New TLDs

Our Vision for Advancing and Growing the Domain Industry

ICANN 54 is upon us, and to commemorate it, we've got www.dublin.pub loaded up with friendly places to network, take advantage of the city's comedy and music scene, and possibly even enjoy a pint. With so many issues to discuss and address this week, a .PUB address wouldn't be the appropriate destination for the entire conference, but for a microsite discussing the cultural and social opportunities that Dublin has to offer, we happen to think it's perfect, especially in the place that gave the world the Irish pub. more

Donuts Completes the Acquisition of Afilias

Donuts stated today that it has completed the acquisition of Afilias announced on November 19. Donuts' CEO Akram Atallah says the company is now ready to begin the integration plan promising minimal disruptions to customers. more

Site Finder: The Technical, Legal & Privacy Concerns

It is openly admitted , in the same Implementation PDF file, that all accesses to the Site Finder service are monitored and archived. A further worry for users is the privacy policy and terms of service posted on the Site Finder service. Not only does the simple act of mistyping a URL implicitly cause you, the end user, to accept VeriSign's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy without the chance to review and accept or decline either, but critical information as described above is not disclosed in either policy (as of this writing). The Privacy Policy clearly states... more

Hong Kong Billionaire Richard Li Becomes First Person to Own a TLD Matching His Name

The new top-level domain (TLD) .richardli secured for the Hong Kong billionaire Richard Li went live on the internet today. Kevin Murphy reporting in Domain Incite: "The registry is Pacific Century Asset Management (HK) Limited, a subsidiary of PCCW, the Hong Kong telecomms and internet giant of which Li is chair... The gTLD is a pure brand-protection play, according to the 2012 application" more

New TLD Public Comments: Jumping-to-Conclusions?

Having been involved in the whole TLD issue since its inception, back in the ancient history of the mid-1990's, one would think that nothing would surprise me anymore. As it turns out, however, watching the comments on ICANN's public comment list with respect to the new sTLD proposals, I find that I'm taken-back by some of the kinds of comments I'm seeing. more

GoDaddy Lists Controversial ‘.sucks’ Domain: Brands Advised to Bolster Monitoring

The '.sucks Top Level Domain (TLD), by Vox Populi, which initially faced criticism from brands due to its launch fee of $2,499 is now listed on the world's largest domain registrar, GoDaddy. more

First “Africa DNS Forum” To Be Streamed Live July 12 and 13 From Durban, South Africa

The first Africa DNS Forum will take place on Friday, July 12, and Saturday, July 13, 2013, in Durban, South Africa, in advance of next week's ICANN 47 meeting. Jointly organized by AfTLD, ICANN and the Internet Society, the Africa DNS Forum "aims to establish a platform for the DNS community across Africa and to advance the domain name industry and domain name registrations on the continent."  more

DNS Inventor Impressed With Innovative Effort Behind .LUXE TLD to Integrate DNS With Blockchain

The company running the new .LUXE top-level domain (TLD) recently issued an update on its progress with the innovative effort to tie the TLD with blockchain. more

Closer Look at Domain Name Transfer Policy and the Hijacking of Panix.com

Given the recent panix.com hijacking, I will give an outline of the current ICANN transfers process for gtlds. In the case of panix.com, evidence so far indicates that a third party that holds an account with a reseller of Melbourne IT, fraudulently initiated the transfer. The third party appears to have used stolen credit cards to establish this account and pay for the transfer. That reseller is analyzing its logs and cooperating with law enforcement. more

Chinese and Japanese IDN in .BIZ

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

New gTLDs Will Work Way Better Than Vanity Domains Did

There are updates in the domain name business that I have never been able to understand: one of them is called "vanity domain names". A vanity domain name is a domain that keeps on using the first and the second level domain, to form a keyword; the third level domain is sometimes used too. Good examples of these would be: webc.am or marmala.de, aud.it or del.icio.us. more

After ICANN’s TLD Application System Glitch, Communication Is the Key

There were long faces all over the new gTLD ecosystem yesterday -- applicants, consultants and technical operators alike -- when ICANN took their Application System (TAS) offline and announced that it would not be brought back up for 5 days. As a result, the long-anticipated close of the first new gTLD application window was pushed back from April 12 to April 20, 23:59 UTC. You could almost hear the groans of dismay spreading over social cyberspace! more

What Do Bitcoin, Cloud Computing and the New gTLDs All Have in Common?

I am a student of life, learning one hard lesson at a time. In fact, I actually dropped out of my last year of college to start a tech company in a new space called the internet. I was an entrepreneur running an online service prior to the advent of the world wide web in 1992, back when Pine, Usenet, and Gopher ruled the information superhighway. Over the last 25 years, I have learned a great deal about technology adoption cycles by launching six internet companies, each at the forefront of a new technology wave. more

Universal Acceptance of New Top-Level Domains Reloaded

One challenge for all new top-level domains (TLDs) is the so-called Universal Acceptance. Universal Acceptance is a phenomenon as old as TLDs exist and may strike at many occasions... The effect when universal acceptance hits you is that you cannot send or receive email, get error messages or even worse when it looks like everything works but it does not and you do not even get a notification. more

ICANN at the Inflection Point: Implications and Effects Of the GAC Beijing Communique

Although this article was first published just a few days ago, on May 8th, there have been several important intervening developments. First, on May 10th ICANN released a News Alert on "NGPC Progress on GAC Advice" that provides a timetable for how the New gTLD program Committee will deal with the GAC Communique. Of particular note is that, as the last action in an initial phase consisting of "actions for soliciting input from Applicants and from the Community', the NGPC will begin to "Review and consider Applicant responses to GAC Advice and Public Comments on how Board should respond to GAC Advice... more