Antony Van Couvering former CEO of Minds + Machines, has been working in the Internet since 1996, especially in the domain name area.  He played a substantial role in early Internet governance, taking a leading role in the early days of the ccTLD constituency.  He is known for thorough, candid analyses and innovative solutions.

In 1999 Antony founded NameEngine, where he worked with many of the world’s top companies including American Express, Bridgestone-Firestone, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Goodyear, Intel, Kodak, and Viacom, and with IP law firms including Fross Zelnick, Ladas & Parry, and Brown Raysman. He sold NameEngine to VeriSign in December of 2001, and as part of the arrangement worked at VeriSign Digital Brand Management Services, handling their marketing and partnerships as well as developing their customer domain name management portal.

In 1997 he founded NetNames USA, the first firm to handle the domain name needs of larger companies. He built the company up to 30 employees before selling the company to NetBenefit, a publicly-traded technology company based in London.

During this time, Antony started and managed several top-level country-code domains, including .TM (Turkmenistan), .AS (American Samoa), .BT (Bhutan), and .PW (Palau)—all of these top-level domains are now run as public-private partnerships. Working with Jon Postel, he co-authored a proposal to reform the .US domain by de-emphasizing its old cumbersome geographical structure. Many of the suggestions in the proposal (though unfortunately not all) were later implemented when the .US domain was re-launched in 2002.

Antony’s deep involvement with Internet governance issues spans back to the first stirrings of reform. He was head of the Policy Advisory Body under the old gTLD-MoU structure, which later morphed (tortuously) into ICANN. Under that structure, as President of the International Association of Top-Level Domains, he chaired the meeting in Singapore that birthed the Domain Name Supporting Organization of ICANN, and was one of the governing council of the ccTLD constituency within ICANN, where he worked especially on government relations and ccTLD standards-setting.

Antony is also a speaker at meetings where Internet and intellectual property questions are aired. He has written on Internet and domain name issues for a variety of publications and in public discussion forums, and now writes mainly on his blog.