French Minister Besson Addresses 32nd International Public Meeting in Paris

PARIS - Over 1,550 delegates have gathered in Paris to discuss some of most important issues facing the evolution of the Internet, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opened its 32nd International Public Meeting, a press release by the Corporation stated.

French Minister of State Eric Besson opened ICANN's Paris meeting. The Minister of State is responsible for Forward Planning, Assessment of Public Policies and Development of the Digital Economy.

"Massive growth of the Internet worldwide has brought with it opportunities and challenges," ICANN's Board Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush said.

"At this meeting, the Internet community will discuss many critical issues for the future of the Internet and its coordination: the transition to IPv6, the possible introduction of new top level domain names including those in Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic and other non-Latin characters, and ICANN's future evolution,” he added.

"The Paris meeting will also see expansive discussion on the need for business to transition from IPv4 to IPv6. By 2011, ICANN expects to finish distributing unallocated IPv4 addresses and business needs to act now to prepare for IPv6, which offers almost infinite address space," Thrush stated.

The Paris meeting is the second of the three public ICANN meetings in 2008.

The next meeting will be held in Cairo, Egypt, in November. These meetings are crucial because ICANN's polices are created through a bottom-up, transparent process involving the global Internet community.

During the opening ceremony, Besson drew attention to ICANN's unique and important role as "the organization in charge of the public trust function of managing the common resources of the Internet", and noted that the overall evolution of the Internet requires the introduction of new gTLDs in many different scripts, not just Latin scripts.

The Minister said that France in particular sees the importance of promoting cultural diversity, and so views as extremely important the rapid introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). He specifically encouraged the various language script communities in different territories to work together.

Besson's opening address also stressed the importance of the planned transition of ICANN at the end of 2009 towards a fully multi-stakeholder and internationalized organization.

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.