ICANN, yesterday announced that over 700 delegates from 82 countries gathered in Wellington, New Zealand for ICANN's 25th International Meeting which was held from March 25-31.

During the week long meeting, several key issues relating to the Internet's growth, security and stability were discussed at length and the ICANN Board voted to approve the 2006-2009 strategic plan, providing the organization with a clear future direction. In addition, ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) issued a communique identifying public policy, issues relating to the ICM Registry's application to operate the proposed .xxx sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD).

Having received feedback from the GAC on the ICM Registry sTLD application, the Board resolved that ICANN's President and General Counsel should analyze all publicly received inputs and continue negotiations with ICM Registry and to return to the Board with any recommendations regarding amendments to the proposed agreement.

Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said, "This is a great example of the success of the public policy advice process at work, which demonstrates that ICANN takes governmental input seriously. The ICANN Board is committed to continuing to enhance the integration of the GAC's public policy role to ICANN's decision processes."

The Wellington meeting also saw developments in relation to Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) including ICANN's progress towards implementation of non Latin character sets into the Root. Another key outcome of the meeting was the release of two reports by ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). The first report examined amplified DNS Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, while the second report looked at alternate Roots and IDNs.