Costa Rica Declares ICANN Meeting One Of "National Interest"

Presidenta Laura Chinchilla and the Ministro de Ciencia y Tecnología (Minister of Science and Technology), Alejandro Cruz, have declared the next ICANN meeting to be held in San José in March, a national interest.

ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - chose Costa Rica for its ICANN43, one of three annual public meetings it holds.

The choice was made after at the request of Costa Rica's National Academy of Sciences (NAS), through the Network Information Centre (NIC-Costa Rica) and after a rigorous assessment process.

Companies like Google, Cisco, Facebook and Symantec, among others, will be participating in the meeting that will be held at the Ramada Plaza Herradura, March 11 to 16, 2012.

"The presence of the 43rd ICANN meeting in Costa Rica reaffirms the country addressing the issue of digital technologies, in particular, the need to maintain leadership in the region with a smart green vision", said Santiago Nunez, director of MICIT digital technology.

The meeting will also allow Costa Rica to become the focus of the global internet community through physical participation of nearly 1,500 attendees from around the world.

ICANN is responsible for the coordination of the global Internet's systems of unique identifiers and, in particular, ensuring its stable and secure operation. This work includes coordination of the Internet Protocol address spaces (IPv4 and IPv6) and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries, for maintaining registries of Internet protocol identifiers, and for the management of the top-level domain name space (DNS root zone), which includes the operation of root nameservers. Most visibly, much of its work has concerned the DNS policy development for internationalization of the DNS system and introduction of new generic top-level domains (TLDs). The actual technical maintenance work of maintenance of the central Internet address pools and DNS root registries ICANN performs pursuant to the "IANA function" contract.

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