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The Privately-owned Melbourne-based company AusRegistry that won a four-year contract on July 2002 from AuDA to provide registry services for Australia's .au ccTLD has reported an earning of $9 Million -- beating its original expectation by $3.5 Million. This earning comes from 52,640 new registration of .au, .org.au, .com.au, .asn.au, .net.au, and .id.au -- the majority portion consisting of .com.au. (pdf report)
AusRegistry has also recently won a contract to operate the registry for Solomon Islands domain names (.sb), and negotiating with five other countries that reportedly includes one "significant" ccTLD. The company is also interested in being authorized by the Australian Communications Authority to run trials of ENUM: "It just makes sense to do that, given the strength of the .au database...the cost to us is minimal, given we've got the existing infrastructure," said the AusRegistry's managing director Adrian Kinderis. [Source: news.com.au] more
ICANN continues at its snail's pace on introduction of new top-level domains. At the Montreal meeting, staff sprung this RFP for new sponsored TLDs. As if "a few" and "sponsored" weren't limitation enough, it further narrowed the applicant pool to those who had applied unsuccessfully as sponsored TLDs in November 2000. more
ICANN has just submitted its seventh status report under ICANN/US Government Memorandum of Understanding to United States Department of Commerce (DoC) titled: "Report by ICANN to United States Department of Commerce Re: Progress Toward Objectives of Memorandum of Understanding". The report provides a review of recent ICANN developments including... more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) concluded its Montreal meeting with a landmark agreement that cements the relationship between ICANN and the worldwide community of country-code top-level domain registries. "Today's agreement represents both a historic achievement for the ICANN process, and a powerful vote of confidence in the newly reformed ICANN 2.0," said Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and CEO.
Finalizing four years of dialogue and negotiation, the creation of the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) heralds a new era of cooperative and productive relations among ICANN and the country-code domain registries. The structure and rules for ICANN's new ccNSO were endorsed by domain registry organizations and individual managers representing every region and populated continent. "Today's agreement is a testament to how ICANN is seen as a forum the international Top Level Domain administrators can come together and jointly address issues," said Twomey. more
John LoGalbo - a "law enforcement" type - is complaining how long it takes him to issue a subpoena. My thought is this: Why should our privacy suffer because his organization can't get its procedural act together?
I am incensed - he is simply stating a conclusion that his targets are "criminals" and that, to go after them, he wants to throw away all legal processes and procedures - so much for the fourth, fifth, sixth, and fourteenth amendments. more
The Internet and corresponding online world have radically expanded the landscape Intellectual Property professionals need to investigate when monitoring for possible infringements of their trademarks, brands and other intangible assets. With few barriers to entry, coupled with the ability to operate anonymously, the Internet has rapidly become a significant target for unscrupulous individuals hoping to take advantage of the easily accessible Intellectual Property assets of legitimate businesses. more
Two controversial issues which were on the agenda of the Montreal ICANN meetings creating some irritation: the way of planning to create a country code support organization (ccNSO), and the discussions around the purpose and operation of WHOIS – the database of registrants of domains. Without going into the history of the ccTLDs withdrawing from their former role within the DNSO and moving towards a self organized structure, there is an obvious conflict revolving around the term... more
Progress is being made towards launching a .eu top-level domain for European individuals, business and organisations.
On 22 May 2003, the European Commission announced its decision to designate the European Registry for Internet Domains (EURID) as the Registry for the new top-level domain (TLD) .eu. EURID is made up of three founder members ? the registry operators for the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) .be (Belgium), .it (Italy) and .se (Sweden). The Commission?s decision follows a call for expressions of interest published last September and an evaluation by independent experts of the seven applications received. more
On World Telecommunications Day last Saturday, the question of the digital divide?the difference between the so-called "developed" and "less developed" countries in terms of the availability and use of new information and communications technologies, particularly regarding access and use of the Internet?was one of the main topics of debate. However, less is understood about the growing knowledge and participation divide between "developed" and "undeveloped" countries on decisions regarding the global structure of the Internet that is currently under the mandate of the Internet Corporation for the Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)... more
Brownian motion is the ceaseless random movement of particles suspended in a warm fluid. The particles move because they are buffeted by random collisions with molecules and atoms speeding this way and that under the impetus of heat. The greater the heat, the greater the motion. But no matter how much motion and how much heat, Brownian motion brings no progress.
Today I learned from Bret Fausett's ICANN Blog that ICANN has just published its Sixth Status Report Under ICANN/US Government Memorandum of Understanding, dated March 31, 2003. This report is subtitled "Report by ICANN to United States Department of Commerce Re: Progress Toward Objectives of Memorandum of Understanding" (emphasis added.) more
John Banks is a loan officer in New York. John's supervisor recently warned John about the potential number of bad loans he may be carrying as part of his portfolio. To dump some of the bad loans he might be carrying, John came up with a scheme. He pointed his web browser to www.whois.org and entered terms denoting disease or poor health such as 'cancer' and 'illness'. This query on the Internet's WHOIS database reported results of names and addresses of domain name owners who had developed websites devoted to providing information on certain serious illnesses. John compared these names and addresses with those in his portfolio of loans. For the matches, he canceled the loans and required immediate payment-in-full. more
Various people whose judgment I value [M. Mueller, B. Fausett] have suggested that ICANN/IANA may finally get to the issue of privacy.
The ICANN Board is establishing a "President's Standing Committee on Privacy" (why the committee is possessed by ICANN's "president" and not the Board is something we can deal with at another time and another place.)
Privacy is a hard question. It is a matter that pervades all aspects of information handling. It would be entirely inappropriate, and ultimately futile, to try to deal with privacy as an after-the-fact adjustment to the existing DNS Whois system. It is necessary to examine the most fundamental questions -- such as what reasons, if any, justify there being a Whois database at all. more
I grew up in a utopian community in India.
I make this statement -- which may seem at best tangential to an article on the DNS -- at the outset because it suggests that I know something about ideology and ideologically charged debates.
Like the town where I grew up, the Internet was the product of dreamers, people who believed in the possibility of surmounting reality. In Code, Lessig compared early Internet euphoria to the euphoria that met the downfall of communism. He could just as well have compared it to the utopianism that accompanied the birth of communism. The point is that Internet pioneers were inspired by ideology, by a fervor to change the world. more
On Monday 17 March, domain name registrations under the new Chinese Internet address, .cn, were available for the first time to registrants both inside and outside of China. As China's equivalent of .uk, or .us, the .cn domain space will be the Internet address of choice for Chinese consumers and for corporations interested in operating in one of the largest Internet markets. more
Part I of this article explored some of the current thinking and direction that key policy-makers seem to be headed with the creation of new gTLDS. This part focuses on a new alternative plan for the ongoing deployment of new gTLDs.
ICANN is likely to see many proposals over the coming weeks that attempt to deal with the thorny issue of how to rollout new gTLDs. Any plan that deals with the rollout of new generic top-level domain names must ensure that the expansion of the namespace does not disrupt the existing infrastructure and services. more
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