Official opening ceremony address. This got quite build up yesterday. Our orientation lead compared listening to ICANN CEO, Fadi Chehade, to listening to Steve Jobs. He certainly has the onstage strut.

Next off to a brief on the new Global Top Level Domains; .shop, .club etc.

1930 applications at $US185,000 each.

Round 3 for Monday, Internet Governance mediated by Chris Dispain, ICANN Board member and auDA CEO.

The IGF (Internet Governance Forum) has certainly garnered unilateral support as a contributor to the multi-stakeholder model.

I find myself sitting next an official ICANN Fellow from Ghana – I must say that the African Internet community is very well represented here.

ICANN Strategy follows for session 4, planning the next stages of multi-stakeholder governance.

Worth noting that the entire panel is wearing lapel pins promoting 1net.org.

Vint Cerf predicts that URLs (domain addresses) will be supplanted, Paul Mockapetris agrees that DNS will eventually be replaced as well.

But wait there’s more: GNSO – ccNSO joint meeting. This is a formal exchange between two of ICANN’s organisations, one focused on Generic domain names, GNSO (e.g. .com, .biz), the other focused on Country Code domain names, (e.g. .au. .nz). The acronyms are thick in the air. Thank god the session concludes with drinks.

I get to catch up with a mini Aussie contingent including Paul Szyndler, Cheryl Langdon-Orr, Justin Myles of Centr and David Cake of Electronic Frontiers Australia.

An amazing evening follows where I catch up with a local friend, Gabriel Grosvald,  whom I met in Mexico 18 years ago! He takes me to a local restaurant (yes, grilled meat, what else?) and bar, together with his girlfriend and Philetto, a local comedian Gabo manages.