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Istanbul in Turkey hosts the first office for internet hub in Africa
| By Maureen Chigbo | May 20. 2013 @ 01:00 GMT
ISTANBUL, Turkey, will host the first office for internet hub in Africa. The Istanbul hub office will be led by David Olive, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN’s, vice president for Policy Development. A number of current ICANN staff will relocate to Istanbul in the coming months while local staff will also be hired.
Fadi Chehadé, president and chief executive officer, ICANN, said on April 29, that this was a significant moment in the evolution of ICANN as it prepares to spread its operational functions across three global headquarters – Los Angeles (current location), Istanbul and Singapore.
“ICANN is becoming increasingly international in terms of our outlook, policies and the makeup of our staff. Now, our global hub strategy will take our internationalism to an improved operational level. These hub offices will become part of the core fabric of ICANN. We looked closely at a number of possible global locations. We chose Istanbul because of the quality of its infrastructure, growing ICT sector, business-friendly environment and its close cultural and geographic proximity to Europe, the Middle-East and Africa,” said Chehadé.
“ICANN provides efficient and considered management of Internet’s Domain Name System, and today marks the latest step in the organisation’s journey of extending its global influence,” said Binali Yıldırım, Turkey’s minister of transport, maritime affairs, and communications. He added: “The ICANN European HUB is being established in Istanbul to act as an epicenter that will help shape internet policy to deliver a more connected community across Europe, Middle East and Africa.”
ICANN currently is overseeing the implementation of more than 1,400 new generic top level domains, gTLDs, representing one of the biggest changes to the Internet since its inception. The first wave of these domains will come online in the coming months. As a result of the massive expansion of the Domain Name System, DNS, ICANN too is expanding as it continues its mission to ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet.
To reach another person on the internet you have to type an address into your computer – a name or a number. That address has to be unique so that computers can know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination, we wouldn’t have one global internet. Formed in 1998, ICANN is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the internet’s unique identifiers.
ICANN doesn’t control content on the internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the internet. But through its coordination of the internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the internet.
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