At last week’s regional ICANN meeting in Amsterdam I was invited to speak on a panel entitled “Whois and Privacy Issues”. As a leading domain name registrar, NetNames is constantly struggling with Whois-related issues simply because our customers are too. As the database of domain reg...
Outside of its thrice-yearly international meetings designed to bring all interested parties together, ICANN also holds smaller regional meetings targeted at the entities it has direct contracts with, the registrars and the registries. The first such meeting of 2013 started today in A...
ICANN has shaken up its new gTLD program team and is also revisiting its approach to communicating with the outside world. Since program director Kurt Pritz left ICANN, new faces have stepped into the limelight. There’s a new program General Manager, Christine Willet, and a new gTLD c...
Let me set a scenario for you. You have an problem with your mobile phone provider in terms of a service issue. As an avid Twitter user you tweet them with the basic details of your problem. You know that it is them because they have a verified Twitter account (signified by the green ...
Travelling backwards on a train is disconcerting. Even though I’m not driving the train I keep feeling that I should be turning round to see where I am going. Somehow, this makes the tedium of the journey even more unbearable despite some good company and the close proximity of an alc...
So after months of speculation as to who would be the first off the block with their new gTLD, the ICANN draw earlier this week has given some indication of which new Top Level Domains will be the first to see light of daw. For those of us who sat through the live streaming of the dra...
On June 13, 2012, ICANN revealed it had received 1930 new gTLD requests. Since then, that number has been going down. ICANN has logged 13 withdrawal requests, 6 of which have already been approved: AND, ARE, EST, CHATR, KSB and CIALIS. The remaining 7 are still being processed. So it’...
If you have kids, then you will know that we are now entering the “silly season”. Halloween and Bonfire night displays have now disappeared from shops, replaced by fake snow, mince pies and Wham’s Last Christmas CDs. There doesn’t seem to be a day that goes by when something else expe...
Whenever there is a scandal these days, we are quick to add the word “gate” to it, in order to underline the seriousness of the affair. Its origins can be traced back to the Watergate scandal in 1974 which eventually led to the downfall of a U.S. president. Since then, we’ve seen Bloo...
Governments are set to play a key role in ICANN’s new gTLD program as they are able to object to specific applications. Individual countries may, for instance, feel that a proposed new gTLD would infringe their national laws and may wish to raise this as a red flag to both the applica...
In the jet-set lifestyle of a modern day Head of Communications I am currently speeding through the French countryside on Eurostar after a day in our Paris office. Sounds very glamoros I’m sure, but with the competitive nature of travel these days, my seat in standard class costs less...
The online space today is a different world from 1994-5. In 1994-5 there were only two real concerns for a business to worry about: (1) what Top Level Domain (TLD) should I register? and (2) what should I do with it? Bearing in mind that there were actually only seven TLDs in existenc...
Phishing with my mum on the Amazon “Help… I need to change my hotmail password – I can’t see where you do that, can you tell me pls???” I received this text from my mother recently. Many of you may sympathize with this, but having once helped … Continue reading... Barack Obama and Mit...
ICANN’s 2012 Annual General Meeting is about to get under way in Toronto, Canada. These international meetings are a key part of the Internet’s technical governance. ICANN’s main prerogatives are threefold: to manage the Internet numbering system (IP addresses), naming system (domain ...
Having spent many hundreds of millions of dollars on their respective campaigns to date, filling the airwaves and television screens across the nation with sponsored adverts, not to mention the robocalls and direct mail, we finally entered the business end of the 2012 Presidential cam...
While video and music piracy regularly steals the headlines in the technology world, there is a quietly growing problem of eBook piracy threatening the entire publishing industry. The wide availability of titles online is of particular concern to textbook publishers, whose already sma...
Question: why has air travel become so painful? Because the threat posed by bad actors requires making everyone jump through hoops before letting them board a plane. To the point that, despite obvious requirements to ensure air safety, some are now openly questioning if the cure is no...
On 13 June this year, when ICANN revealed the 1930 applications it had received in the first round of new gTLDs , some names immediately stood out. Often linked to generic terms, two applicants in particular caught industry watchers’ eyes: Charleston Road Registry Inc., aka Google, an...
With 7.5 million domain name registrations during the first quarter of 2012, the total number of domains registered worldwide has passed the 233 million mark. This is according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief , published by VeriSign, the .COM and .NET registry. Since March 20...
A few days before July 12 of this year, ICANN began evaluating those applications out of the original 1930 received that haven’t since been withdrawn, i.e. all 1924 of them. At this year’s ICANN StudienKreis which I attended in Oslo last week, we learned that the evaluation work is be...
I have lived a relatively sheltered life when it come to holidays. As a youngster it was the golden beaches of St Ives, then the safe environments of five star all inclusive resorts on the Med. But as you get older, and more exotic destinations become accessible, wanderlust takes over...
New York City is also a city that enjoys a natural three letter anagram, NYC. If I was being pedantic I would say NY is the anagram for the State of New York, but people use NY and NYC interchangeably I guess. Which leads me on to the new gTLDs (generic top level domains) and the City...
With the close of the new gTLD public comment window approaching rapidly on Sunday 12 August 2012, one question that keeps on being raised again and again is – “Should I be interested in the public comments and what good will it do my brand?” . Many people view the ICANN public commen...
This week’s guest blog post is by ARI Registry Services (a partner to NetNames on new gTLD services):- Now that the dust has settled from the intense period of preparing and submitting your new Top-Level Domain (TLD) application(s), it’s probably time to sit back and relax whilst the ...
It’s July 2012, a momentous month for the UK, a British tennis player reached the Wimbledon Men’s singles final for the first time since 1938. And the Olympics are in town, and when I say town I mean towns, many towns up and down Great Britain where the Olympic torch has already passe...
It seems hard to think of a world without smart phones yet it was only five years ago that Nokia was the hottest technology brand and we all raved about handsets that flipped open like a Star Trek accessory. Fast forward five years and the Finnish handset company is struggling to reta...
The greatest moments in history are often over in the blink of an eye. People will always look back on some of these moments with a clouded view of what actually happened. “Was that it?” is a question that marks some of these events. And Wednesday 13th June 2012 was one of those momen...
Later this week I am due to stand up in front of a group of strangers and impart some wisdom in how to grow successful online business in a few easy steps. I have had this pleasure annually at the Business Start Up Show since 2005 yet when I look back at my key points in the last seve...
A little birdy was telling me… Nearly a year ago the record for the most number of Tweets per second was set during the UEFA Champions League final between Manchester United and Barcelona at Wembley Stadium. On average during the game, 6,303 tweets were sent PER SECOND. This record su...
“Living in a Microsoft World, and I am a Microsoft girl” could have been a remixed version of Madonna’s Material Girl back in 2008. The Washington State giant ruled the internet world, with over 90% of internet users using a Windows-based PC and accessing their favourite websites via ...
