The inaugural public meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), which looks like the body to which the US government will hand control of the internet’s domain name and numbering systems, will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Saturday November 14. It will start at 9am and conclude at 4pm, but for all other details we will apparently have to wait until with the weekend or at the latest, Monday. Details about the agenda and the exact location will go up at http://www.iana.org, as the icann.org site is still under construction. ICANN has not been handed a contract by the US government yet and will not be until it consults the internet community about its plans and changes its bylaws in a few specific ways. This meeting is part of that consultative process and will be followed by further meetings in Europe and Asia, but probably not until next year (10/28/98). A Manhattan PR company, Rackmil Associates has been appointed by the law firm representing ICANN and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Joe Sims, a lawyer within the technology of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue worked closely with the late IANA director Jon Postel in the drafts of bylaws and articles that, after five revisions, led to ICANN. The following day, through Tuesday November 17, a meeting will be held in Monterrey in Mexico by a group trying to organize itself into one of the three supporting organizations that are supposed to feed policy into ICANN. The domain name supporting organization will eventually be joined by a protocol and an address supporting organization. The DNSO group, which is dominated by supporters and participants from the old Policy Oversight Committee/Council of Registrars movement that emerged from IANA, held at meeting earlier this month in Barcelona. It’s at http://www.dnso.org.
