The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel Meeting and an Outreach program was organised here in Kathmandu at Hotel Radission on May 24 2017.

The program majorly focused on the current development of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel of developing a uniform  standards  for Neo-Brahmī Scripts Label Generation Ruleset for the Root Zone, covering Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu scripts. The program also highlighted on the current ICANN mission and objective in Asia pacific.

Champika Wijayatunga, an ICANN staff said, “It is high time that Nepalese community should further collaborate in the global multistakholder platform through various community policy developing process and facilitate their issues and challenges in the various working group”

Though Nepal has been participating in various ICANN programs since past 10 to 12 year but the participation has been very limited in context of diversity and representation.

ICANN is a nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces of the Internet, ensuring the network’s stable and secure operation. ICANN performs the actual technical maintenance work of the central Internet address pools and DNS root zone registries pursuant to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function contract. The contract regarding the IANA stewardship functions between ICANN and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the United States Department of Commerce ended on October 1, 2016, formally transitioning the functions to the global multistakeholder community.