At the Westin St.Francis which was the venue of the meeting as also the Hotel for most ICANN participants, the Security team of President Clinton was unobtrusive and caused the least changes in our activities during the day. There were no unusual security checks on arrival at the Hotel on Saturday, no sign of any restrictions on any of us for the next few days leading to the day of the visit by the President. The only requirement was that all of us had to assemble at the Ball room an hour before the speech on Wednesday evening at 6 pm. All the participants queued up along the hallway, everyone without any discrimination, the queue started at the door of the ball room, wound its way along the stairway up to the end of the corridor on the floor above, everyone was on the queue for about 20 minutes, then it took about 5 minutes to reach the door of the ball room. No instructions to leave behind the laptops or mobile phones, no metal detectors, no frisking, the only instruction was to walk through, on a single line. It was very polite on the part of the President's Security Team to have organized this event so well, so unobtrusively. We all went in with our laptops and laptop bags and mobile phones and took our seats with least interference.
The following from the ICANN Web: President Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, praised the success of ICANN's multi-stakeholder model by pointing out that when he took office in 1992, there were about 50 Internet web sites. When he left office eight years later, there were roughly 36 million.
"We've seen an enormous amount of success," said President Clinton. "All of you played a role in that and I am grateful. We have in its new incarnation, the international community, governments and the private sector working together to get information to people all over the globe and I think it's a good model."
The Clinton administration was instrumental in 1998 in helping to form the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a unique non-profit multi-stakeholder organization to coordinate the global Internet addressing system.
President Clinton stressed the link between job creation and information technology during his address Wednesday evening to about thirteen hundred people at ICANN's on-going Silicon Valley-San Francisco international public meeting.
(Audio of the full speech soon to be posted with possible help from Joly MacFie of ISOC NY)
..
"We've seen an enormous amount of success," said President Clinton. "All of you played a role in that and I am grateful. We have in its new incarnation, the international community, governments and the private sector working together to get information to people all over the globe and I think it's a good model."
The Clinton administration was instrumental in 1998 in helping to form the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as a unique non-profit multi-stakeholder organization to coordinate the global Internet addressing system.
President Clinton stressed the link between job creation and information technology during his address Wednesday evening to about thirteen hundred people at ICANN's on-going Silicon Valley-San Francisco international public meeting.
(Audio of the full speech soon to be posted with possible help from Joly MacFie of ISOC NY)
..
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