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Ever sat at one of the VeriSign "State of the domain" meetings at any of the ICANN meetings? Or read their reports about countries with the greatest opportunity in domains? Almost without question you will learn that Japan is earmarked as the country with the greatest opportunity for growth in the domain market. They take into consideration important factors such as GDP of a country, internet population, and current domain registration levels... more
ICANN is currently analyzing technical and policy implications regarding the introduction of Internationalized Top-Level Domains into the root. This is an important step in the continued evolution of the Internet by enabling language communities of the world that write non-Latin and extended Latin scripts to utilize their languages on the Internet... While the IDNC Working Group (IDNC) has made constructive progress on proposing a framework for the introduction of an initial set of IDN TLDs, the approach taken by the IDNC from a legal perspective is fundamentally flawed. more
OK. Now my lawyer has given me the green light, I can officially announce I am working on a proposal for a .sport TLD, to be submitted to ICANN for consideration as a new TLD next year. There is still a long way to go in terms of getting the proposal ready, but I this this one is a winner... more
I have recently been a "victim" of the domain name tasting "scam". A domain name (.COM) which is related to me personally (and which was owned by someone else previously) expired and as I knew from Whois (which is another debate on its own) that the expiry date was coming up, I kept a watch on when it would become available so I could register it. To cut a long story short, it took me nearly 6 weeks to get the domain. Each time the domain dropped off the 5 day grace period (it is not really something that would generate ad revenue), it would be picked up by a different registrant... more
Earlier this week, we inserted eleven new top-level domains in the DNS root zone. These represent the term "test" translated into ten languages, in ten different scripts (Chinese is represented in two different scripts, and Arabic script is used by two different languages). This blog post is not about that. (If you're interested about it, read our report on the delegations.) What I would like to talk about is some of the difficulties we face today in expressing scripts in a consistent way over the Internet... more
One of the most frequently asked question when it comes to the discussion about a city top-level domain ".city" (such as .london, .berlin or .nyc) is what .city means to the already established official city portal (such as London.gov.uk, Berlin.de, NYC.gov or in general City.com). This article contributes to the most important topics in this discussion... The choices at the top-level available to individuals, companies and regional communities is today limited to country codes (such as .de or .fr) and a very few generic endings (such as .com or .info). Individuals and companies in cities can't really identify with Internet addressing and look for ways to circumvent it. For instance, the term "hamburg" is already used in about 50,000 domains such as www.habour-hamburg.de demonstrably showing that they belong to the Hamburg community. The synonym "nyc" can be found in almost 300,000 domains... more
The announcement this week that DotAsia will work with Pool.com on an auction system to introduce its new domain names is a good reaction to problems of the past. Previous launches worked (sometimes not well) on a first-come, first-served basis. For example, sex.eu had over 280 potential applications but only the first was even considered. Yet, today, nearly 2 years later, the domain application is still being reviewed... more
I just got back this morning from attending the OASIS XRI TC face-to-face meeting with Bill Barnhill, Drummond Reed, Laurie Rae, Les Chasen, Markus Sabadello, Marty Schleiff. A number of good things came out of the meeting, which I'll leave for another blog because this post is about Internationalized Domain Names, not XRI. So we just opened the flood gates for Chinese and Japanese IDNs for .BIZ. This has been my brainchild for the past half a year or so, and represents a significant step forward for our registry in terms of internationalization. more
While I was in LA last week John sent me details of the Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2007. While there are some potentially positive aspects in the Bill some of the Bill's contents are, for lack of better word, simply crazy... more
Today on Dave Farber's IP list, someone revived the ancient argument that ICANN imposes limits on the number of top level domains (TLDs) because to have more than a few will cause DNS to wobble and cause the internet to collapse. Although long discredited, that argument hangs around like a zombie. ICANN has never been able to adduce a shred of proof that there is anything to support that assertion... more
In the late summer of 2006, the ICANN Nominating Committee will convene to select three members to the ICANN Board of Directors, and four members to various councils. Depending on the global visibility of the nominees, and the current political and technical currents pulling at the Internet community, these nominations will be both pilloried and lauded in different circles. This process of selecting a good ICANN board member is astonishingly complex; I should know, having served on the founding NomCom in 2003, and the succeeding NomComs in 2004 and 2005. By far the biggest challenge is finding good candidates... more
"GOD, at least in the West, is often represented as a man with a flowing beard and sandals. Users of the Internet might be forgiven for feeling that nature is imitating art — for if the Net does have a god he is probably Jon Postel" (The Economist, Feb. 1997) David W. Maher, Senior Vice President, Law and Policy of Public Interest Registry (PIR) offers his reminiscence of the early days of the Internet and attempts made to restructure the Domain Name System — an article he has entitled 'Reporting to God'. more
If you have been following the debate over Internet governance over the past few years, you know that while ICANN supporters (U.S., Canadian, Australian governments; business lobby) and critics (developing world and occasionally Europe) argue over the optimal approach, particularly with respect to government involvement in the domain name system, the reality has been that possession is all. ...The alternate root has always lurked in the background as a possibility that would force everyone to rethink their positions since it would enable a single country (or group of countries) to effectively pack up their bags and start a new game. ...It is with that background in mind that people need to think about a press release issued yesterday in China announcing a revamping of its Internet domain name system. Starting tomorrow, China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. more
In September 2005 ICANN approved the first top–level Internet domain to be dedicated to a particular human language and culture: '.cat'. A related paper was recently published in First Monday by Peter Gerrand, titled "The Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain". As explained in its abstract, the paper explains: "While '.cat' creates a precedent for greater use on the Internet of 'minority languages', there are significant hurdles for other candidates for language–based top–level domains. The paper discusses the concomitant factors needed to support the greater use of any minority language on the Internet." more
This document is intended to be a starting point for a discussion on upcoming city Top-Level Domain Names (city TLDs) such as .berlin, .nyc, or .london. It reflects considerations about the impact of city TLDs on the city society, the individuals in the city, the regional and global environment, and the Internet at large. more
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