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French government launches public consultation on who should run .FR
Friday, April 25. 2008
Is France gearing up to change its registry? That question has been bugging the people at AFNIC ever since the French government published a decree on February 8th 2007 in which it was clearly stipulated that there would soon be an RFP (request for proposals) for the management of .FR.
AFNIC was both surprised and angered at the government's move, which clearly undermines its position as France's registry. Those reactions are understandable as AFNIC, since its creation on January 1st 1998, has always been state run. Its board has 10 members, four of which are elected. All the others are nominated representatives of various ministries and state institutions. The board's president (who enjoys a double vote) can only be chosen amongst the elected member. And an extra representative of the government sits in at every board meeting and has veto power over any decision the board makes.
The elected board members are representatives of the registrars and users communities. I have sat on the AFNIC board since 2004 as one of the two registrar representatives and I am currently serving my second consecutive term (the maximum allowed under AFNIC rules). In that time, I have seen first hand a system that, while giving registrars and Internet users the opportunity to voice their opinions, remains firmly in government control.
So when that same government decided a fresh look was needed on how the French namespace is run, it was a bit of a bombshell for AFNIC.
Continue reading "French government launches public consultation on who should run .FR"
England wants its own domain
Wednesday, April 23. 2008
After reading this post's title, your first thought is probably "the English already have their own domain with .CO.UK, don't they?"
Well it appears they don't agree. An online petition has been launched the persuade ICANN to sanction a .ENG domain. "For many years the UK's online entity has been represented by the .CO.UK domain extension," claims the petition's website. "The Welsh and the Scots have been campaigning for their own country-specific domains .CYM and .SCO respectively, despite not being classed as independent countries. We believe that we - the English - should also be allowed our own independent voice on the internet and show our patriotism through our choice of domain name."
The petition is still young as it was launched on April 23rd of this year. Its creators hope to gather around 10,000 signatures before taking it to ICANN and, in their own words, "lobby ICANN to make .ENG available."
Seasoned ICANN watchers will no doubt consider this plan a little flawed. New TLDs such as .ENG can of course be okayed by ICANN, but only if they are part of the Internet overseer's official new TLD request for proposals (RFP). This means putting together a complete business plan, like .BERLIN or .PARIS are doing, so that the new TLD project can be submitted to ICANN when the RFP process begins (the next one is currently expected early in 2009). Doing so requires deep pockets and, if you're claiming to represent a nation such as England, clear support from national authorities or government.
In other words, although a nice try, it's very doubtful that a web petition would suffice, even if it does draw a large amount of signatures.
P.S.: Here are the links to the Welsh's and the Scot's attempt to get their own domains.
Selling bond!
Tuesday, April 22. 2008
This week's high profile domain name auction (seems like there's one every single week at the moment) is bond.com. The name has 2 days left to run on its auction and currently stands at 70,000 USD. The name's current owner obviously thinks it's worth a lot more, as there's talk of a reserve set at 1 million USD for this sale!
Poor Bond. Not only has an Aston Martin engineer just wrecked his almost unique (the car maker has prepped 5 ultra special cars for the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace) car by plunging it into an Italian lake but now his name is up for sale. Of course, the domain bond.com could just as well refer to the famous London street or to the ties that two people might share. And it remains to be seen if domain investors will consider it as valuable as recent heavy hitters like pizza.com or vodka.com…
Dollars.com set to make lots of euros
Tuesday, April 15. 2008
Auction watching is getting to be a great sport these days. After the fun I had tracking pizza.com as it scaled to ever increasing heights before finally making its previous owner's fortune, I've now got a new hot sale in my sights. Dollars.com is currently being auctioned and I guess it must be a sign of the times that the auction is being handled in euros 
. So far, the name already stands at a quarter of a million euros. No doubt it will go higher before the auction ends on April 18th…
ICANN Paris agenda released
Thursday, April 10. 2008
ICANN has just put up the agenda for the Paris meeting. An agenda with several changes to the standard ICANN meeting format.
The first is a shortened meeting week. As I'd written on this blog a few days ago, Paris will end with a Board meeting on the Thursday instead of the traditional Friday morning. Cost issues are being put forward as an explanation for the change.
The Paris week will start on Sunday June 22 with a small number of closed meetings. For most participants therefore, main proceedings kick off on Monday with the early morning Welcome Ceremony.
Regular ICANN followers will be pleased to see all the current hot topics on the agenda, including new gTLDs, IDNs, WHOIS and IPV6. In an effort to increase the business community's involvement, a new "class" of work sessions dubbed "Business Access Agenda" is also being introduced for Paris.
.ARABIA, .RUSSIAN… a new run of TLDs?
Wednesday, April 9. 2008
There's a lot of talk about the possible types of new TLDs that could be made available on the Internet in the near future.
