------------ Cordialement ABDELDJALIL BACHAR BONG ---------------------------------- PRESIDENT & CEO "HOUSE OF AFRICA" E-mail: bachar@houseof.africa Twitter: @HOUSEOFAFRIK WEBSITE : www.houseof.africa Whatsapp: +23566274284 Skype: Bongbour ------------------------------------- Le Secrétaire Exécutif/Executive Secretary Forum sur la Gouvernance de l'Internet au Tchad (FGI Tchad) / Chad Internet Governance Forum ------------------------------------- E-mail: Bachar@igf.td Website: www.igf.td Twitter :@IGFCHAD https://twitter.com/bacharbong Tél:0023566274284 N'djaména(Tchad) --------------------------------------------- |AFRINIC Fellow|ISOC CHAD Member|ICANN/AFRALO Member|NEXTGEN Fellow|GIVE1PROJECT MEMBER|IGFSA MEMBER|ACIEDD BOARD MEMBER|UN YOUTH DELEGATE - CHAD 2016-2018|ICANN60 Fellow ||Youth Peacebuilder|VP United Nations Association of Chad (UNA-Tchad)|| ---------- Forwarded message --------- De : ICANN <icann.communications@icann.org> Date: lun. 18 mai 2020 à 04:24 Subject: Read stakeholder experiences of COVID-19, learn about DNS security efforts, and get the latest updates on ICANN To: <abdeldjalil.bachar@gmail.com> <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> <emea.newsletter@icann.org> ICANN Board Withholds Consent for PIR Change of Control After a thorough evaluation process, the ICANN Board is withholding consent to the request for a change of control of the Public Interest Registry (PIR). Read more about the decision <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> from ICANN Board Chair Maarten Botterman, and find the full Board resolution here <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> . A Glimpse at Stakeholder Experiences During COVID-19 As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, we reached out to some of our stakeholders in Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to learn about their experiences and hear their thoughts. Follow our Instagram <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> account to see more of the stakeholder experiences during COVID-19. “COVID-19 changed the way we work as many businesses closed down or reduced their working hours, coupled by the activation of no travel and work from home policies. Many technological solutions emerged to deal with public problems. This reveals that the technology is up to the challenge of supporting a large remote workforce, which could result in everyone feeling more connected to each other than before.” Rolla Hassan Senior Manager of Internet Policy Analysis, NTRA Egypt Egypt - 8 April 2020 “Hoster.by is taking all possible measures to ensure the safety of its employees and business continuity. Part of our team has been working remotely as we had already examined all the risks posed by remote work. We are providing for the health and safety of our employees who cannot work remotely, such as customer support and technical support team members. As the .BY registry and a strong brand, we are attentive to each our client, and we try to alleviate the panic with personalized approaches and planned complex solutions at hoster.by.” Sergey Povalishev, hoster.by Belarus - 26 March 2020 “COVID-19, fortunately to date has not taken toll on our staff in the sense of a reported case and to this extent we touch wood and hope none of our staff members will be infected. Whilst we are excited by what I consider good news, we seem to be slowly encountering a situation of social loneliness due to the lockdown, and we need to be ready to deal with its negative impacts. At the same time I believe we are standing at the pedestal of great things to come and how we conduct our business. Since the lockdown, our staff has been able to deal with the customer queries with great ease and enthusiasm, and to that we say thumbs up.” Lucky Masilela, CEO of ZACR/RA South Africa - 14 April 2020 “From a technical standpoint, we have not experienced any problems due to COVID-19 at Registro .it despite of the sharp increase in Internet traffic. We have specifically developed a DNS organization for the ccTLD .it, based on an anycast architecture to ensure the maximum resilience of our services. This anycast architecture exploits both a third-party service and a proprietary infrastructure of sixteen nodes, carefully positioned around the world to intercept the Internet traffic in order to guarantee the responsiveness and the reliability of ccTLD.it DNS. The impact of COVID-19 on the society and economy reflected also on domain name registrations. At the end of March, we received more than one thousand registrations related to COVID-19, and we are working closely with the public authorities to prevent abuses associated with these domain names.” Marco Conti, Registro .it Italy - 8 April 2020 The DNSSEC Implementation Relaunch in Finland By Juhani Juselius, Chief Specialist, Traficom For almost two decades, .FI has been taken care of by a relatively small but highly motivated team at the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom, a team that believes in secure and up-to-date technology. As part of that vision, .FI-root was signed in 2010 and the registration system was updated in 2011 in order to provide Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for the second level. From the very beginning, it was obvious to us that we did not want to charge any extra fees for this important add-on service. During the following years, we raised awareness via several activities such as presentations, media interviews, targeted events, user trainings, meetings with registrars, and master's theses supervision. I am quite sure that our message reached its target, and relevant people learned about DNSSEC. However, not much happened after all, despite all of our efforts in raising awareness. At the end of 2018, I was not aware of any .FI registrar offering DNSSEC for their customers: Only 1 percent of domains were signed, and none of the three big ISPs were validating Internet traffic in Finland. Those were very depressing numbers, especially when compared to the success of DNSSEC in the other Nordic countries. At the beginning of 2019, we asked our colleagues at the National Cyber Security Center for an opportunity to attend their meeting with the Finnish ISPs and talk about