It’s Aji here, telling you all about my second ICANN meeting – RRRAO~!! Morocco is such an amazing country, all the SIGHTS and SMELLS and SOUNDS are super cool. Marrakech is known as the Red City because of its famed red walls that surround the Medina. A lot of the buildings are also in the same signature red! I took a stroll around the Jemaa El Fna square with the DotAsia team, and it was out of this WORLD – spice stalls, olives, fresh-squeezed orange juice, snails, lamb offal, and mint tea all for sale – some were WEIRD but most were DELICIOUS!
As this is my second time around, I’m so happy to see everyone again from Dublin, and of course meeting new friends! This time, I know a bit more about the stakeholder groups – yup the GNSO is the Generic Names Supporting Organisation, and the GAC is the Government Advisory Committee, ALAC is the At-Large Advisory Committee. Do you know what my FAVORITE acronym is? No I won’t tell you here, you have to watch my interview with my friend Dustin from ICANNwiki to find out!
The Marrakech meeting also marked a REALLY IMPORTANT milestone for the Internet community – the IANA transition proposal package was sent off to the US government under a STANDING OVATION! A super BRIEF summary: the process began with the NTIA announcement on 14 March 2014, kicked off a TREMENDOUS multistakeholder community effort (for the blood, sweat, tears and STATISTICS, see here), and produced one transition proposal and one proposal for enhancing ICANN’s accountability (it’s all about the CHECKS and BALANCES). The proposal is now going through the process in the US government, and the Internet community is also REALLY hard at work realizing the implementation aspects that need to be in place! RRRAO~now that’s something to celebrate!
If you want to learn more about what the IANA functions are, and why as a netizen, you should care, watch this video.
