Reporting on ICANN APAC Regional Plan Achievements for FY24Samiran Gupta

I'm pleased to invite you to read the Asia Pacific (APAC) Regional Plan Report for fiscal year 2024 (FY24). It features the contributions our APAC regional office made to ICANN's Strategic Plan, and I'd like to detail a few things that stand out.

First, however, I want to thank our community for working with and supporting us. Your dedication and determination has been as invaluable in FY24, as it has been since the launch of the APAC regional office in 2013. With 29 staff members, the APAC regional team is eager to collaborate with the growing community and leaders actively participating in ICANN's policy development process.

As we move into FY25, we continue to support the community in working to bring the next billion Internet users, many of whom do not speak English, online. To that end, we have already started our work around the New Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) Program: Next Round, including support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) and promoting the adoption of Universal Acceptance (UA). We are also working closely on the Applicant Support Program (ASP) and Registry Service Provider (RSP) Evaluation Program related to the Next Round.

As always, we look forward to working together with you on this and many other projects listed in the APAC Regional Plan.

Here are some highlights from the FY24 APAC Regional Plan Report:

• At-Large Structures and unaffiliated individual members from 25 economies attended the Asia Pacific Regional At-Large Organization (APRALO) 6th General Assembly.
• We co-hosted the APAC DNS Forum 2024* with Pengelola Nama Domain Internet Indonesia (PANDI). The event attracted 290 in-person attendees and 465 virtual participants over two days.
• The APAC GAC community held a workshop on Day Zero of the APAC DNS Forum 2024 to discuss topics including DNS Abuse, the Registration Data Request Service, the New gTLD Program: Next Round, and the multistakeholder model for Internet governance.
• For UA Day 2024,12 proposals were selected from the 30 submitted within APAC.
• We supported ICANN Meeting readout sessions conducted by communities in Australia, China, Japan, and Malaysia, as well as by APRALO.

• The 7th and 8th* annual regional Asia Pacific Internet Governance Academy (APIGA) were successfully held in July 2023 and July 2024, respectively.

  • Forty-two youths from 20 economies (2023) and 39 youths from 22 economies (2024) attended and completed the five-day Internet governance (IG) capacity-building program.
  • The success of the program is evident from the high rate (>50%) of alumni actively leading and/or participating in local and regional IG events. The 2023 cohort had 22 alumni currently active while the 2024 cohort had 20 such alumni.
  • For the first time, the APIGA program was expanded to include "local APIGA" programs.

* The FY24 APAC Regional Plan Report extends to include significant events which took place in July 2024.

List of new and re-elected leaders from the APAC region in alphabetical order (appointed in FY24):

• Anupam Agrawal, Board Member, Public Technical Identifiers
• Nicole Chan, Vice-Chair, Address Supporting Organization
• Manju Chen, Council Member, Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) and Expedited Policy Development Process on IDNs Liaison to the GNSO Council
• Justine Chew, Vice-Chair, At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) and ALAC Liaison to the GNSO
• Jennifer Chung, Council Member, GNSO
• Imran Hossen, Vice-Chair, Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) Measurement Working Group
• Hong Fu-Meng (Tom), Council Member, GNSO
• Tomslin Samme-Nlar, Vice-Chair, GNSO
• Balendu Sharma, Ambassador, UASG
• Wang Lang, Vice- Chair, Governmental Advisory Committee
• Jiankang Yao, Council Member, Country Code Names Supporting Organization