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ICANN's new gTLD program was designed in part to boost innovation. The thinking was: give people the canvas and let them paint in new and fascinating ways, with no set direction... and paint they will. Now that the new gTLD dream has become reality, new uses and business models are already emerging to prove this theory correct. One of the industries in which new gTLD innovation is making itself felt is traditional advertising. This is a sector that has been turned upside down by the Internet revolution of the last decade. more
John Yunker reporting in Global by Design: "Google has gone live with one if its many Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs): ???. I want to emphasize here that this is a top-level IDN - that is, the equivalent of a .com or .org. This TLD, according to Google, stands for 'everyone.' So you could in effect register 'someword.everyone,' which sounds a bit odd to me but I'm not Japanese. And, frankly, the Japanese have not been blessed with much in the way of IDN options up to this point." more
The ICANN Board has approved the community recommendation that "the provision of Thick Whois services should become a requirement for all gTLD registries, both existing and future." We have long supported the migration from 'thin' to 'thick' Whois, which will improve both quality and ease of access to Whois data, thereby further facilitating intellectual property enforcement online. The ICANN community has debated the merits of migration from 'thin' to 'thick' Whois for years, as part of the larger Whois Review process. more
With so many new gTLDs moving into their respective general availability periods, and incidents of cybersquatting beginning to appear, many companies are now looking towards the URS (Uniform Rapid Suspension) as a possible solution for quickly remediating abuse. As a reminder, domains that are the subject of a successful URS ruling are suspended for the remainder of the registration term, or can be renewed for an additional year at the current registrar. more
Donuts is an applicant that threw the entire domain name industry into uproar due to the number of applications it submitted: 307 in total. It is hardly surprising that whenever new gTLDs are mentioned in the media that Donuts are mentioned alongside due to shear number of applications that they have submitted. There are dozens of articles in the media mixing information and opinions about Donuts. Often, they address the benefits to those registrants who are excited about the possibility of acquiring a new domain name and the threats to those who have an existing .COM domain name portfolio. more
There may still be a few security practitioners working in the field who didn't have a copy of Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography on their bookshelf the day they started their careers. Bruce's practical guide to cryptographic algorithms, key management techniques and security protocols, first published in 1993, was a landmark volume for the newly emerging field, and has been a reference to developers ever since. more
Minds + Machines was the first "new gTLD portfolio applicant" I spotted early in 2008, when .PARIS started being mentioned. Then came a few other projects like .HORSE and later .VODKA. Being French, my vision of good new gTLD suffixes may be slightly different to those native English speakers. Therefore, I favour some TLDs such as .SURF and .ART over some clearly English terms others such as .HORSE. more
The European Commission is not a big fan of the David versus Goliath ICANN new gTLD auction scenario. On December 12 last year, ICANN released a set of revised public auction rules. These auctions are presented as the avenue of last resort for resolving new gTLD contentions. As is ICANN's custom, the rules were put out for public comment. The EU submitted its statement on the very last day of the comment reply period. more
I've often found truth in the famous George Santayana quote, "Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." That's an apt warning for what is currently happening - again - with the hundreds of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) that are launching ... and failing to work as expected on the Internet. First, a quick refresher: As most CircleID readers know, in the early 2000s, seven new gTLDs were launched: .AERO, .BIZ, .COOP, .INFO, .MUSEUM, .NAME and .PRO. Aside from Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs), these were the first top-level changes to the DNS since the early days of the Internet. more
The first "Middle East DNS Forum" kicks off on this coming Monday, February 3, 2014, in Dubai. The event is hosted by the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the UAE and was organized jointly by ICANN and the Internet Society. The event aims to bring together people from across the region to look at opportunities to advance the domain name industry within the region. more
Poker players say if you can't spot the fish within your first 15 minutes at the table, you're the fish. With that in mind, I'm tempted to ask ICANN President Fadi Chehade who's the fish in the high-stakes game of global Internet governance we're now playing. In 2013, ICANN dramatically changed its course in the global Internet governance debate. For a decade ICANN largely stayed out of the game, allowing stakeholders to defend the multi-stakeholder model where private sector and civil society are on equal footing with governments. But in 2013 ICANN went on the offensive... more
2013 was one of the most exciting and forward-looking year for our Industry, and here we are, right at the beginning of 2014. Shall we look into the crystal ball and see what the horizon up ahead likely holds for us? We hope and foresee that a lot of everyone's hard work will eventually begin to pay off this year. We also believe that the industry will witness a huge change; opportunities and possibilities that were never before thought of. more
How do you keep track of what new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs) are now available? Particularly when there seem to be new ones being announced weekly? Because I've written about newgTLDs here previously, someone recently asked me those questions... Now, these are the newgTLDs that have been delegated by ICANN, meaning that they now appear in the "root zone" of DNS. This does NOT mean that you can go right now and register a domain underneath one of these new TLDs. more
ICANN has recently stated that it will allow the public to register plural and singular gTLDs that are variants of words already registered as domain names. .Books will be able to join the currently allocated .book, and .pet will be able to join .pets. Of course, a pair like .blue and .blues, two words that look alike but have different meanings, isn't at issue here. The focus is just plurals and singulars. But that leaves plenty of room for trouble, and ICANN has to tackle some tough questions now, before the policy launch. more
January 2014. The first registry contracts have been signed. The first Sunrise priority registration periods have been opened. The new gTLD program is well on the way. So maybe now, at last, we can start to find out the real costs of opening up the Internet root? And how much revenue doing so has brought ICANN! Short answer: ICANN has taken in USD 344.958 million from the first round of new gTLD applications. The figure comes from the first of ICANN's quarterly financial statements, covering the three months up until September 30th. more
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