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You know, the question,
which is under discussion since the establishment of ICANN, is: Who oversees ICANN?
Many people think that ICANN,
they're regularly labeled as US-controlled, inward-looking, and highly technical organization.
Because ICANN was established under contract with the United States government ...
so it was first of all the United States government that made the decisions.
When the US government was considering its role
we urged them to step back and privatize ICANN. Which is what they promised to do originally.
They said ICANN was going to be a private sector organization and
the US government was going to get out of the picture after two or three years.
Well, ICANN is already a private not-for-profit company based in California.
So it's already a private company.
To me, it would be better if it becomes a real international body,
with a more international status.
Now it's still a non-profit company based in California. So that is the status of ICANN.
When the United States government ended its contract with ICANN, which was called a joint-project agreement,
a new affirmation of commitment
was signed, both by ICANN and the US government
and part of this affirmation of commitment is that ICANN should be reviewed and overseen,
not by one single government,
or by any number of governments in an inter-governmental counsel,
but by a multi-stakeholder review team, so that the global internet community can follow
what ICANN does.
The governance of the internet is dominated by North America,
and to some extent Europe.
The Asians are the real ones that are kind of left out of the picture.
I think mainly for linguistic reasons, partially for cultural reasons.
And the US has so much of an advantage in terms of technological prowess.
In some sense they are reaping the benefits of good policy.
And then we had a very entrepreneurial, open approach to the internet.
So of course it's not just American people, but also
Europeans or Asians who want to become business people on the internet ...
have actually migrated to the US because of the better infrastructure and better policies.
So for example the world wide web protocol was invented by a European ...
but where is he now?
I think, by all means, Europe has to defend itself.
And of course when you talk about Europe, you talk about the European Union, all 27 Member States.
And more countries when you talk about Europe as such. So we have to strengthen the links.
I'm quite involved, working at the European level at BusinessEurope with EURid to promote .eu
I think that the business community is more represented at the American level.
I think that European business users
should make their voice more heard at the ICANN level.
Again, you know, there are different ways for them to do that at ICANN,
and they should know ICANN is one of the options they have.
So participation should be a Plus for them.
Today, Europe has six of the top ccTLD registries in the world.
EURid is ready to take up its responsibility as well,
and play its role.
At the end of last year for instance, we introduced IDNs,
making it possible to register domain names with characters used in the 23 official languages
of the European Union.
.eu, operated by EURid, is among the fastest growing domain names
in the European Union.
EURid has been working closely together with registrars and law enforcement bodies
to contribute in the fight against different kinds of cybercrime.
Last week, we deployed DNSSEC,
without compromising our service of dynamic updates.
.eu and EURid have been heavily mentioned
in many press releases, so that's really good.
The .eu zone has been signed, and some early adopter registrars
have started signing some of their zones.
It's going on,
it's going to be a hot topic,
and it's going to be implemented in the root zone next month.
We are now looking forward to the 15th of July, to put our keys in the Root, completing the deployment.
Hi, my name is Mike Sax, and I'm a Belgian,
I'm very pleased and honoured to welcome everybody here to Brussels.
I hope you have a lot of fun.
I think it's already been a success for EURid and .eu,
because we have been told by many people
that it has been an extremely well-attended conference, extremely well-organized.
As hosts of this meeting,
we are happy to see so many people joining us here in Brussels.
This meeting has already set a landmark
as one of the best attended meetings in the history of ICANN. Thank you.