General manager of INDOM
Joined on August 27, 2008
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Stéphane is cofounder and General Manager of Indom, part of the GroupNBT family of companies. He is also Group NBT's Head of Domain Operations and oversees the group's new gTLD operations. Stéphane is the editor of the domain name information daily www.domaines.info and runs a bilingual blog on the domain industry at www.stephanevangelder.fr (French version) or www.stephanevangelder.com (English version).
Stéphane has been an active member of the Internet governance community for a number of years. He was a board member for the French registry AFNIC from 2004 to 2010. He was elected treasurer of ICANN's Registrar Stakeholder Group in 2008, and that group's European representative on the GNSO Council that same year. ICANN is in charge of the coordination of the global Internet at a technical level and the GNSO is ICANN's policy making body for generic Top Level Domains such as .COM. Stéphane was elected Vice Chair of the GNSO (Generic Names Supporting Organisation) Council in 2009 and Chair the following year. He was re-elected as GNSO Council Chair at the 2011 Dakar ICANN meeting.
Stéphane earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Sussex University (UK). He was a print and TV journalist before starting Indom with his father and his cousin in 1999. The family-run business was sold to Group NBT in December 2010.
Today, Friday April 27, ICANN had promised an update on the problems that led to its TLD Registration System (TAS) being taken offline on April 12. As the working day ends in Europe, that update has yet to come. Even if it does, I would not expect anything more concrete than the "we are still working on the issue, thanks for your patience" message of recent days. So what's really going on here? Does anyone at ICANN seriously expect us to believe that the tech team is "still reviewing the TAS data and checking the integrity of each and every application"? more»
At the start of the TAS outage, I said ICANN had a great opportunity to get its crisis management right by communicating properly. Now, nearly two weeks after the application window was supposed to close, ICANN has clearly done just that... But clearly, communication isn't the only parameter in crisis management. At some point, you also need to act. more»
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»
A couple of recent articles have caught my attention because they offer scathing criticism of ICANN. The first is a long and convoluted article by Kieren McCarthy on the .JOBS debacle. Kieren has basically written a feature that only a seasoned ICANN insider can hope to understand and that's a pity, because the points he makes appear very valid. Namely that ICANN is incapable of looking at itself in the mirror and admitting when it's wrong. more»
I think it's fair to say that ICANN is in a state of near meltdown at the moment. With less than a week to go before the new gTLD program's first application window is opened, on Thursday January 12, 2012, the amount of work being done is mind-bending. The ICANN Board held a special meeting on January 5 to determine the program's state of readiness ahead of the launch. more»
Yesterday evening, the ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) held its last teleconference of the year. We had invited ICANN's new gTLD supremo Kurt Pritz to give an update on the recent US Congress hearings. Kurt was ICANN's spokesperson in both hearings, and felt that the first was more favourable to ICANN than the second. more»
