 We're here at Wicked 2012 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Mr Nigel Hickson, who is Vice President for Europe for ICANN. Nigel, thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to start off by talking about this conference. This conference has been attracting a lot of attention. ICANN is no stranger to controversy. You've got a new leadership. I wanted to find out for you if that's been introducing a new spirit of collaboration. Well, absolutely. I think a new leadership always introduces new opportunities, new ways of doing things. Fadi Jihadi, of course, has got an Arabic background. He's a global player in many ways, and he is very keen to engage ICANN on the global stage, and we're delighted to be at this ITU conference. He came and spoke here. What was the feedback from that? Yeah, very positive. It was a difficult decision to an extent. ICANN is an organisation involved in the internet governance space, and ITU has long traditions in terms of telecommunications. Of course, we have different views on various things, but we recognise each other in the work we do, and therefore we decided on the gracious invitation of Hamid and Tore that we ought to come along and embrace the ITU. There's often been seen as a clash between the internet and the traditional telephone community. Given that cohabitation is pretty much an inevitable outcome, do you see a summit like this as very much bringing together of both sides? Yeah, I don't really see it as two sides. The ITU has got a fundamental responsibility for telecommunications, and the telecommunications layer is absolutely essential to global connectivity, and of course the work that the ITU have done on spectrum and on development and on standards is absolutely crucial. ICANN play in a slightly different field in terms of the domain name system, but we clearly need to cooperate, and this conference is very important. The ITU Secretary General has been making a big push recently for greater multi-stakeholder partnership and involvement in events like these. Do you think that this is a positive development? Yes, absolutely. Clearly the involvement of all players in this space is just crucial. I work for the UK government for 29 years, and we never pretended we had all the answers. No government has all the answers, and therefore it seems absolutely totally sensible to involve other players in your decision making process, and I'm very glad that the ITU is going down that road. Clearly there's some way to go, but I think the involvement of the business community and I know the Secretary General has been very warmly reaching out to civil society. I mean they might not feel they have a full role, but I think this is a trend in the right direction. You've been recently involved in a big project involving top level domain names. How has that been going for you? Yes, this is the new generic top level domain program, so basically at the moment there's 22 generic top level domains, and we're expanding that considerably. There were 1,930 applications for new generic top level domains. At the end of the day, when they start coming into being sometime during next year, there probably won't be that many, but it will be a significant project. I'm glad you asked the question because it's significant being here talking about this, because the new program, especially in that it allows names of Arabic script, names in Russian script, in Cyrillic, in Indian script, Chinese script. It's an ideal way to globalise the internet. Finally, what do you hope will be the outcome of this conference? I hope we reach a result. I think we need to reach a result. The ITR is 1988. Come on, you know, they're out of date. We need to update them. We need to be able to show that the ITU is relevant, that it's fostering broadband access, that it's fostering competitive markets, that it's fostering security. I think there is a positive outcome of this. Nigel Hickson, thank you very much indeed for being here today. Thank you.