Fees for .org Top-Level Domain to Increase by 10%

Public Interest Registry, the organization in charge of ".org" top-level domains, disclosed a planned fee increase in a May 1 letter to ICANN [PDF]. The fee increase does not require the ICANN's approval. PIR did not cite a reason in its letter. Earlier this year, VeriSign Inc., the company in charge of managing ".com" and ".net," also announced price increases. more»

Top-Level Domains .arpa, .org, and .uk Adopting DNSSEC

The Internet is slowly inching closer to ratcheting up the security of its Domain Name System (DNS) server architecture: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) plans to go operational with DNSSEC later this year in one of its domains. more»

Soviet's .su Domain Resists Death

The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising -- registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. more»

Canada's Top-Level Domain .ca Hits One Million Mark

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has announced that Canadian Internet users have registered one million dot-ca (.ca) domains. Dot-ca ranks as the seventeenth largest Internet domain name registry when compared to generic domain names like dot-com and country specific domain names like dot-uk (United Kingdom).  more»

Separatist Petitions to Create Quebec's Own Top-Level Domain

A Parti Quebecois member of the national assembly is trying to drum up support to create a top-level domain for the Canadian province, Quebec -- predominantly a French-speaking population. Daniel Turp has started a petition to convince ICANN pointing out that Catalonia, an autonomous region in Spain, has its own national extension -- .cat, while the same goes for Greenland, a self-governing province in Denmark which uses .gl. Quebecers now use the extension .qc.ca, which indicates a website is a Canadian website. more»

Scotland Wants Its Own Top-Level Domain '.SCO'

The Scottish Nationalist Government is reportedly considering a formal request with ICANN seeking a ".sco" top-level domain to replace the distinctly "Unionist" .co.uk. Proposals which could see the endings of websites based in Scotland changed from '.co.uk' to '.sco' are currently being looked at by the finance secretary. The campaign for the '.sco' suffix has been led by Nationalist backbencher Christine Grahame and it will see to it that most Scottish Governments and agencies change their website suffixes immediately. more»

Lawsuit Against ICANN for Denying .xxx Top-Level Domain is Now Possible, Says Attorney

The company behind the proposed .xxx top-level domain, which was rejected after the Bush administration intervened, has been trying to dig up embarrassing government documents through a federal lawsuit. Make that "was trying." Last week a federal judge granted summary judgment to the Bush administration in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ICM Registry. more»

33 Million Domain Names Registered in 2007, Total Domains Now Over 153 Million

The March 2008 Domain Name Industry Brief released by VeriSign reports that "the Domain Name Industry closed 2007 with more than 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top-Level Domain Names (TLDs), an increase of nearly 33 million domain name registrations since the close of 2006." A summary of the report follows... more»

eTLDs? ICANN to Take Bids for Common Extensions as TLDs

Internet addresses ending in popular extensions such as ".pdf", ".doc", or ".mp3" could appear under a new proposal by ICANN. However, ICANN said it would likely bar all-numeric suffixes, such as ".123". Once ICANN finishes crafting its criteria, it will start taking bids from outside companies and groups for new domain names, so a ".pdf" domain would appear only if an applicant comes forward and wins approval. The organization is looking for feedback on security and operational issues that may arise from the introduction of new domain names as early as this year. more»

Fortune: Are Domain Names Recession-Proof?

Paul Sloan writing in Fortune magazine: "Global markets are in a state of panic. Credit markets are all but closed. And recession fears are everywhere. But at the conference I attended in Hollywood this week, called DomainFest, you'd have little clue that the financial world was melting down. The domain world -- the people that buy and sell names and make money from pay-per-click ads on their websites -- is booming. Downturn? Bring it on." more»

Dot Travel: The Rise and Fall of a Brilliant Concept

Jens Thraenhart of Tourism Internet Marketing writes: "I was saddened when I read the press release... and I realized that the dot travel concept may have been killed by greed and short-term vision." more»

Russia's Internet Dilemma: .RU Domain Translates Into Cyrillic as .PY, the Domain Name of Paraguay

The growing cold war with Russia has a new front besides oil fields and undersea territorial claims: the internet. Russia's government is pushing for greater control over the Russian-language part of the net -- and its aim seems to be to create a web that operates in Cyrillic, completely independent from the wider web. more»

Uniting the Internet and Phone Network, ENUM Project Starts in UK

Enum, or Telephone Number Mapping, aims to do for phone numbers of any kind what the Domain Name System did for the World Wide Web. BBC is reporting that UK's Enum directory has begun and it will be run by Nominet -- the administrator of the .uk top-level domain. more»

ICANN CEO: "High Politics" Fueling IGF Debates

It has been reported that the U.S. control over how domain names are assigned dominated discussions at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) which began yesterday in Brazil. Although few participants at IGF attacked the United States directly, most were well aware of the role Americans play over domain name policies, including whether and how to assign top-level domains in languages other than English. more»

ICANN Unleashing Single-letter and Single-digit Domain Names, Seeking Best Method

ICANN will be seeking proposals for potential allocation methods of single-letter and single-digit domain names at the second level in generic Top-Level Domain registries. Examples include a.com, i.info, 4.mobi, 8.org. Comments regarding the potential uses for revenue generated from the sale of such domains are also requested. more»