The eco Names & Numbers Competence Group focussed on the ICANN78 Meeting in Hamburg in 2023. Together with the City of Hamburg and DENIC, the eco Association was the proud co-host of the first ICANN meeting to be held in Germany in over 20 years. Around 2,800 international visitors came to the conference in the Hanseatic city.

In close cooperation with its members and ICANN, eco used various activities and events throughout the year to draw attention to the importance of the Domain Name System (DNS) and ICANN for an open, secure and resilient Internet, as well as the role played by the multi-stakeholder model.

In April, the geoTLD.group organised a full-day Universal Acceptance Technical Training Day in cooperation with ICANN and eco. Thomas Rickert and Ronald Schwärzler from the geoTLD.group summarised the most important points in a video.

In May, ICANN and eco hosted a dialogue in Berlin. An exclusive “Roundtable Luncheon for Business” at the Adlon was followed in the evening by a reception with a panel discussion on current regulatory issues, which took place at eco member I/P/B Berlin.

A two-day DNSSEC hands-on workshop in September at DE-CIX in Frankfurt was also on the agenda as part of the accompanying programme.

To kick off the meeting, the members of the Names & Numbers Forum organised a Day Zero workshop on the most important topic of the year, the Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2), with a focus on Article 28. For a whole day, industry experts and members discussed with representatives of the European Commission how the domain industry will be affected by the directive in the future and how the directive should be implemented. The results were summarised in a comprehensive report. The Competence Group had previously made its views known to the public with an eco statement on Article 28 of the NIS2 Directive.

eco’s Ladies in Tech initiative also naturally availed of the ICANN78 meeting to network with the DNS Women and exchange ideas in a joint session, followed by a reception.

The ISPCP applied ICANN meeting in Hamburg for its annual outreach event. Chaired by eco, eco Board Member Klaus Landefeld and ETNO Managing Director Lise Fuhr discussed the fair share debate, while Michal Havelka from Whalebone and Peter Thomassen from deSEC gave the community an update on DNS4EU.

eco’s activities around ICANN78 were accompanied by surveys on the distribution of domains, the need for further geoTLDs and the independent administration of the Internet. In the German media, there were also reports on NDR with Thomas Rickert, Tagesschau, WELT and Oliver Süme on Deutschlandfunk. eco also featured the ICANN78 meeting on its own German-language podcast.