The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is getting ready for its next round of meetings to be held for the first time in Australia next month.
ICANN, the non-profit organisation responsible for maintaining the Internet's domain name system, has long been criticised for its lack of transparency and accountability to the Internet community.
The much-anticipated meetings, free to attend and open to the public, will be held at Melbourne's Convention and Exhibition Centre on March 10-13.
"It'll give Australians the opportunity to make up their minds first hand about what ICANN is," ICANN Host Committee Australia representative, Tony Hill told ZDNet.
"Whether it's open enough, what its budget is like, whether it takes on public issues."
"People have issues with ICANN and predictably so because it's an interesting area," Hill added.
ICANN was set up by the US government in 1998 and in November last year added seven new suffixes, .aero, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro, and .biz, to join the existing list which included .com, .net, .org and .gov.
Decision expected
However, there was a great deal of controversy over the selection of seven suffixes out of numerous proposals and ICANN has yet to implement them, according to Hill.
"This ICANN meeting will probably consider the implementation of these names," he said.
Another issue likely to cloud the ICANN meetings will be funding.
Currently the Internet administrative body has no guaranteed source of funding and is in discussions with those who operate country code top level domains (CCTLDs) to come up with a funding formula.
There are over 250 CCTLDs in the system, such as .au, .uk.
"Every rock and every island has got one of these CCTLDs," Hill said. "These discussions will be influential in deciding ICANN's future."
Changing the guard
Another highlight of the meetings will be the introduction of the organisation's five newest directors, voted in at last year's first global election for seats on the board of ICANN.
With 34,000 candidates, one was chosen from each of five global regions - they replace five of the original nine board members.
The up-coming Melbourne-based meeting will be the first time those directors will participate in ICANN discussions.
There's no Australian representative on the ICANN board but Masanobu Katoh was elected to the Asia-Pacific seat.
"[Australia's] not a very big Internet country," Hill said. "It'll be interesting to know what this guy thinks of Australia's role in the Internet and see how Australia's needs are now being represented at board level."
