Earlier this week, ICANN issued its 2007 annual report, a slickly put-together PDF document outlining the organization’s goals, achievements, and initiatives for the new year.

While not exactly red-hot news (overviews of board membership changes, bylaw fulfillment, litigation status, that sort of thing), the report is interesting reading, and anyone involved in the domain registration or web hosting industries should be aware of the changes being planned by this very powerful organization. (As it turns out, ICANN has some ambitious projects in the works.)

But it’s hard to read the gushingly enthusiastic report without having a skeptical moment or two. It’s absolutely understandable for any organization to be self-promoting in the reports it issues to the public, but there are perhaps more than a few souls who might take issue with some of these claims. For example, one cannot dispute the facts behind ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey’s words that ICANN “now produces more up-to-date and accessible information that allows a wider range of people to participate in our processes” — and yet, some people might single out the words “more” and “wider” as indicative that the organization still has a long road ahead of it before it achieves the kind of transparency it seems to be looking for.

For the most part, though, the report focuses on ICANN’s initiatives for the future, which are always good to know given its huge influence. Per Mr. Twomey’s pages, ICANN

made enormous progress on two developments that will change the Internet as we know it: the creation of new generic toplevel domains (new gTLDs) and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) concluded almost two years of policy development work to develop a fair and efficient process for introducing new gTLDs. The GNSO’s work was guided by advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee and by ICANN’s core values of fostering choice and competition while preserving the security and stability of the Internet. The GNSO recommendations will be considered by the ICANN Board of Directors in early 2008. Pending approval by the Board, a big staff priority for 2008 will be the implementation of new gTLDs.

On Internationalized Domain Names, we passed several major milestones that bring us closer to making a truly multilingual Internet a reality. The first was the successful laboratory testing of IDNs in November 2006. This paved the way for the next and most exciting step: inserting test IDNs in 11 languages in the root zone. While these “example.test” domain names are for evaluation only, they are an important step towards the expected deployment of IDN TLDs in 2008.

Read the entire report here, and feel free to sound off in the comments section.

Happy holidays!