New Geographical Top-Level Domains and Auctions

I was surprised by ICANN's "Economic Case for Auctions in New gTLDs" paper especially with view to the latest presentation on the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) implementation process in Paris. That Paris presentation highlighted the protection of community interests such as religious organisations, geographically based communities or indigenous groups and suggested a preference of bona fide community-based applicants against pure generic applications for the same string. Contrary to this the only text passage in the current paper where ICANN considered the community-based applicants is "a 25% bidding credit could be offered to community-based bidders whose community is located primarily in least-developed countries". This reminds me of the discussion on discounts for HIV medicine... more»

ICANN Released Its Draft for New Top-Level Domains, 45 Day Comment Period Now Open

In follow up to its earlier announcement this year regarding the relaxation of rules for the introduction of new Top-Level Domains, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) yesterday released a draft version of the Applicant Guidebook for those interested in applying for a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD). Although application comes with a hefty entry fee of close to $200,000, the development of new gTLD introductions will be of particular interest to trademark owners as well as any other company involved with domain names. Among various issues, the guidebook aims at addressing concerns such as who would qualify for '.apple' or '.amazon' gTLDs. more»

China Slashes .CN Domain Price to 13 Cents

CHINA'S top Internet address registration agency has slashed the price of domain names ending with .cn to one yuan (13 US cents) a year in order to win users from the ".com" service, whose server is overseas.

The China Internet Network Information Center, or CNNIC, said the promotion is for the sake of national information security and to increase Internet use in the world's second-largest Web market. more»

U.S. Senators Criticizing Current .com Arrangement

Senator Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, questioned why VeriSign should have what critics have called a guaranteed perpetual income stream from .com domain registrations. The company currently receives $6 per domain, or about $323.4 million a year, from .com fees alone.  more»

ICANN Rejects Dot XXX Top-Level Domain Name Agreement

Faced with opposition from conservative groups and some pornography Web sites, the Internet's key oversight agency voted Wednesday to reject a proposal to create a red-light district on the Internet.

The decision from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers reverses its preliminary approval last June to create a ".xxx" domain name for voluntary use by the adult entertainment industry. Paul Twomey, ICANN'S chief executive, said the decision largely came down to whether by creating an "xxx" domain ICANN might be put in a position of having to enforce all of the world's laws governing pornography.

He said board members were aware of the controversy but "the heart of the decision today was not driven by a political consideration." more»

Campaign for .CYM: Catalonia has a TLD, so why not Wales

Welsh websites could soon choose a .cym address rather than .uk, if a campaign backed by assembly members succeeds. The assembly's house committee voted to support efforts to get .cym accepted as a top-level domain (TLD) name root on websites with a Welsh interest.  more»

What's Going on at ICANN in Cairo

Following up on the big decision at the Paris ICANN meeting in June to make new Top-Level Domains available, there's lots of activity at the ICANN conference in Cairo, Egypt this week. A few of the hot topics of discussion that we are following are the applications process for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), Registry/Registrar Cross Ownership, and restructuring of the ICANN Board. more»

Phishing Registrar Accounts: eNom is First Target

Criminals are now looking to use established domain names, via phishing targeted at domain registrars. This is possibly related to ICANN finally moving to stop the black hat registrars of the world. According to the first report on the matter sent yesterday to Registrar Operations (reg-ops) mailing list, the attacks seem to be run by gang of child pornography spammers. more»

Russian Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications Talks About Cyrillic Domain Names

Igor Schegolev, the Russian Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications spoke at the opening of the InfoCom 2008 exhibition in Moscow. Among other things, which made news (for example, that the Russian government will be implementing a free and open source based operating system on all computers in the Russian schools), he also made the following remarks - translated by me in English. more»

Governments Concerned Over Introduction of New Geographical Top-Level Domains

There has been a lot of argument at the 33rd meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Cairo, which ends on Friday, about the rules for introducing new top-level domains. If certain governments have their way, ICANN will have to wait before introducing country or regional names as top-level domains (TLDs). They want the procedure for introducing new country domain names (ccTLDs, such as .uk) in non-Latin alphabets to be adopted first. This emerges from a report delivered by the Latvian diplomat Janis Karklins, chairman of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) at the meeting in Cairo. more»

Software Error at .ES Registry Knocks Thousands of Spanish Websites Offline

A botched software update at Spain's central domain registry knocked as many as 400,000 sites offline for several hours Tuesday, according to the Esnic registry. The error left Internet users unable to access domains using .es, the country code top-level domain for Spain. more»

ICANN Releases New .Com Contract

Internet overseeing body ICANN has released a revised contract for all dotcoms which it hopes will finally end a huge legal fight at the heart of the Internet.

Significant changes have been made to the deal - which will hand control of all dotcom domains to current owner VeriSign until 2012 - following widespread criticism from the Internet industry. more»

Nominet Signs Up to ICANN

In a hugely significant move, .uk registry Nominet has signed up to internet overseeing organisation ICANN and put to bed a historic battle between the US not-for-profit company and managers of country-specific internet domains.

The decision to go through with an "exchange of letters" where ICANN recognises Nominet as the owner of the .uk registry and Nominet recognises ICANN as the global technical body of the internet follows a decision by the ICANN Board to give ccTLDs greater autonomy within ICANN. more»

Two-Thirds of All Domain Names are Hosted in the United States

There are currently more than 77 million generic top-level domain (gTLD) names in the world (counting .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz domain names). 67.23 percent of these are hosted in the United States, which corresponds to 52,277,677 domain names, making it by far the most dominant country on the Internet. The United States has almost twelve times as many domain names as Germany in second place. more»

ICANN Reviews Revoking Outdated TLDs

Meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil, ICANN began accepting public comments this week on how best to revoke outdated suffixes, primarily assigned to countries that no longer exist.

The Soviet Union's ".su" is the leading candidate for deletion, although the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro are transitioning from ".yu" to their own country codes. A Google search generated millions of ".su" and ".yu" sites. more»