in Dakar to highlight New gTLD Program

42nd ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Conference is running in Dakar (Senegal) October 24 - 29 2011. Top of the agenda is introduction of New gTLDs and this theme has become one of the central ones at the opening of the conference.

In his opening speech at the inauguration of the conference the President of ICANN Rod Beckstrom stressed that the New gTLD Program was intended not just for rich states and commercial organizations, but in the first place for developing countries and for cultural-linguistic communities. “Applicants for new gTLDs from developing countries, non-profit organizations may need technical or financial assistance, and ICANN is already taking steps to help needy applicants apply for new gTLDs”, he said. “Support for needy applicants will help ensure that we receive a diversity of new gTLD applications and that these are not just domains for big organizations and the developed world. “We can also bring more voices and more people to the Internet through IDNs. IDNs make it possible to access the Internet in scripts other than Latin-based characters, and their adoption has been one of the community’s great collaborative efforts”.

Particular attention was turned to the role of ICANN in the modern world. Rod Beckstrom highlighted the role of ICANN in Internet development: “Nowadays the future depends on stable DNS, and it is ICANN which advances the common goal of a secure, stable and unified global Internet. President of ICANN reminded that ICANN was built on openness, inclusion, trust and collaboration.  

President of ICANN also drew attention to the fact that ICANN was aspiring to become a genuine international organization considering interests of all Internet users, from governments and international corporations to citizens from different countries.