All meetings this year will occur virtually.
ICANN69 was originally scheduled to be held in Hamburg, Germany. But, like the March meeting and this month’s Policy Forum, the domain overseer is moving it online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The virtual meeting will be held October 17-22.
ICANN’s events attract a diverse group of people from all over the world. Even if attendees weren’t concerned about the virus, current travel and visa restrictions would make it challenging for many people to attend.
Hopefully, ICANN will be able to resume in-person meetings sometime next year. It has meetings scheduled for March 2021 (Cancun), June (The Hague) and October (Seattle).
“[V]isa restrictions would [always] make it challenging for many people to attend”–all ICANN meetings (there are three a year) should ALWAYS be virtual — “One World, One Internet.” Junkets to places like Cancun, etc., where favored “insiders” have ALL EXPENSES (travel, lodging, meals and per diem $$) PAID by ICANN Org while others, including MOST Domain Name Registrants, must pay their own way (at a cost of somewhere between $15,000 to $30,000 or more annually per person) — check out what ICANN has been paying for travel, lodging, per diem, etc., for the “insiders” — ensures having a non-representative multistakeholder organization dominated by contracted parties & lobbyists and lawyers representing a few “special interests” — the antithesis of a multistakeholder organization purportedly operating in the global public interest. ICANN didn’t become incompetent, corrupt and captured, overnight, it took years of work by, and for, the “few.” Ask Esther Dyson, she will explain it ALL to you what happened to ICANN, including how its organizational “structure” is rigged in favor of the contracted parties and a “few” special interests. That’s why ICANN Org and its inept ICANN Board of Directors, disregarded, with impunity, thousands of registrants’ comments submitted during the “public comment periods” re: .ORG and .COM in 2019-20. Bottom line: ICANN is institutionally too corrupt to be reformed (don’t waste your time trying), it needs to be replaced.