On December 12 in Moscow Rod Beckstrom, ICANN President and CEO met Alexander Panov, President of the Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development and Artem Ermolaev, Head of the Department of Information Technologies of the Moscow Government. George Sadowsky, member of the Board of Directors ICANN and members of the Board of the Foundation Vasiliy Dolmatov and Dmitry Burkov also took part in the meeting.

At the meeting a project for .MOSCOW and .МОСКВА TLDs implementation was presented to ICANN. In addition, questions regarding filling ICANN application for the domains were discussed.

During the visit to Moscow Rod Beckstrom also made introduction of the New gTLD Program, that would give a start to .MOSCOW and. МОСКВА top-level domains next year.

The head of ICANN confirmed the intention to start the New gTLD process 12th of January 2012. He noted that the program marks the third step of the significant expansion of the domain space. The first two were made in 2000 and 2004. The main objectives of New gTLD are to give users an additional choice and to make the domain name industry more competitive.

ICANN expects a lot of applicants would like to participate in New gTLD. In case there are more than 500 applications in 2012 they will be divided into batches for the further consideration. The principle of batch forming has not been defined yet, but ICANN has decided it will not depend on the date of filing the application. Rod Beckstrom emphasized that the need to protect the intellectual property, particularly trademarks, causes high costs and complexity of the process.