The 46th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) takes place this week in Beijing, China, and will bring together leaders from all over the world to discuss and debate a wide range of issues related to domain names and the surrounding industry. One can expect that the new gTLDs, a topic frequently discussed here on CircleID, will naturally consume a great amount of the discussion at ICANN 46. The main site for the event can be found at:

http://beijing46.icann.org/

and the full schedule of events can be found at:

http://beijing46.icann.org/full-schedule

A great aspect of ICANN meetings is that most of the meetings have some mechanism for you to view the meeting remotely. If you go into any of the sessions on the schedule, you will see remote participation links—often for both high and low bandwidth connections. In my experience, many sessions are also recorded for later viewing.

Do keep in mind that all times are local to Beijing which is UTC+8 and may not work with your viewing schedule. For instance, there is a 12-hour difference from the eastern US where I live and as a result a session that starts Monday at 9am will be starting Sunday night at 9pm for people in the eastern US..

In the midst of all the more business-focused discussions around domain names and governance questions, there are also some excellent technical tracks. I will be in Beijing specifically for the excellent DNSSEC Workshop and related sessions, as well as attending the IPv6 workshop.

I’m looking forward to the ICANN 46 event—if you will be there, too, please do feel free to say hello. You can pretty much expect to find me in any sessions related to DNS security.

P.S. If you are interested in the views of my employer, the Internet Society, on the events happening at ICANN 46, a few of my colleagues prepared the “Internet Society’s Rough Guide to ICANN 46’s Hot Topics” that outlines what the organization will be watching and participating in over the next week.