USCIB vice president for ICT policy, Barbara Wanner, attended meetings of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Copenhagen, Denmark last week, concluding a first of three rounds of meetings scheduled for 2017. Wanner joined 2,400 participants from business, government, civil society, and the technical community for a six-day meeting largely focused on domain name system (DNS) policy issues and inter-stakeholder discussions.

Wanner participated in DNS related meetings in her new capacity as the Business Constituency representative to the Commercial Stakeholder Group, enabling greater input to policy discussions at the executive committee level on behalf of USCIB members.

A noteworthy addition to this meeting – and reflecting heightened global concerns about protections of personal data – was a special “privacy summit,” which featured senior privacy officials from the Council of Europe and EU Article 29 Working Party. “An important result of the “summit” was recognition by the ICANN community of the need for timely, legal analysis of the implications of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect May 28, 2018, on the processing of data related to domain name registrations and related contractual obligations of companies that register domain names,” observed Wanner.