New TLDs

Do You Care About Your Privacy?

ICANN is currently going through a complicated process in order to introduce more Top-Level Domains (TLDs). While the launch of new TLDs is something that a lot of people will welcome it is not without its issues. One of the areas that has been receiving quite a bit of attention is in relation to intellectual property rights. So what has this got to do with privacy? more

Will ICANN Drop Its Biggest Revolutionary New Idea? Five Reasons

ICANN, the Internet Authority is up against the wall, and here are the top five reasons for which it may simply drop its greatest revolutionary idea of offering a brand new type of a designer domain name to fit the next generation of widely expanded Internet and cyber realities of tomorrow. This new proposed platform will surely revolutionize the marketing and branding for big and small businesses around the world, offering highly affordable tools for global reach than ever before but the strong opposition would like to kill this idea. more

Per Capita, Netherlands Is the World’s ccTLD Leader

The Netherlands, a country with just 16 million people, accounts for more than 3 million ccTLDs. That's an impressive ratio of people to domains -- one ccTLD per 5.3 people -- and it the highest ratio of any country with more than five million residents. Germany comes in a close second, with a ratio of roughly one ccTLD per 6.5 people... more

Working With ICANN’s IRT and Not Against is in Order

ICANN realized during the Mexico City public meeting that its draft proposals for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) did not take sufficient account of the trademark problems that might arise if the new top level domains become havens for cybersquatters. ICANN sensibly asked the trademark and brand owners to propose rules and procedures that might address these problems... more

ICANN IRT Report Open for Comment With Short Timeframe?

The Intellectual Property Constituency's draft report on trademark issues is now available for comment. The draft report was put together behind closed doors, which would appear to go against the normal policy development process at ICANN, which is quite worrying. Its contents, however, are even more disturbing... more

New gTLD Comment Period Closes

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been holding a public comment period on the second draft of the new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) handbook. This period was due to close yesterday. Prior to yesterday afternoon there was a healthy number of comments, but in the past 24 hours a significant number of new comments have been submitted... more

Comments on ICANN’s Studies on New Proposed TLDs

I outline some general critical comments on the recent commissioned reports for ICANN's proposed introduction of new top-level domain names (TLDs)... The reports cite seminal papers in economics, but the papers' applicability here is dubious. For example, for economists a "good" is a product intended for consumption, which is a different sort of animal than a financial investment. more

ICANN’s Economic Reports: Finding the Missing Pieces to the Puzzle

The ICANN community has been especially concerned about the economic reports used by ICANN to justify its decisions as to whether, and how, to implement applications for new gTLDs. Among the greatest sources of concern has been the failure of ICANN staff to issue a complete public response to the ICANN Board's October 2006 demand that ICANN Staff commission economic studies about gTLDs... more

The DNSSEC Industry Coalition Meets to “Make It So”

The DNSSEC Industry Coalition conducted its first face to face meeting on Friday, March 13, 2009 at Google's Washington, DC office. Google's fun filled meeting room was packed with organizations that share a keen interest in DNS Security through the implementation of DNSSEC. more

WIPO’s Misleading Release

The World Intellectual Property Organization put out a release yesterday trumpeting an eight percent increase in domain name disputes handled by WIPO. In 2008 there were 2329 complaints filed with WIPO, the most ever. WIPO uses the increase to raise questions about the possible increase in the number of available generic top-level domains... more

Al Gore Backs Creation of New .eco Domain Name, Calls It Truly Exciting Opportunity

The former US vice president, Al Gore, is backing the creation of a new green .eco domain name. Dot Eco LLC, the applicant for the new .eco Top-Level Domain (TLD), announced during the ICANN meetings in Mexico City that it has entered into an integrated partnership with former Vice President Al Gore and his philanthropy, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to secure and promote the .eco TLD. "We fully support Dot Eco LLC in its efforts to secure the .eco top level domain through the ICANN application process and look forward to working with Dot Eco LLC to promote .eco. This is a truly exciting opportunity for the environmental movement and for the internet as a whole," said Al Gore. more

Deeply, Deeply Flawed Economic Report and Analysis of New gTLDs Posted by ICANN

The reports and analysis by Dr. Dennis Carlton are deeply, deeply flawed. I will prepare a long rebuttal to it in the coming weeks, but wanted to go on the record early as to its weaknesses. The analysis appears to be based on a very limited review of the market for domain names, and utilizes little actual data. It fails to even consider how nuanced the market for domain names has become, and how registry operators can exploit those nuances, including tiered-pricing... more

European Commission Can Register ‘galileo.eu’, Even if It Deprives Owner of Identical Trademark

When it drafted the .eu regulation EC 874/2004, the Commission reserved for itself a (long) list of domain names. One of them was galileo.eu. For obvious reasons, Galileo Lebensmittel GmbH & Co. KG claimed before the Courf of First Instance that the Commission's decision to reserve galileo.eu should be annulled... more

The DNSSEC Groundswell

It's been 15 long years since the standard for DNSSEC was developed and sadly adoption has been painfully low until recently, thanks to Dan Kaminsky, the infamous Internet Researcher who indentified that gaping hole in the DNS. The discovery of the fundamental flaw in DNS sparked industry wide attention! Every day, we move a little closer to widespread DNSSEC adoption, so I thought I'd take a moment and highlight some of the most notable milestones... more

Another Look at the Latest Domain Name Numbers and Trends

There are now 177 million domain names across all top-level domains, which is an increase by 16% (24 million domain names) compared to a year ago. These numbers are from the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly report from VeriSign about the growth of the domain name industry. In this review, Royal Pingdom has broken down the numbers in order to demonstrate the growth of both gTLDs (generic TLDs, such as .com and .net) and ccTLDs (country-code TLDs, such as .cn, .se, .uk and .us). more