Starting this month, ICANN will be hosting a series of global New generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) events in various locations around the world. These events have been designed in a wide range of formats to address different community needs for those that have an interest in the Program and in the development of the Applicant Guidebook.
The live consultations will facilitate on-going discussions with the Internet community regarding workable solutions to some of the outstanding, overarching issues, particularly trademark protection and malicious behavior. Starting with ICANN’s the Sydney Meeting, a session dedicated to trademark issues will take place on Wednesday, 24 June . Subsequent consultation sessions are scheduled to take place in New York (13 July) and London (15 July); attendees will have the chance to meet ICANN staff and hear from those who have contributed to the ongoing process, including members of the Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT) that submitted their report to the ICANN Board on measures to protect intellectual property.
The proposed outreach events in Hong Kong (24 July) and Abu-Dhabi (4 August) will focus mainly on the New gTLDs and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) program details.
Additional locations are under consideration as well as a series of topic-specific webinars.
All events are free of charge, and we are expecting a high demand for places; therefore, on-line pre-registration is recommended and allocation will be primarily first-come first-served, but with preference being given to first-time attendees to any of the consultation sessions. Remote participation will be available and details will follow shortly. For any of these events, attendees will be responsible for their own travel and visa arrangements, accommodation and meals.
The cut-off date for New York and London pre-registrations is 10 July 2009.
For detailed information about these events go to http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/consultation-outreach-en.htm. Pre-registrations can be done at http://www.registration123.com/ICANN/GTLD/.
Related Resources:
New gTLD Page: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-program.htm
WIKI for Overarching Issues discussions: https://st.icann.org/new-gtld-overarching-issues/index.cgi?new_gtld_overarching_issues
IRT Final Report on Trademark Protection (pdf): http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/irt-final-report-trademark-protection-29may09-en.pdf [PDF, 300K]
More Information on IRT: http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-4-29may09-en.htm