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I wrote this history and analysis of domain tasting for the ICANN Business Constituency membership. It's by no means perfect but I thought I'd share it with those who would like a bit more color on the subject. "Present day 'Domain Tasting' has its roots in 2001 and 2002 when a small group of ambitious domain registrants persuaded two registrars to allow them to register large blocks of domain names for the purpose of establishing which names garnered type-in traffic..." more
Eurid, the operator of .EU, announced that it was cutting its wholesale price from 10 Euros to 5 Euros (about US$6.40 at today's rate). Is Eurid crazy? They're cutting the price in half! Eurid is acting as if unit cost should go down as sales increase! Haven't they learned the lesson... more
Bret Fausett's recent assessment of Tralliance's ".museum-like" wild card is just dead wrong. If Tralliance is so focused on monetizing its search results, why, then, would we not capitalize on the cornerstone of our registry, directory.travel? The fact is .travel is a sponsored space on the Net that is designed to do one thing and one thing only: Serve its constituency. For years the community has heard me at the open forum microphone reminding the ICANN board of directors that the industry was anxious to have its own domain to enable it to improve business efficiency... more
The 2004 new sTLD round brought about a new type of TLD in the form of .asia and .cat. As we always struggle for words to capture their nature, I call them "geoTLDs". Culture, language and ethnicity are also part of geography. Contrary to ccTLDs, geoTLDs do not have a territorial meaning. They are a wonderful addition to the Internet as they provide a way to demonstrate one's commitment to a community that is not defined by borders, yet linked to where the individual chooses to be. ...Will they be? They will, unless we do the wrong thing now. more
Starting from an old article (dated July 21st, 2005) published at Computer Business Review, (and following a more recent entry on GoDaddy's Bob Parson's blog) I would like to touch a bit more on the topic of 'traffic testing' or 'traffic tasting' of domains. This topic has been discussed at ICANN meetings since last year and is also referred to by the name of 'add/delete' or 'add/drop' storms... more
The Intellectual Property Constituency, meeting at the ICANN conference in Vancouver, was interested in increasing ICANN's budget not because they thought they deserved it, but because they wanted ICANN to actually enforce the rules on the books about fake registrations. Now there's some evidence about how prevalent that is. If there's any surprise here, it's that the numbers are so low. more
There is considerable coverage this morning (or this evening in Tunis) on the last minute WSIS deal struck yesterday. The gist of the coverage rightly reports that the U.S. emerged with the compromise they were looking for as the delegates agreed to retain ICANN and the ultimate U.S. control that comes with it (note that there is a lot in the WSIS statement that may ultimately prove important but that is outside the Internet governance issue including the attention paid to cybercrime, spam, data protection, and e-commerce). This outcome begs the questions -- what happened? And, given the obvious global split leading up to Tunis, what changed to facilitate this deal? more
mTLD's .mobi entered the root zone on Tuesday, quietly contrasted amidst all of the recent ICANN/VeriSign announcements. The .mobi mTLD is a Dublin, Ireland based joint venture between the Nokia Corporation, Vodafone Group Services Limited, and Microsoft. The .mobi domain was granted to service a sponsored community, consisting of: Individual and business consumers of mobile devices, services and applications; Content and service providers; Mobile operators; Mobile device manufacturers and vendors; IT technology and software vendors who serve the mobile community, and there are numerous benefits of .mobi to this community. more
James Seng, my good colleague in APEET, said: "...Chiao called .ASIA 'more or less like a joint venture among APxx organizations'. I say nonsense!" When I say more or less, I mean more or less... On this .ASIA entry, I've intended to use the language carefully at this moment 'cos I know someone will be watching... more
After releasing .travel and .jobs (hey, steve.jobs up for bidding!), ICANN said they will look at .xxx and .asia next. (via Chiao) "Vint Cerf: ...of those, we have had fairly extensive discussion about .asia and .xxx. We continue to evaluate those. The others will be attended to as we can get to them. But i want to say for the record that we will attempt within the next 30 days to come to a conclusion one way or the other about .asia and .xxx so these will be on a board call sometime within that period." Chiao called .ASIA "more or less like a joint venture among APxx organizations". I say nonsense! Don't let appearance fool you. more
Yesterday was the deadline for the submissions of responses to the .NET re-bid RFP. As of my last count, there are five companies that I am aware of that submitted proposals for the .NET rebid. Three of these were quite publicly announced, Afilias, Denic, and Verisign. The other two bidders are Multi-Stakeholder groups. Sentan and Core++. Sentan appears to be a Joint Venture between .jp and Neulevel, and Core++ is ISC, Telfonica, and .br, with participation from Core, Nida (.kr), and .zaDNA (.za). more
There's a thread on NANOG to the effect that Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, had its domain name 'panix.com' hijacked from Dotster over to MelbourneIT and it has pretty well taken panix.com and its customers offline. Looks like this may be among the first high-profile unauthorized transfer under the new transfer policy. It begs the question, despite the existence of the dispute policy under the new system, what provisions should there be for a situation like this where every hour causes untold damage to the party in question... more
I am writing this note in order to express my concern about an impending change in the root of the Domain Name System (DNS) and two of the largest Top Level Domains (TLDs). I am concerned that there is a risk of disruption to the net that has not been adequately evaluated and I am concerned that this change is being deployed without adequate monitoring or safeguards. more
More than 200 leaders from government, business and civil society attended the Global Forum on Internet Governance, held on 25 and 26 March 2004 and organized by the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Task Force. The forum, held at United Nations Headquarters in New York, was intended, according to a UN press release, "to contribute to worldwide consultations to prepare the ground to a future Working Group on Internet Governance to be established by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which is to report to the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (Tunis, 2005)". more
Sonia Arrison, a director of the Center for Technology Studies at the California-based non-profit Pacific Research Institute, writes an interesting op-ed piece in the Internet news publication CNET News.com. She argues that the job of privatizing the domain name system should be completed and that market forces should control registry services such as SiteFinder deployed by VeriSign for about three weeks in September...While not a position I would agree with, as I would prefer more government control and additional regulation, it is definitely insightful and well written. She makes some interesting quotes... more
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