On February 11th during ICANN 52 in Singapore, The Domain Name Association (The DNA) hosted a breakfast meeting with its members and ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehadé. The 40+ minute video is worth a watch when you have some time, but I wanted to highlight a question asked by Jeff Sass, CMO of the .Club registry.

Jeff asked if ICANN is going to contribute some resources in order to help with “universal awareness.” Jeff mentioned that The DNA has two primary objectives – universal acceptance and universal awareness. Essentially, this means that the organization wants people to learn about the new gTLD domain names and wants to help promote the usage of the new domain names. It would make sense that ICANN, the organization that received many millions of dollars in application fees for the new TLDs, would help contribute to these ends.

Here’s how the question was answered:

This afternoon, ICANN sent out an email news alert to inform recipients about a scam that the organization recently learned about. Apparently, there are entities trying to sell fraudulent certificates with the ICANN logo on them that supposedly “are required to protect generic top-level domain names.” I am unsure about who the target audience for the scam is, but I want you to be aware of this.

I also recommend signing up for the ICANN newsletters, which will keep you in the loop about ICANN activities, meetings, and updates.

Here’s the full news alert that was sent to ICANN newsletter subscribers warning of this unauthorized activity:

The ICANN 50 meeting is being held in London this week. Although I chose not to attend, there are many people who are attending the meetings. As you might expect, some of the most interesting discussion doesn’t take place during the organized sessions, and similarly, some of the most candid discussion takes place via Twitter.

I am not inclined to listen to the ICANN meeting audio stream, but I am sort of following along via Twitter. If you search (or click on) the #ICANN50 hashtag, you can follow along with the meeting. Some participants have been sharing their candid thoughts about the discussions and others have been offering commentary based on the proceedings.

If you didn’t make the ICANN meeting but you are interested in

I want to share three domain industry infographics that were published by ICANN that I thought were interesting. If you are unsure of the role ICANN plays in the oversight, allocation, distribution, and management of domain names, these infographics can give you a bit more perspective. According to the blog post accompanying the release of the infographics, “ICANN has published infographics to illustrate various aspects of the system that plays such a crucial role in the global Internet.”

I am not involved with ICANN governance, and I don’t cover it all that much about ICANN on my blog as a result (perhaps to a fault). For those of us who don’t follow ICANN all that much, these infographics are helpful tools to learn more about what ICANN does as well as the roles of other types of companies involved in the business side of domain names.

There are three infographics that were published, and you can read them more clearly by clicking on the button on the bottom right to enlarge them to the size of the screen. You can also click on the links below each infographic to be taken to the page where more information about each is provided.