ICANN to work closely with India to focus on revised mission

Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will work closely with India  to focus on its revised mission after the transmission, its president and CEO Goran Marby said on Tuesday, at its 57th meeting in Hyderabad.

ICANN, which matches domain names with  appropriate IP address numbers, is hosting the meeting from 3 November to 9 November.

ICANN took over the task of assigning web addresses from the USA's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. ''With the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) stewardship transmission behind us, our top priority now is to focus on our revised mission and new bylaws and working with the empowered community. Expanding our outreach is key to our mission.

"In this context, we are keen to further deepen our ongoing engagement in India. As the second-largest group of Internet users globally, we welcome India's voice and participation,'' Marby said in his address during the inaugural session.

Union minister for electronics and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad said India had lent support to the multi stakeholder model of internet governance. ICANN would work with India's stakeholders, including the centre, to develop a structured framework focused on fostering the development of the DNS (Domain Name System) industry in India.

India currently led the world with seven internationalised country code top-level domains delegated and eight more have successfully passing  evaluation. India also had a Neo-Brahmi script panel that was defining the rules for the nine scripts used in India for evaluating future top-level domain applications work. This would serve communities using these scripts globally, and pave the way for a multilingual and more inclusive internet.

Telangana minister of IT and industries KT Rama Rao said the state government had embarked on anovel initiative for providing fibre optic connectivity along with drinking water pipelines to households across the state.