NEW DELHI, INDIA: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened its 31st International Public Meeting in New Delhi yesterday with an address from Shri Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, the Government of India.
In his address to the told the crowd at the meeting's welcoming ceremony Monday morning, Secretary Singh made a number of comments about the work ICANN is doing, including its Strategic Plan.
"We would also like to endorse ICANN's strategic plan for the next three years. We wish ICANN all success in rolling out this plan," Secretary Singh said. "Introduction of IDNs and DNS security issues are of great importance to us. We also welcome ICANN's initiatives to promote adoption of IPv6. We eagerly look forward to an active engagement with ICANN on all these issues."
After highlighting India's emergence as an IT power, he spoke about the government's efforts to bring millions more Indians online through 100,000 Common Service centers in rural India. He also spoke about the importance of ICANN's efforts on Internationalized Domain Names in a diverse nation with 22 official languages using 11 scripts.
"The Internet has changed the world in the last decade. ICANN has played a key role in the development of the Internet by involving all the stakeholders in establishing various technical standards and delivering a safe, secure, and trustworthy domain name system and IP address system," Secretary Singh said. "ICANN has, in recent years, made significant progress in the performance of core operational activities. This meeting is important to achieve further improvements in such functions."
The Secretary said ICANN is an "interesting public/private experiment" and the world is looking carefully at how this organization performs.
"Principles such as inclusiveness, transparency, openness, and diversity will show the world to look upon ICANN as a positive influence for the technical coordination of the Internet," the Secretary added.
A transcript of Secretary Singh's entire speech is available at: https://delhi.icann.org/files/Delhi-11-Feb-08-Welcome.txt
ICANN's Strategic Plan is online at: http://icann.org/strategic-plan/
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About ICANN:
ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers like domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .uk) and the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols that help computers reach each other over the Internet. Careful management of these resources is vital to the Internet's operation, so ICANN's global stakeholders meet regularly to develop policies that ensure the Internet's ongoing security and stability. ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit non-profit company. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.
Media Contacts:
Jason Keenan
Media Adviser, ICANN
Ph: +1 310 382 4004
E: jason.keenan@icann.org
International: Andrew Robertson
Edelman (London)
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E: andrew.robertson@edelman.com