ICANN ready in March 2010

By Brian Adero
Preparations for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Meeting, scheduled for Kenya in March, are underway. The international event, which is poised to attract major players in the cyber sector, is scheduled for the capital, Nairobi, from 7-12 March.

Officials from the Kenya Network Information Centre (KENIC), which will host one of the biggest events in the sector Kenya has ever hosted, said preparations were progressing smoothly.

Headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, United States, ICANN is a non-profit corporation that was created on September 18, 1998 and incorporated September 30, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

ICANN's tasks include responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. More generically, ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses.

To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of new generic top-level domains (TLDs). The technical work of ICANN is referred to as the IANA function.

Its primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet, to promote competition, to achieve broad representation of global Internet community and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.

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