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When ICANN launched the new gTLD program five years ago, Amazon eagerly joined the process, applying for .AMAZON and its Chinese and Japanese translations, among many others. Our mission was -- and is -- simple and singular: We want to innovate on behalf of our customers through the DNS. ICANN evaluated our applications according to the community-developed Applicant Guidebook in 2012; they achieved perfect scores. more
ICANN has posted a request by Afilias for a new registry service in relation to "abusive" domains in dot-info. While in general the proposal is motivated by good intentions, the devil is in the details. While most folks (including myself) probably care very little about the .info TLD, my concern is that any bad implementation in .info might be copied or used as a precedent in other more important TLDs, in particular .com run by VeriSign. more
This is the second part of a 2-part series article arguing that the decentralization of the Internet will allow the DNS to recede to its earlier, uncontroversial role, before all the lawsuits and screaming matches at ICANN board meetings. To read the first part click here.
Another source of pressure on the DNS was the system's shifting role from one that was primarily mnemonic to one that was meaningful as well. The difference is subtle, but important. Consider the phrase "Every good boy deserves fudge", which music students sometimes learn to help them memorize what notes correspond to the lines of the treble clef. The phrase is helpful, but its content -- boys deserving fudge -- has nothing to do with music. It's mnemonic, but not meaningful. more
PayPal's corporate communications director confirmed that the company has sold the domain X.com back to its previous owner, Elon Musk. more
Neustar, the registry operator of the .US domain and NTIA have reversed course, allowing the inclusion of previously restricted "seven dirty words" from future .US domain name registrations. more
I'm writing this column in November, and that means that it is time for the traveling circus known as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to come down to earth, unpack its tents and sell tickets for its annual song and dance routine. The script for this year's show has been changed, and after being excluded from the main arena last year at the Athens gig, the headline act of "Critical Internet Resources" is taking a starring role this year in Rio. Some folk are even saying that it is the single most contentious issue to be scheduled at this year's IGF show. So what are "Critical Internet Resources" anyway? If folks are going to spend all this time, energy and carbon emissions traveling to Rio to talk on this topic, then wouldn't it be helpful to understand what it means in the first place? There are probably a number of ways to answer this question, so in this heavily opinionated column I'd like to look at the range of possible answers to this question. more
Many law firms and Intellectual Property departments in charge of managing brands and domain names for their customers or businesses must have had that same question: "how do I protect a brand online under the ICANN new gTLD program?" The first potential answer that is usually offered up to an enquirer is: "the Trademark Clearinghouse does that". As time goes by, and the rules under which the Trademark Clearinghouse operates are better defined and understood this answer becomes clearly fallacious. more
Attacks on ICANN are coming from several different directions, and the list of concerns includes "cybercrime and protection of intellectual property rights."... First, it's not apparent to me that any government can "control" the internet -- and it's even less likely that that control can happen through the DNS. The most that governments will do will be to build walls between nations, requiring their ISPs to point only to approved sites. (China is well on its way to doing this already.) That's not controlling the Internet, that's creating different, national Internets. more
Yesterday, The Epoch Times reported on leaked internal Chinese government documents revealing that premier Xi Jinping has "personally directed the communist regime to focus its efforts to control the global Internet, displacing the influential role of the United States." Xi's ultimate aim is for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to wield "discourse power" over communications and discussions on the global geopolitical stage by controlling content on the Internet. more
It is pretty common knowledge now that domain name growth started to drop around two years ago and is falling still. At this rate there is every chance that TLDs that have only ever seen growth will start to see a decline sometime in the next few years. What follows is a theory on where that growth has gone. It is widely stated that the greater choice provided by hundreds of new gTLDs means that demand is dissipating across them and that's where the growth has gone. more
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series of blog posts I described the need for a registration operations industry association. At the end of Part 2, I wrote that Part 3 will describe "an opportunity for everyone that's interested in discussing this topic in a live environment." The large number of people attending ICANN 51 in Los Angeles presents the best chance of discussion with many potential participants being in the same place at the same time. Let's take advantage of that proximity. more
As a seasoned internet user, even an old 'Domainer', I was there when ICANN launched the first round of New TLDs. I remember the criticism we received from the media back then. We were invited to countless roundtable discussions, press conferences, and local internet events at which we were expected to answer the key media question: "Why are new TLDs necessary?" Dot BIZ, .INFO, and four more were the test bed new TLDs -- I represented .BIZ in EMEA. more
One of the major takeaways from the Web Globalization Report Card is the importance of providing "front doors" to your localized websites. These doors begin with the addresses themselves, which may not include the .com domain. In fact, I'd recommend that most localized websites not use the .com domain, as this is an overloaded domain. This article looks at the many ways brands are creating more localized addresses, beginning with country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). more
At the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2024 in Riyadh, the Internet Standards, Security and Safety Coalition (IS3C) released a new tool: 'To deploy or not to deploy, that's the question. How to convince your boss to deploy DNSSEC and RPKI'. In this report, IS3C advocates mass deployment of these two newer generation, security-related internet standards, as their deployment contributes significantly to the safety and security of all internet users. more
Much of the domain industry has seen a huge surge in sales of 2, 3 & 4 character sales. More specifically numeric domain sales are ever increasing mostly driven by Chinese buyers. As such domain marketplaces are utilizing and developing stronger connections in China to foster this growth even further while creating awareness for why this is occurring. When talk turns to economic and trade growth, China is never left out of the conversation. This talk extends to the domain market as well. more
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