ICANN63 Barcelona: Updates from the 20th AGM

The MarkMonitor team is pleased to provide updates from the recent ICANN meeting in Barcelona, Spain.

This meeting marked the 20-year anniversary of ICANN’s existence and was ICANN’s 20th Annual General Meeting (AGM). The AGM format consists of seven days of sessions and includes two open community sessions, during which the ICANN board makes itself available for questions and comments from anyone in attendance.

This year’s AGM kicked off with an additional daylong session of the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) team, meeting to work on the state of WHOIS data post-GDPR. The MarkMonitor team was engaged in various sessions for the duration of the meeting.

EPDP meeting – a celebrated success

The EPDP team met on Saturday with thunderous applause from the audience when it finally (after months of debate) agreed on a list of purposes for each type of entity involved in processing WHOIS data, a preliminary task required both by GDPR and the EPDP group’s charter. With that task accomplished, the EPDP team shifted gears toward policy positions for inclusion in the group’s Initial Report, seeking consensus across the nine participating organizations.

When the ICANN meeting officially kicked off on Sunday, the MarkMonitor team continued our engagement with ICANN staff, our valued vendor partners and entities such as the Registrar Stakeholder Group, Business Constituency, Intellectual Property Constituency and Brand Registry Group, working for smart policy that helps our clients protect their businesses and their customers online.

Tech Ops session focuses on security

Importantly to our clients, MarkMonitor hosted a Tech Ops session focused on improving both security and practicability of domain name transfers in a WHOIS-redacted world, and we advocated for strong rights protection mechanisms and a “smart and soon” approach to opening the next round of .Brand new gTLD applications.

For more details on the 20th ICANN AGM, including how we advocate for our clients at ICANN, please check out our post-ICANN webinar recording.

And don’t forget to get in touch. Both myself and your CSM would love to hear about how we can best advocate for you.