Discussing the Future of the Internet this week
Discussions that are affecting the future of the Internet has just finished up this week at the ICANN49 Meeting in Singapore. These international meetings involve all kinds of people: businesses, government leaders, non-profit organizations, legal professionals, innovators, technical leaders, to name a few. A broad range of Internet-related topics are discussed, with the agenda ever-changing because the Internet is dynamically changing too.
Without getting mired into the many technical details that run the Internet, I want highlight the hot topics that have drawn the most attention at this meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the entity that oversees the operations of the Internet and governs its policies.
1. The announcement last week by the United States Government to transition the oversight of key Internet technical functions to the global community, yet to be determined. It’s the announcement that a transition process is starting and could begin to change things by September 2015. As it is human nature, any sort of uncertainty and pending changes can be quite stressful and raise many concerns.
ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehadé told an international news conference: “This is indeed momentous… the decision by the United States Government validates the idea that people around the world can come together and manage a global resource that is borderless.”
What could happen with this transition? Experts differ on how best to insure the stability, reliability, and availability of the Internet, but the most probably outcome with this transition is a smooth one, given how much of the world’s economy is invested in the Internet and how many people’s lives are affected by the Internet.
2. 175+ new gTLDs are delegated. The Internet namespace program continues its brisk pace of roll-out, even though public awareness is slow to get traction. As many as 1,300+ new generic top-level domains are projected to become available in the next 2 to 3 years. People will start using these new top-level domains when popular websites are using these new domain names and marketing efforts are actively messaging the uses of new top-level domains. (I’m going to refrain from my personal predictions for now, but may share them in the near future.)