DNSSEC. In that meeting, we asked a question: "In your opinion, what should we do in order to boost DNSSEC usage in Finland?" They gave us the clearest answer so far: "We see DNSSEC as an important addition to security, but we don't want to do it alone. If it breaks something, our customers will switch to a non-DNSSEC supporting operator. We will implement DNSSEC if we don't need to do it alone." That was it! So simple. The idea of DNSSEC (re)Launch Day was born. There were two main components in our DNSSEC Launch Day campaign. The first one was a campaign website with a public list of registrars and ISPs committed to implementing DNSSEC by the date of Launch Day. This was important to convince participants that they were not alone in implementing DNSSEC. The second component was to get publicity. First, there were some articles in professional online media, but the real game-changer was a one and half page article in the main national newspaper, the Helsingin Sanomat: “DNSSEC and its low adoption rate in Finland. <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJTLyVVOtVtZeQZyB6YWcvMNOZldI6PDXAX_wBEZpUDnRjGNzyVsq3aOL27g3L32II9wJOz85wbXtXKIPwqsbv0UMwTqo62FhFcufNJ87mWg2WwTs_wB2nmdZxIBAwSpVHrSvLqEimKQ==&c=fRFFGe9kjiDXcpw0RsjLIvUgwvtQUGPXpKaWjDOwZY61gmByDLDDVA==&ch=Zc1DwUy-Ip4PuPwnNCP1IYsqimePud6UV3XXomtU2XjHakdg3Oy_7A==>” The article was straightforward, and it made people wake up. At the end of 2019, there were at least 250 registrars offering DNSSEC to their customers, 2 percent of domains were signed (low, but doubled in number), and the validation rate exceeded 90 percent, one of the highest in the world. In addition, our DNSSEC training session in cooperation with ICANN became very popular after the campaign, as people got interested in DNSSEC implementation more than ever before. A Virtual “ICANN Month” for Students at Lodz University With all face-to-face interactions with our community suspended due to the COVID-19 crisis, engagement with stakeholders poses a new type of challenge: How do we adapt our engagement to these new circumstances? Our good partner in Poland, The University of Lodz (UoL), adapted quickly to the new situation by opening their virtual doors for ICANN. Through this initiative, which we called the “ICANN Month”, we delivered online lectures to the students of Social Sciences Doctoral School at UoL for three consecutive weeks in April 2020. Each lecture attracted 25 to 50 students. ICANN Month was comprised of three lectures by ICANN org members. Patrick Jones opened the series by presenting on “Managing Identifiers and Domain Name System Privacy in an Insecure World”. He was followed by Adam Peake, who presented on ICANN and the Internet, touching upon the fundamental importance of the DNS and global multistakeholder policy. Lastly, Gabriella Schittek delivered a talk on ICANN, new generic top-level domains, and its rights protection mechanisms. The students were also invited to participate in ICANN via programs such as NextGen and Fellowship, and introduced to the ICANN Learn platform. We would like to extend our gratitude to the University of Lodz, and Joanna Kulesza from At-Large leadership for the openness and flexibility that made the ICANN Month possible. Should there be an interest in organizing similar activities for your institution in Europe, please contact Gabriella Schittek at gabriella.schittek@icann.org. “The DNS in the Time of COVID-19” Webinar Attracts 210 Participants On 9 April, the Global Stakeholder Engagement team in Europe, led by Chris Mondini, organized the webinar “The Domain Name System in the Time of COVID-19: A Technical Perspective” <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> in collaboration with ICANN’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO). The webinar was attended by 210 participants from Europe and beyond. Moderated by Chris Mondini, the webinar featured presentations by the Vice President of Research Matt Larson, and Chief Security, Stability, and Resiliency Officer John Crain with their observations of DNS resiliency and other COVID-19 related issues. They also discussed highlights from observations of DNS queries, along with news on community-based efforts to address DNS abuse. The webinar called on participants to join the ongoing efforts to combat DNS abuse. If you’ve missed this webinar, you can still watch it here <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> . You can send feedback or questions to our OCTO team at octo@icann.org, and share ideas for future assemblies at engagement@icann.org. A Reflection on the Post-COVID-19 Work in Eastern European and Central Asia By Mikhail Anisimov, Head of Global Stakeholder Engagement for Eastern Europe and Central Asia My ICANN journey as an org member started on 16 March 2020, around the time when COVID-19 was becoming a global crisis. As the world began facing one of the toughest challenges in modern history, all planned activities came to a halt. Face-to-face meetings and community gatherings are now no longer viable in the foreseeable future. As a result, we are looking at different ways to continue our work. When I was training for long distance running fifteen years ago, my trainer had advised this: If I had to slow down, it would be a good opportunity to look around and see where I am, and check how others are doing. Now that we all have to slow down, there is time to look around, and at our community. For us at ICANN, we will continue engaging with you, and raising awareness about ICANN’s work via the remote tools available to us. Although many regional events have been postponed, the preparations continue for the ones later on in the year. Organizers are still discussing agendas and potential speakers. Currently, it seems things will get busy as of September. But until then, we can look at what work we have to do now, prioritize the regional needs in light of the new situation, and continue to work together. In my new role, I look forward to working with you, our stakeholders across Eastern Europe and Central Asia! Please do not hesitate to contact me at mikhail.anisimov@icann.org for any questions or suggestions. I am here to support you. MEAC Regional Plan Receives Feedback through Public Comments To align with ICANN’s 2021-2025 Strategic Plan at the regional level, the Middle East and Adjoining Countries Strategy Working Group (MEAC-SWG) started work in October 2019 to develop a draft regional plan for the Middle East, summarizing the engagement priorities for the region. On 18 February 2020, the MEAC-SWG published the draft Middle East and Adjoining Countries (MEAC) Regional Plan for Fiscal Years 2021-2025 for Public Comment <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...