Wednesday, March 29, 2023
Home   >   Regional   >   Caribbean   >   ICANN Holds International Cyberspace Conference in Puerto Rico

ICANN Holds International Cyberspace Conference in Puerto Rico

By on March 16, 2018

SAN JUAN – The Internet Corporation for the Assignment of Names & Numbers (ICANN) held its 61st meeting in Puerto Rico March 10-15 at the Convention Center in San Juan, becoming one of the first international conferences on the island after Hurricane Maria’s passage through the region.

In an interview with Caribbean Business, Pablo Rodríguez, vice president of Puerto Rico Top Level Domain (PRTLD), stressed the activity is expected to inject $10 million to $12 million into the local economy, especially in the hotel industry, as many of the lodgings in the greater metro area contain a lot of guests attending the event.

He also explained that about 2,500 people, including representatives from more than 150 countries, including heads of state, among others, participate through the different committees that comprise ICANN.

About the world event, Rodríguez said, “We are talking about the type of conference in which many people in a room do not feel like listening to a speaker, but there are more than 400 simultaneous sessions in which all kinds of business will be discussed—the A to Z related to the internet.”

The PRTLD, in addition to being the only organization authorized worldwide to administer the country code—“.pr”—representing Puerto Rico and its users on the internet, works with ICANN to maintain a stable, secure and interoperable network configuration to promote competition and the development of policies for these unique identifiers.

Rodríguez emphasized that part of the PRTLD’s purpose on the island is to provide entrepreneurs their identity on the internet, so they work directly with each merchant to provide a low cost or even free name for their domains with the “.pr” extension.

Meanwhile, ICANN is the worldwide nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining the safe management of the internet, as well as its interoperability, through the development of policies on the internet’s unique identifiers through the coordination of the internet’s domain name system (DNS).

On the achievements ICANN has obtained, the president of the organization’s global domains division, Akram Atallah, told Caribbean Business that the organization has been able to transition to version six of internet protocol addresses (IPv6) as these interconnection policies are regularly updated.

These changes seek to expand the address capacity that allows hosting the internet from its original design; in the not-so-distant past there were fewer computers connected and, therefore, version four of internet protocol addresses (IPv4) was sufficient.

To allow more devices to more efficiently connect to the cybernetics network, he said it was essential to expand these addresses to IPv6 to ensure all electronic devices that use the internet can access it without problems.

In addition, the executive said that as part of ICANN’s efforts to benefit internet users, the organization includes more than 1,200 top-level domain names around the world.

This action has the purpose that cities, as well as brands and geographic areas, are identified within the DNS to expand that registry, to promote competition among users by transferring their identity to cyberspace.

With this DNS expansion, Atallah indicated the policy for security protocol for the domain name system guarantees all users, who access any internet page, that the data they receive is correct and no external agents enter to affect the connection.

You must be logged in to post a comment Login