• DENIC eG, eco e.V. and City of Hamburg acting as joint hosts
• ICANN coordinates the management of address identifiers on the Internet
• City of Hamburg welcomes international Internet community

Important decisions on the core functions of the Internet could be taken in Germany in 2020: Along with the City of Hamburg, Germany’s ccTLD Manager DENIC eG (.DE) and eco – Association of the Internet Industry will act as joint hosts of the 69th ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) meeting from 17 to 22 October 2020. ICANN is a not-for-profit organization which is responsible for the global coordination of names and parameters for the functioning and further development of the Internet. The decision in favour of Hamburg was taken on 24 June 2018 at the ICANN 62 Policy Forum in Panama.

“After Berlin in 1999, this is the first time in 20 years that we have brought an ICANN conference to Germany,” says Oliver Süme, Chair of the Board of eco – Association of the Internet Industry. “With eco, DENIC, and the City of Hamburg, strong partners from industry and politics have joined to achieve this goal.”

ICANN coordinates the management of address identifiers on the Internet

For the Internet to work, domain names and IP numbers world-wide need to be unique. The central task of ICANN, founded in 1998, is to ensure this in collaboration with the global Internet community. As a result, Internet users anywhere in the world can, for example, type www.denic.de into their browser and thus reliably reach the DENIC webpage.

“An open, free, and secure Internet is a strategic priority for DENIC. The commitment of the German Internet Community has been honored with the decision to bring the ICANN meeting to Hamburg. This will offer a good opportunity to put the German and European perspectives to the table at an even broader level,” says DENIC Board Member Dr. Jörg Schweiger. DENIC operates Germany‘s top-level domain .DE, which currently – with close to 16.3m domains under management – is the second-largest country-targeted namespace on the Internet.

Alongside the country-targeted ones, there are also generic domain suffixes, including – on offer for several years now – ones with a clear regional focus. The City of Hamburg actively supported the registration of the new top-level domain .hamburg, so that, for example, the Hamburg police website can now be reached at www.polizei.hamburg.

City of Hamburg welcomes international Internet community

ICANN meetings are held three times a year, at varying locations around the world. The 2020 ICANN Annual General Meeting will run from 17 to 22 October in Hamburg. The organizers expect around 2,500 to 3,500 attendees to participate in this conference from academia, the tech community, politics, industry, and civil society: “Hamburg is smart and innovative, and is therefore a suitable setting for such an important conference of the international Internet community,” says Hamburg’s Senator of Economic Affairs, Frank Horch.

The hosting partners had submitted their application to ICANN in November 2016, under the coordination of the Hamburg Convention Bureau.

About DENIC

DENIC is the managing organization of the country-code top-level domain .DE, representing Germany’s namespace on the Internet. With close to 16.3 million domains under management, it counts among the top 3 Internet registries world-wide. The private-sector, not-for-profit cooperative is also actively involved in promoting a free, open, and secure Internet.

About eco

eco is the largest Internet industry association in Europe, with 1,000 member companies. Since 1995 eco has been instrumental in shaping the Internet, fostering new technologies, forming framework conditions, and representing the interests of members in politics and international committees. eco’s key topics are the reliability and strengthening of digital infrastructure, IT security, and trust, ethics, and self-regulation. That is why eco advocates for a free, technologically-neutral, and high-performance Internet.