ICANN São Paulo meeting site

During a meeting yesterday, I heard one of the most profound things I have ever heard at an ICANN meeting.

In a discussion, representatives from New Zealand, the host country of our meeting in March of this year, told of the substantial benefits to their country that came from hosting an ICANN meeting. They extolled that the meeting had resulted from bringing a high profile Internet related event to the country, including a tantalising conclusion.

I am sitting in the "Meeting on meetings", a workshop convened by Susan Crawford - one of our ICANN Board members, which is discussing how to improve the way ICANN meetings are held.

ICANN meetings are unwieldy, complex, demanding and tiring; and yet hugely constructive places to get a great deal done throughout the days (and nights). Work begins each day with an alarm clock at 6am in the morning, and you'll rarely get back to bed before 1am in the morning. The question is: how do you make them better, reduce the exhaustion factor, and eke out the most from the precious few days when everyone is in the one place?

I'm pleased that today we were able to launch a couple of discussion papers that I have been keen to start a public dialogue on to help improve management of the DNS root zone.

We've been working hard to improve the responsiveness and efficiency of IANA for some time now. In assessing how IANA does its job, it became clear some of the delays that affect us are because we have inherited some policies that aren't the most efficient to implement.

Number one on the list of things that would improve average processing time for the DNS root zone is to alter our "glue" policy. I have presented at the last few ccNSO meetings, as well as meetings of APTLD and CENTR, on this particular topic. Some name servers are shared between many different TLD operators, and simple administrative changes to these can require two confirmations from every single affected TLD operator. In practice this has made some fairly simple changes take over a year, because one or two of them would not respond to our requests.