Final Thoughts on ICANN47

i2Coalition is wrapping up its third engagement in ICANN at the ICANN47 meeting in Durban, South Africa. I got to connect with members and friends, and a lot of exciting companies in the Internet infrastructure space.

We came to ICANN to focus on finding ways that we can strengthen the multistakeholder model by bringing it voices and perspectives that are underrepresented. Specifically the smaller and medium businesses of the Internet infrastructure industry – particularly web hosting providers, data centers and Cloud infrastructure providers.

Our membership application to join the ISPCP (Internet Service Provider Constituency) group of ICANN is pending. Like other organizations within that constituency, our members provide IP addresses, route packets, run networks and build infrastructure in order to provide Internet access and connectivity to Internet users around the world. We engaged in ISPCP meetings and had meetings to articulate our desire for membership. We look forward to future discussions and I hope to announce our membership before I travel to Buenos Aires in November.

In addition to our efforts to build our voice with ICANN through the Commercial Stakeholders Group, we also made strategic efforts during this ICANN to attempt to engage with and learn from ICANN’s security and stability community. We reached out to the SSAC, or the Security and Stability Advisory Council, so that i2Coalition can serve as a connection point between their work and our members, and explore potential opportunities for experts within our membership to help the SSAC. This group is critical to ICANN’s mission since it researches and provides recommendations regarding security and stability of the Internet’s naming and address allocation services.

I spent a lot of time learning from the SSAC. Importantly, ICANN is introducing potentially 1000 new gTLDs. As you can expect, making sure it goes off as smoothly as possible is a heavy lift. The SSAC seems to be a group that is up to the task.  I attended every single open session the SSAC held here at ICANN and I’ve been tremendously impressed by the scope and thoroughness of their analysis. On the remaining issues they have identified as being potentially problematic, I am convinced they are listening, and will meet ICANN’s mandate. Our goal is to build a pathway so that our members can help them in these important efforts in any way we are able. We have that obligation to our clients.

ICANN’s implementation of the multistakeholder model is impressive, and it is growing and getting progressively better. We are still a relatively new voice here, but we’re not the only new voice on the block. I do think that we are one of the most important ones, and we are bringing an underrepresented perspective to the process. I couldn’t be happier with our continued and growing engagement here.