ICANN to consider cancelling ICANN 68 tomorrow
ICANN is to consider whether to cancel its in-person ICANN 68 gathering at a meeting of its board of directors tomorrow.
The agenda for its meeting tomorrow has one line item: “Impact of COVID-19 on ICANN68”.
The four-day Policy Forum is currently scheduled to take place from June 22 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
I think the chances of this event going ahead in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic are zero point zero.
March’s ICANN 67 meeting was replaced with a series of virtual Zoom rooms on February 19, when cases of Covid-19 had been reported in just 26 countries and it was still widely thought of as a Chinese problem.
According to today’s data from the European Centre For Disease Prevention and Control, coronavirus cases have been reported in 204 countries and territories. That’s pretty much all of them.
Even if some currently hard-hit countries in North America and Europe are over the hump by June, you can guarantee that somewhere in the world there’ll be a horrific Biblical epidemic going on. I can’t see ICANN taking the risk of opening its doors to the world at a time like that.
Frankly, I think ICANN 69, the annual general meeting slated for Hamburg in October, has a big question mark hanging over it as well.
Germany may have been handling its crisis relatively well compared to other nations, but ICANN has participants from 150 countries and it may well have to make its call based not on the strongest national response but the weakest.
Only an insane country would let in a bunch of tourists. ICANN will be canceling meetings for the next year.