Just days ago, stories coming out of Dubai, where ICANN has just held one of its outreach meetings, mentioned a possible .ARAB or .ARABIA for the region.
I've also been hearing of possible "linguistic" TLDs like .RUSSIAN, .CHINESE or .GREEK. The idea remains one of pushing for a more regional Internet, where local flavours are brought to the fore. And it's also a great way of pushing for IDN use, as obviously if we're talking regional or linguistic TLDs, they would need to be useable in the areas or languages they represent. In short, a perfect solution for killing two birds with one stone, both IDNs and the launch of new TLDs being hot topics at ICANN right now.
But the "fad" of the moment remains the "City TLDs" or "cTLDs" for short. Projects such as .BERLIN and .PARIS are known to be underway and would obviously be the first on the table should ICANN start a new official round of request for new TLD proposals.
When might that be? By latest estimates, not before the start of 2009…
Only two ICANN meetings a year from 2009?
Saturday, April 5. 2008
There were a couple of interesting points re ICANN meetings during the last Board meeting, held via teleconference on March 27th. ICANN's Executive Officer and Vice President Paul Levins presented a plan to reduce the number of meetings from the current 3 per year to 2.
It seems the financial burden of organizing the meetings is just getting too much for ICANN. Since the end of last year, the corporation has already had to step in rather significantly as local hosts have found themselves less and less able to face mounting costs on their own.
The reason for the cost increases? Simply put: the success of the ICANN meetings. More and more people have been attending, and the forthcoming June Paris meeting is set to be ICANN's biggest yet.
Paul Levins advised the Board that there would have to be a transitional period, starting from June 2009, should the decision be taken to move away from the current 3 meetings a year format. He did not make it clear if such a decision would have to be green-lit by the Board.
He also gave some interesting budget figures. The full budget for New Delhi was $1.7 million and the current budget for Paris is $1.54 million.
That's quite a slice!
Friday, April 4. 2008
Everybody's been following the pizza.com auction these past few days, as the bids piled up and the price rose above the 2 million USD mark.
Well, the auction ended last night (French time) and the previous owner has got to be ecstatic with the final price: 2.6 million!
The domain's first owner is a one Christopher Clark who lives in Maryland and was tracked down by the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Clarck explained that he'd bought the name in 1994 (on July 17th according to the name's WHOIS) in a bid to get some consultancy work for his company from a local pizza firm. Clark sold his company in 2000 but kept the name.
There's a decision he probably doesn't regret today…
ICANN's brain drain?
Thursday, April 3. 2008
Interested to learn, thanks to Francesco, that Tina Dam might soon be heading home. Since 2003, Tina has been a prominent member of ICANN's staff, first as liaison to the gTLD registries, and since 2006 as manager of the IDN program.
Nature has undoubtedly been kind to Tina, (who would rather not dwell on her past as an ex miss Denmark :-), a bright individual who has brought ICANN qualifications as diverse as maths, physics and business (she has a Master of Science in Mathematics and Physics and a BBA in Marketing Management and International Trade.)
She clearly understands the very difficult topic of IDNs better than most. Not only that, on several occasions she's actually managed to explain it to me in such a way as I could understand it as well! No mean feat.
And she's passionate about it, something which has fuelled the recent progress made by ICANN on IDN TLDs (making non-ASCII characters work for the part left of the dot, the suffix), culminating in the current successful live test of 11 non-English scripts as IDNs (two new scripts have just been added).
So if people like Tina are leaving ICANN, will the organisation suffer from it? And why would they be thinking about leaving in the first place? I can't say for the first question, but I do have an idea about the second...
Continue reading "ICANN's brain drain?"
Whoa, hold your horses there, Dot ME!
Tuesday, April 1. 2008
Francesco paints a humorous picture of .ME's launch programme, which we revealed at the end of March in the French edition of Domaines.Info.
His message to the Montenegrin powers-that-be: don't rush things and make sure you get the launch right. Sound advice. Even if the local registry's angst to open for business is understandable, mistakes made at the launch of a new extensions are generally then carried over for years before they can be fixed.
So let's hope the people at .ME do resist the temptation to rush things, because there's a domain with plenty of potential if I ever saw one (just think of all those possibilities with a "me" on the end...).
For those of you who don't understand French, here's the current launch schedule published in the March 27th edition of Domaines.Info.
From March 25 to April 16, a priority period will enable prior registrants of .YU domains (.ME is being migrated from the ex-Yugoslav suffix) to request the equivalent .ME name.
From May 1 to May 6, .ME's sunrise period will be restricted to Montenegrin nationals.
From June 6 to June 26, the registry has announced a landrush period, the precise rules of which are apparently not yet finalised. This, in part, is what prompted Francesco's warning to the registry to take its time and do a proper launch.
Go-live is planned from July 17th.
