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Thursday, January 20, 2011

Bill Clinton to speak at ICANN's Silicon Valley Public Meeting in March 2011

Rod Beckstrom and Bill ClintonWilliam Jefferson "Bill" Clinton, 42nd President of the United States, with Rod Beckstrom, ICANN President and CEO. icannphotos
As the Internet community gets ready for participating in ICANN's 40th Public Meeting taking place in San Fransisco from March 13-18, 2011, there is confirmed news that President Bill Clinton will also be participating in the meeting as a speaker. Scott Pinzon at ICANN posted this news on January 13th, 2011 on the ICANN blog stating "Bill Clinton and the ICANN Silicon Valley Meeting." here.

Scott confirmed that:

"A few blogs and a swarm of tweets have announced that former President Bill Clinton will speak at ICANN’s Silicon Valley-San Francisco public meeting in March. Some are asking why ICANN hasn’t announced this yet. While it’s true that we have invited and he has accepted, we’re still working on a contract, and without it a formal announcement cannot be made. We are also aware that ICANN meetings are highly structured, work-intensive events, and we want to be sure that an appearance by President Clinton enhances the meeting’s outcomes rather than distracts from them."

The most important addition to this story were the rumors that ICANN, a non-for-profit organization and custodian of the technical coordination of the global Internet root and IP addressing was going to end up paying half-million and million-dollar figure to President Bill Clinton have all been declared false way out of line.

Antony Van Couvering has spin off information about this through an article he posted on CircleID here "Confirmed: Bill Clinton to Address ICANN Meeting in SF" on Jan 13, 2011. According to Antony, Bill Clinton's presence will generate inevitable tech press that will be really beneficial for both ICANN and the Silicon Valley.

Antony also showed his skepticism over the overall issue of having an ICANN Public Meeting in the Silicon Valley, where all those companies reside including giants like Facebook that are changing the global Internet landscape and how the world uses the Internet. Well I don't blame him, ICANN really has been moving at a snail's pace with on-going issues like the ten year delay in launching IDNs' Internationalized Domain Names and now the trouble with launching Generic Top Level Domains. I won't go with the claim about the GAC and its pressures on ICANN, I still cannot recognize that as to exist because what the governments did with the Internet Governance Forum improvements issues upon the renewal of its five year mandate tells a whole different story.

I personally believe that its time for ICANN to actually announce and launch the new gTLD program at with what ever the state of the gTLD applicants guidebook because unless you don't test the ground, how do you know what worked and what didn't and improvements can take place on an on-going basis for the intelligent!

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