Blocking of a TLD by a local government is not going to lead to the fracturing of the Internet. If the case of Egypt is any guide, it's more likely to lead to the fracturing of the local government.
The new gTLD program is not going to be undone. For that to happen would mean jettisoning 10 years of the ICANN experiment and all the work that has gone into it.
Interactive Investor Interviews Antony Van Couvering and Peter Dengate ThrushA VeriSign Inc. official defended its contract to operate the .com domain Monday, after Network Solutions accused the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of not requiring adequate security safeguards in its registry agreements. Network Solutions, a domain-name registrar, released a report last week saying ICANN has "failed" to address security in its latest proposals for the .com, .biz, .info and .org top-level domains. more»
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»
"In many parts of the world, dot-com is not the preferred domain suffix. In Germany, for instance, companies advertise their .de Web addresses more prominently than their .com addresses." ...Even with Google and Yahoo's best efforts, the Internet advertising revolution is still in its early stages, especially overseas. But if they're successful at bringing online ads to more countries, overseas domain owners are going to find themselves sitting on prime property. more»
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»
A sale of Chinese Internet domain names netted more than $160,000 on Friday in what organizers said was the biggest such auction yet in the computer-crazy country.
A pair of sites named for ultra-mobile personal computing (umpc.cn and umpc.com.cn), one of the hottest technologies around, fetched an eye-popping 390,000 yuan ($49,000). more»
EURid, the organization that administers the .eu top-level domain, has suspended 74,000 domain names after launching a lawsuit against 400 American registrars for "breach of contract". The domains in question were all registered for three UK-based limited companies, Ovidio Ltd, Fausto Ltd and Gabino Ltd. Between them the three companies registered 74,000 names.
According to EURid, the three companies are a front for a "syndicate" of 400 US-based registrars, who stand accused of "warehousing" the domain names registering them speculatively for resale, rather than following a client's request. more»
The company that manages the U.K.'s top-level domain has struck a truce with the U.S.-based organization responsible for overseeing Internet domain names, cooling ongoing disagreements over administrative control of the Internet.
On Friday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced at a conference in Marrakech, Morocco, that it had exchanged letters with Nominet UK, a sign of future cooperation on managing the name and number system that makes Web browsing possible. more»
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»
ICANN unanimously approved the creation of the new .Tel Top Level Domain (TLD) and awarded the contract to Telnic Limited.
"The .Tel domain offers the first genuinely different use of domains since .com was first created. It will provide seamless integration of existing methods of communication with emerging technologies like Voice over IP (VoIP). This places the .Tel domain at the core of the next phase of Internet development," said Khashayar Mahdavi, CEO of Telnic. more»
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»
As proposed, individuals could use a ".tel" Web site to provide the latest contact information and perhaps even let friends initiate a call or send a text message directly from the site...
Its proponents also envision ".tel" as a place from which the various people-finding services on the Internet could pull the latest contact information as individuals move about. Now, data typically come from third-party sources like phone listings, which may be old or incomplete, particularly if an entire household is listed under one name. more»
This is a debate that will make plenty of money for Washington lobbyists for years to come.
But there is less talk about another infrastructure issue that could also have a major effect on the Internet. This issue is whether the .com domain name will remain reliable and secure. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that manages the technical aspects of the Internet, has decided to allow the cost of .com domain names to increase by a little less than $2 over the next five years. The additional funds will allow more investment in managing and protecting the .com domain. more»
Nineteen internet companies, including Network Solutions, have asked ICANN's Board of Directors to reconsider a controversial agreement giving VeriSign control of the .com top-level domain until 2012.
Domain name registrar GoDaddy has also petitioned the US Department of Commerce, which has yet to approve the agreement, asking that the deal be sent back to the ICANN Board. more»
The Internet's key oversight agency has outlined a plan for testing domain names entirely in non-English characters, bringing closer to reality a change highly sought by Asian and Arabic Internet users.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced a tentative timetable Tuesday that calls for tests to begin in the second half of the year. The tests would help ensure that introducing non-English suffixes wouldn't wreck a global addressing system that millions of Internet users rely upon every day. more»
ICANN will start the trial testing of internationalized domain names (IDN) in the Top-Level Domain (TLD) system, in the third quarter of 2006, Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN, told Interfax in an interview Tuesday. Once IDN domain names are implemented Internet sites will able to have domain names in foreign languages, and foreign character sets -- such as Chinese.
"The preparation for the testing is already underway, and it will be a testing on the top of the root," said Twomey. "We are presently moving to introduce the IDNs of TLD, and are much closer to the end for the answer." But the exact date for the launch of the IDN is not yet available. more»
