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  • Antony Van Couvering
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  • Member Since: Jul 16, 2005
  • Featured Posts: 5
  • Comments: 6

About: Antony Van Couvering is CEO of Names@Work, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of DomainsBot. Antony has been working in the Internet since 1996, especially in the domain name area.  He played a substantial role in early Internet governance, taking a leading role in the early days of the ccTLD constituency.  He is known for thorough, candid analyses and innovative solutions.

In 1999 Antony founded NameEngine, where he worked with many of the world’s top companies including American Express, Bridgestone-Firestone, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Goodyear, Intel, Kodak, and Viacom, and with IP law firms including Fross Zelnick, Ladas & Parry, and Brown Raysman. He sold NameEngine to VeriSign in December of 2001, and as part of the arrangement worked at VeriSign Digital Brand Management Services, handling their marketing and partnerships as well as developing their customer domain name management portal.

In 1997 he founded NetNames USA, the first firm to handle the domain name needs of larger companies. He built the company up to 30 employees before selling the company to NetBenefit, a publicly-traded technology company based in London.

During this time, Antony started and managed several top-level country-code domains, including .TM (Turkmenistan), .AS (American Samoa), .BT (Bhutan), and .PW (Palau) — all of these top-level domains are now run as public-private partnerships. Working with Jon Postel, he co-authored a proposal to reform the .US domain by de-emphasizing its old cumbersome geographical structure. Many of the suggestions in the proposal (though unfortunately not all) were later implemented when the .US domain was re-launched in 2002.

Antony’s deep involvement with Internet governance issues spans back to the first stirrings of reform. He was head of the Policy Advisory Body under the old gTLD-MoU structure, which later morphed (tortuously) into ICANN. Under that structure, as President of the International Association of Top-Level Domains, he chaired the meeting in Singapore that birthed the Domain Name Supporting Organization of ICANN, and was one of the governing council of the ccTLD constituency within ICANN, where he worked especially on government relations and ccTLD standards-setting.

Antony is also a speaker at meetings where Internet and intellectual property questions are aired. He has written on Internet and domain name issues for a variety of publications and in public discussion forums, and now writes mainly on his blog.

Featured Posts — by Antony Van Couvering 

DNS, DNSSEC, Domain Names, Internet Governance, Regional Registries, Security, Top-Level Domains / blogs / Apr 03, 2008 9:39 AM PST

Domain Name Price Jump: Moore’s Law or Parkinson’s Laws?

As expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.) ...So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign's registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage... yet the cost is going up. How is this justified? ›››

By Antony Van Couvering | Comments: 1 | Views: 2442

DNS, Domain Names, Security, Top-Level Domains / blogs / Nov 20, 2006 11:35 AM PST

Why is .EU Trying to Destroy the Internet?

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... ›››

By Antony Van Couvering | Comments: 4 | Views: 4646

DNS, Domain Names, Multilinguism, Security, Top-Level Domains, Whois / blogs / Feb 03, 2006 7:54 AM PST

IDNs and IE7 and the Coming Storm

If you're brave, today you can finally download the Internet Explorer 7 public beta. Why should you be interested? Not because the browser's wonderful. It isn't -- initial reports are that it's not ready for prime-time. But you might be interested to know that as of today, users of IE will be able to use internationalized domain names (IDNs). ...Many other browsers are already IDN-capable, including Firefox, but most people in the world use Explorer. Think China, Japan, India. Think most of the world's population... Think of millions of new Internet users working in their own language, customers for commercial goods and services. But think also about intellectual property nightmares, think about phishing, think about whether there's one interoperable Internet, or several Internets acting very weird. These issues and others will become big news when people start using IDNs massively -- and with support from Internet Explorer, that's about to happen. ›››

By Antony Van Couvering | Comments: 7 | Views: 8341

Cybersquatting, DNS, Domain Names, Law, Top-Level Domains / blogs / Dec 22, 2005 9:32 AM PST

What’s Wrong with Domain Names?

Despite the significant traffic that comes from typed-in domain names, the public harumphing and clucking about type-in traffic is climbing in volume as it becomes clear how much money is involved. Articles this week show that domain names, and the people who make money on them, are making some commentators uncomfortable. ›››

By Antony Van Couvering | Comments: 6 | Views: 9338

DNS, Domain Names, Law, Privacy, Security, Whois / blogs / Dec 08, 2005 8:54 PM PST

She Gave Me a Fake Phone Number!

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. ›››

By Antony Van Couvering | Comments: 4 | Views: 12999

Recent Comments — by Antony Van Couvering

John Levine said: It should be obvious that the distinction here is that you control… Jun 26, 2007
Interestingly, if I just “typo” stocks.com by typing “stocks” in my browser, I end up… Jun 26, 2007
John, Hell, you’ve finally written something I can fault with! “Them” is not an indefinite… Jul 04, 2006
The sad thing, Wendy, is not just that ICANN presents the same sad canned obfuscation… Apr 14, 2006
What I meant by “offering this service” was a public interface to search IDNs —… Feb 03, 2006

Most Popular — by Antony Van Couvering

She Gave Me a Fake Phone Number!
Dec 08, 2005 | Comments: 4 | Views: 12,999
What’s Wrong with Domain Names?
Dec 22, 2005 | Comments: 6 | Views: 9,338
IDNs and IE7 and the Coming Storm
Feb 03, 2006 | Comments: 7 | Views: 8,341
Why is .EU Trying to Destroy the Internet?
Nov 20, 2006 | Comments: 4 | Views: 4,646
Domain Name Price Jump: Moore’s Law or Parkinson’s Laws?
Apr 03, 2008 | Comments: 1 | Views: 2,442