Heading to ICANN Abu Dhabi

For the past five weeks Roselyn and I have been traveling all over Europe. It’s been fantastic to experience different cultures, food and a lot of adventures but now I’m focused on ICANN in Abu Dhabi.

I’m writing this from the Rome airport where we’re catching an Emirates flight through to Dubai. Once landed, a car will take us to Abu Dhabi and the conference.....so please bear with the brevity of the article.

For those of you that have never been to an ICANN conference they are something to experience. As well as the normal policy work a huge amount of business is conducted in a very short space of time. You literally have thousands of representatives from registries, registrars, hosting companies and ancillary businesses in the same room….so a lot gets done.

What can be a little intimidating for first time attendees is the fact that everyone seems to know everyone else. This shouldn’t be a surprise as many of the attendees have spent the last twenty plus years charting the course of the Internet together. Despite this, what I’ve found is the great majority are really wonderful people trying to do the best for the businesses and organisations they represent.

I’ve found that each ICANN related conference has been very worthwhile attending as they have given me a much wider appreciation for all the stakeholders in the domain community. Sometimes, as domain investors, we can become quite myopic in our thinking about what is and isn’t important.

Some people complain about ICANN taking a long, long time to make decisions. I personally like this as I know nothing is going to leap out of a dark corner and sideline my business. If ICANN does anything on the policy front that impacts my investments, then I’ll know about it for literally years before it’s finally put into practice.

If you’re attending ICANN then don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to catch-up for a drink or two….in the meantime, I’d better go and catch that flight!

Cheers!