ICANN is MIA on .XYZ

By now anyone who's part of the domain investment or broader ICANN community is aware of the curious saga of the recently launched .XYZ registry. Soon after its young CEO boldly stated, "we hope to reach 1 million .XYZ registrations in the first year and 5 million registrations in the first three years", the registry launched with a remarkable total of nearly 18,000 registrations on its first day, a total that has quickly grown to more than 100,000. But it was soon noted that "the zone files showed that over 70% of all .XYZ registrations had been made at NetworkSolutions...

The IETF’s *Other* Diversity Challenge

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the standards body for the Internet. It is the organization that publishes and maintains the standards describing the Internet Protocol (IP -- versions 4 and 6), and all directly related and supporting protocols, such as TCP, UDP, DNS (and DNSSEC), BGP, DHCP, NDP, the list goes on, and on... But how do they do that? How does the IETF produce documents, and ensure that they are high quality, relevant, and influential?

How to Turn a Closed Generic gTLD Into a Restricted One

As the New gTLD Program has rolled out over the course of the past few years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has made a number of program changes along the way. One of these changes disallows closed, generic gTLD applications, such as Amazon's application for .BOOK. Now, applicants for closed generics must decide how to proceed: whether to open their generic strings to the public, limit registrations to a defined portion of the public, withdraw the application, or sell it.

Welcome to the .uk - Unless You’re Not in the UK

The .uk launch today has been getting quite a bit of press coverage. Getting a big name celebrity like Stephen Fry to endorse the shorter namespace is also a nice win for Nominet. As part of the PR around the launch they've also put out a big welcome sign near Heathrow airport... It'a a bit ironic though as .uk isn't exactly welcoming to non-UK individuals or companies.

New gTLD Community Objection Standing Analysis

The notion of community has been debated since the inception of the ICANN New gTLD Program. However, as far as we know no one has yet taken a holistic approach to analyzing the wealth of information generated by the experts who participated in the ICANN New gTLD community objection process. As a community applicant for .eco on behalf of the environmental community, Big Room Inc. has a keen interest in understanding how independent experts are interpreting the ICANN notion of community.

NANOG 61 - Impressions of Some Presentations

The recent NANOG 61 meeting was a pretty typical NANOG meeting, with a plenary stream, some interest group sessions, and an ARIN Public Policy session. The meeting attracted some 898 registered attendees, which was the biggest NANOG to date. No doubt the 70 registrations from Microsoft helped in this number, as the location for NANOG 61 was in Bellevue, Washington State, but even so the interest in NANOG continues to grow...

Happy World IPv6 Launchiversary! Two Years Of Remarkable IPv6 Growth

Happy Launchiversary! It's been two years since World IPv6 Launch in 2012, the day many major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world started permanently enabling IPv6 for their products and services. In the last two years, participation and interest in IPv6 has only grown. Today nearly 250 network operators around the world are participating in World IPv6 Launch measurements, and we continue to see increased IPv6 deployment by network operators, websites, and home router vendors.

.Paris Takes Over the Eiffel Tower

Last night there was apparently a big event in Paris at the Eiffel Tower (Champs de Mars) and there were plenty of photos shared by the brands, companies and people in attendance.
But what's really impressive is that they were able to get the message up on the side of one of Paris' best known monuments -- the Eiffel Tower. How? The City of Paris is behind the domain extension - so that's "how".

Senate Appropriators Add IANA Language As House Requests GAO Study and Civil Society Opposes Shimkus

The Senate Appropriations Committee just reported out on June 5th its version of the Commerce-Justice-State Departments Appropriations bill for FY 15. In the course of its deliberations it added a consensus amendment on the IANA transition offered by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE)... Parsing the amendment's language, the requirement that NTIA conduct a thorough review and analysis of any proposed IANA transition plan amounts to telling it to do its job properly; implicit in this requirement is that the analysis be shared with Congress.

A Very Good Week for Applicant Famous Four Media

Multiple new gTLD applicant Famous Four Media is having a very good week. "FFM", the name that they now use for the company to be acknowledged, is getting closer to an important period of its development: the General Availability, also known as "GA", for three of its domain name extension. Added to this, another announcement was made to make it known.