The 66th ICANN meeting was attended by 2.5 thousand people from 130 countries, and an even greater number of participants remotely.

The conference was opened by ICANN Board Chair Cherine Chalaby. In his speech he summed up the work done over the last three years. Above all, security of the system of unique Internet identifiers has been strengthened. A new system for managing root DNS servers (domain name system) is being developed, which stores information about which IP address corresponds to a particular domain name. The main achievement since the last conference is ICANN’s five-year operational development plan for 2021-2025, which should be published in December for the second stage of collecting public comments, and a development plan for the corporate governance model that takes into account the views of all interested parties.

Cherine Chalaby pointed out three main goals for the future: strengthening the multi-stakeholder model; ensuring the security and reliability of the global network; maintaining its interoperability and technological unity.

The .ART registry staff engaged with other domain name industry leaders at ICANN’s Montreal meeting on several levels involving several topics.

UK Creative Ideas Founder Ulvi Kasimov engaged with industry CEOs and other executives to describe the innovation and value in the .ART Digital Twin project. The .ART registry recently launched Digital Twin in partnership with Alibaba and has entered into discussions with other registrars such as Amazon, GoDaddy, Tucows, and Uniregistry that have global reach and connections in the art community. Discussions will continue with those and other registrars to discover how best to make .ART Digital Twin broadly available to art collectors, galleries and museums.

Several in the industry, including ICANN technical and business leadership, identified Digital Twin as the most important and significant innovation resulting from ICANN’s program that introduced all 1200 new domain name registries.
For more about Art Digital Twin see https://art.art/digital-twin/.

Kurt Pritz, UK Creative Ideas Strategic Planning Board member, and other members of the .ART team met with registrars and other industry investors describing, among other things, the value of the .ART premium names portfolio and how that value can be shared across the domain distribution chain. We learned that many registrars are successfully exploiting the .ART premium opportunity.

The .ART team also provided leadership in ICANN policy discussions, especially those related to DNS abuse mitigation and data studies related to DNS abuse.


Also published on Medium.