>, which remained open until 3 April 2020. Complementing these efforts to receive community feedback on the regional plan, a webinar <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> was held on 18 March 2020, attended by 24 community members. The feedback received during this webinar and public comments were summarized and published in this staff report <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> on 17 April 2020. Next steps involve the incorporation of community feedback into the work towards finalizing the regional plan in May 2020. Then the MEAC-SWG will work on the year 1 action plan, which will be released in June 2020, in time to go into effect on 1 July 2020. This timeline might be affected due to the COVID-19, but we will keep the community updated in the event of any changes. Interested in our work? Please write to us at meac.swg@icann.org. ICANN67 Readouts in the Middle East Following our first virtual public meeting ICANN67, two readout sessions were organized in the Middle East: One for the Middle East region in general, and one specifically for Turkey. These sessions complemented our efforts in keeping the regional community updated and engaged in our work. ICANN67 Readout Session for the Middle East was held on 23 March and attended by 24 participants. The agenda <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> covered updates from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and At-Large, Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP), the new gTLD subsequent procedures PDP (SubPro), and Universal Acceptance. One key thing to note, was the positive feedback on the success of ICANN67, even exceeding some community expectations. You can find the recording here <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> . ICANN67 Readout Session for Turkey <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> was somewhat different, with additional topics covered by ICANN org members based in Istanbul. Some of these topics were Open Data Platform and highlights from the Root Server System Advisory Committee. The webinar was held on 22 April, with the participation of 39 people, out of which 19 were local community members. The recording is available here <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> . Interested in our future readout sessions and other activities? Join our mailing list for the Middle East <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> or mailing list for Turkey <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> . 27 Years of Internet in Turkey ISOC-Turkey celebrated the Internet’s 27th anniversary in Turkey by holding a webinar in collaboration with ICANN and Bilgi University Information Technology Law Institute. The event focused on how COVID-19 impacted the local Internet with regards to social, legal, and technical frameworks. Our Global Stakeholder Engagement team member in Istanbul, Seher Sagiroglu, presented on the Domain Name System during the time of COVID-19 and its implications. We were pleased to be a part of this celebration and look forward to further collaboration with the local community. ICANN’s New Regional Plan for Africa in the Making The work on ICANN’s Africa Regional Plan for Fiscal Years 2021-2025 kicked off in January 2020,. The draft document, an effort to align the regional plan with ICANN’s Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2021-2025, has been developed by the new African Strategy Working Group (ASWG 2020), and posted for Public Comment <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...>, which will remain open until 10 June 2020. Following the Public Comment period, we will consolidate the comments, incorporate them into an updated strategy document, and formally launch the final document on ICANN Africa Regional Plan for Fiscal Years 2021–2025 by the end of June 2020. This is the first time our regional plan is being developed fully remotely. We would like to thank our committed and versatile community for this success. ICANN67 Readout for Africa Attracts Over 50 Participants The ICANN67 Readout Webinar for Africa took place on 2 April, opening the ICANN67 Virtual Public Meeting experiences of African community members to discussion. Some participants shared challenges to participating in the virtual meeting, mainly those caused by the time zone difference. Participants lauded ICANN org for the quick work in transforming ICANN67 into a virtual meeting, and the inclusion of French interpretation, which provided inclusivity for many community members from Africa. In addition to community feedback, several Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee leaders gave updates and shared highlights from the meeting during the webinar. There was an encouraging turnout with 59 participants, and we hope to see many more of our community members attend our upcoming webinars. We appreciate our community members for their active participation even in these tough times. For those who missed it, here <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...> is the recording of the session. Welcoming Paul Muchene to the ICANN Family Paul Muchene has recently joined ICANN org as a Technical Engagement Specialist, reporting to the Adiel Akplogan, Vice President for Technical Engagement. Paul is based in Nairobi, Kenya, and will be working closely with the GSE Africa team. He will support the regional efforts for technical engagement and capacity development. Paul holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and is doing his master’s in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. New Learning Opportunities Now Available <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001TNgwtZ4HeFNu_BAj1-rFshRNI1rYrI4p6GG8G8acZ0JJT...>