MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is joining forces with the Taiwan Network Information Centre (TWNIC) to host a special regional meeting — “Toward the New Era of Internet” — in Taipei 19-21 October 2007.

“ICANN, TWNIC, and the global Internet community are tackling some of the most important issues impacting the Internet since its creation,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “This meeting is an opportunity for technical communities, Internet businesses, and policy makers from the Asia-Pacific to come together and share thoughts and ideas on how we can move forward together.”

Some of the meeting highlights include:

Internet security and the challenges it presents to governments, service providers, and end-users
The need for a migration to IPv6, with its 340 trillion trillion trillion Internet Protocol addresses, because of the depletion of the widely-used IPv4 space
One of the last official ICANN functions for Board Chair Vint Cerf, whose term ends at the Los Angeles International Public Meeting at the end of October.
ICANN’s progress on implementing internationalized domain names (IDNs), which have the goal of adding to the 37 characters presently available for domain names to tens of thousands of characters from many of the languages of the world.
“IDNs are going to change the face of the Internet when they arrive — it will give people the chance to register domain names with their names in their languages,” Dr Twomey added. “ICANN is about to launch a technical evaluation of the impact IDNs will have, and if all goes well internationalized domain names could be available sometime in 2008.”

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-20sep07.htm