At the recent 61th meeting of ICANN in San Juan (Puerto Rico) the number one topic was the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that will be effective from 25 May 2018.
Several sessions with governmental representatives dominated the seven days agenda, including participants like David Redl, new chief of the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), who opted for a much more open access to the WHOIS database that his counterpart from the EU commission.
GDRP was also the major topic of the two meeting the members and observers of the geoTLD group made (association’s meeting link https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/641074 and the presentations’ meeting link https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/641083).
The geoTLD members discussed the latest proposals made by ICANN and the comments that various affected parties made. And exchanged how the members are going to implement various features of their model including visibility of WHOIS data, differentiation between personal and organizational data, retention time and access procedures for law enforcement, domain name owners or lawyer. The exchange was quite fruitful and clear trends were identified, such as the manual access request handling, as not many request are expected if you operate a well managed geoTLD with 20,000 domain names under management.
The geoTLD group was also mentioned in the new ICANN session format “Walk in my shoes” where interested parties got insights from registry operators how the their day-to-day experiences looke like and what it took to bring their TLD to life.
Dirk Krischenowski, CEO of .berlin and vice-chair of the geoTLD group mentioned that the formation of the geoTLD group was an important step to gain recognition of cities and regions in the Internet community during the New gTLD process.
The session was moderated by Kurt Pritz, Member and Strategic Planning Board for .art. The panelists were from left to right: Gg Levine, .pharmacy; Matt Embrescia, .realtor; Dirk Krischenowski, .berlin; Craig Schwartz, .bank and .insurance; Jason Loyer, .neustar; Andrew Merriam, .design and Martin Sutton, BRG. The session was supported by Sue Schuler, Nathalie Peregrine and Terri Agnew.
Moderator Kurt Pritz on the left side.
Link to the session materials: https://61.schedule.icann.org