ICANN 55 kicks off officially this weekend.

As usual it will be a very busy week and many of our members will be both in attendance and heavily involved in many of the meeting’s key sessions. I’ve tried to highlight several sessions that might be of interest to registrars. It’s not definitive and one of the wonderful things about ICANN meetings is that you can access more than 90% of the sessions by just turning up.

The full schedule is available here, or via the official meeting mobile app.

Friday is all about the IANA transition

Saturday and Sunday the GNSO council sits all day. Our stakeholder group is represented by:

  • James Bladel, GoDaddy, USA – GNSO Chair
  • Volker Greimann, Key Systems, Germany
  • Jennifer Standiford, Web.com, USA

If you are interested in finding out what’s going on with the various GNSO policy development groups, then the GNSO working sessions are a good way to get up to speed.

Monday is the official opening ceremony, which will be the last one presided over by ICANN’s current CEO Fadi Chehadé. There will be quite a varied selection of sessions for people to choose from. We are meeting with Law Enforcement / Public Safety Working Group on Monday afternoon. There is also a number of IANA related sessions, as well as the public forum in the late afternoon

Tuesday the Registrar Stakeholder Group meets all day. You can find details of the meeting here. If you cannot attend in person there will be remote participation throughout the day, though bear in mind that when we move rooms you will need to reconnect to the new room! We’ll have two sessions in other locations:

  • when we meet with the registries
  • our joint meeting with the registries and the ICANN Board

Wednesday has a very full agenda, but the “GNSO Next-Generation gTLD Registration Directory Services PDP Working Group ” meeting is probably of interest to most registrars. It’s all about whois and its possible replacement.

Thursday has several sessions of interest to registrars, including a session with ICANN’s Compliance team, as well as one on the upcoming changes to domain transfer policy (IRTP). Both of these sessions are very important for registrars, so please attend them. There will also be a second public forum.

If you’re attending the ICANN meeting in person I look forward to seeing you there!