Kuala Lumpur meeting cancelled and ICANN 68 could be even trickier online
ICANN has as expected cancelled its in-person ICANN 68 meeting, which had been due to take place in Kuala Lumpur in June, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The decision, which was never really in any doubt, was taken by its board of directors yesterday. The board considered:
Globally, a high number of people are under some form of a “stay at home” or lock-down order, directed to avoid contact with others except to receive essential services such as medical care or to purchase supplies. Schools and offices are closed, gatherings are prohibited, and international travel is largely on pause. We do not know when travel or in-person meetings will be authorized or possible. As it relates to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia has a Movement Control Order in force at least until 14 April 2020 that prohibits meetings such as ICANN68. The duration of the Movement Control Order has already been extended once.
It appears that the four-day meeting, which will instead go ahead virtually (presumably on the Zoom conferencing service) might be even more disjointed than ICANN 67.
ICANN 67, which took place online in March, did have a centralized component — a bunch of ICANN staffers on location at its headquarters in Los Angeles — but that may not be possible this time around.
The board said that “due to current social distancing requirements, ICANN org is unable to execute a virtual meeting from a single location, and that a decentralized execution model might necessitate changes to the format.”
It added that there is support for “a flexible, modified virtual meeting format that focuses on cross-community dialogues on key policy topics, supplemented by a program of topical webinars and regular online working meetings scheduled around the key sessions.”
While there has been a lot of criticism of the Zoom platform in recent weeks due to security and privacy concerns, ICANN indicated this week that it’s not particularly concerned and will carry on using the service.
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