Making Sense of GAC Advice?

On the final day of the recent ICANN meeting in Beijing the GAC, which includes representatives from many countries’ governments, issued their communique as they do at all ICANN meetings. While the contents of a GAC communique always attracts commentary and reaction, the GAC communique from Beijing has probably provoked more debate, anger and confusion [...]

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More Premium Domains Released by ME Registry

The .me registry held back a bunch of domain names when they went live a couple of years back. They’ve been releasing some of them via auctions, while others have been made available to companies who were able to submit a project plan to the Montenegrin company. Some of the higher profile .me domains would [...]

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XXX Registry Launches Promotion

ICM Registry, the guys behind .xxx, have announced a big pricing promotion available via select registrars. The promotion, which runs for the entire month of May, has .xxx domain names available from as low as USD$8.99 Disclosure: We are one of the registrars

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Uniregistry hiring in Caymans

Uniregistry Hiring For Cayman Islands

Uniregistry, who have applied for 54 new TLDs, are hiring for their Cayman Islands offices. The company is currently looking for software developers, front-end developers, Sysadmins and marketing staff. It’s not clear how much the roles pay, but they’re obviously using the location as a selling point:   Full details including how to apply on [...]

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Domaining Spain Day One

Domaining Spain is taking place today and tomorrow in Valencia. Speakers from the four corners of the globe are addressing a predominately European audience on domains, domaining, new TLDs and related topics. The full agenda is here Related articles The Domains In Spain Fall Mainly On .. (blacknight.com) Domaining Spain heads to Valencia next month [...]

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ICANN Board Seeks Input On Government Advice

ICANN has opened a comment period to get feedback and guidance on the GAC advice from Beijing. The comment period details and some background may be found here. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, as it’s very clear that a lot of new TLD applicants are very angry when faced with potentially [...]

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ICANN Publish 2013 For Comment

Following on from talks during the ICANN public meeting in Beijing the final text of the proposed 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement has been published for comment Full details here  

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French Domains Popular With Individuals

According to the .fr registry’s latest report .fr domain names are popular with private individuals. One in two new .fr domain names is registered to a private individual. Currently over about 40% of .fr domains are registered to individuals, compared to approximately 20% 6 years ago. AFNIC’s latest report is available here.

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Google Does The Right Thing Opening Several Closed Generic Applications

Over the last few months one of the areas of attention in the new TLD project has been “closed generics”. I’ve written about this several times in the past and I’ve also raised the issue in as many fora as possible. Yesterday ICANN published a letter they’d received from Google with respect to several of [...]

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Latin American Countries Reject .Amazon & .Patagonia

While the ICANN 46 meeting in Beijing was warming up on the other side of the globe the “Cuarta Conferencia Ministerial sobre la Sociedad de la Información de América Latina y el Caribe” (4th ministerial conference on information society of Latin America and Caribbean) was taking place in Montevideo. The “Montevideo Declaration” (PDF) runs to [...]

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European Hotel Association Files Objections Against .Hotel Applications

HOTREC, the European association of hotels, restaurants and cafes has filed four community objections with the ICC. They’re concerned about several of the “closed generic” applications for .hotel and derivatives of the string. With that in mind they’ve filed against the following: Application # 1-1016-75482 for HOTELS by Booking.com B.V. Application # 1-1249-36568 for HOTEL [...]

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A New Domain For Canada

CIRA’s CEO, Byron Holland, made an important announcement today aimed at all Canadian internet users. CIRA currently runs .ca, but feels that maybe it’s not quite Canadian enough… At present the .eh ccTLD is not assigned, though I’m not sure what the process would be for getting it assigned to Canada Meanwhile ICANN’s CEO has [...]

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ICANN Launch New WHOIS Inaccuracy System

ICANN’s Compliance team put the new WHOIS inaccuracy reporting system live earlier today. (Oddly enough Google alerts picked up on the new page!). The new system should make reporting issues easier for all parties involved ie. reporters, ICANN and the affected registrars. They’re also including generic information on how registrants may update their own domain [...]

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More DotConnectAfrica Fun And Games

If you’ve been following the ICANN new TLD program over the last couple of years you’ll probably be aware of some of the applications and the applicants. However in the case of the competing bids for the .africa string the competitors, or at least one of them, has brought more “colour” to the proceedings than [...]

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Domain Guardians Confirm 7 Figure Offer On Australian City Domains

A couple of weeks back Domain Guardians announced they were brokering the sale of several Australian city domains. These weren’t the domains associated with small little towns that nobody would have heard of, but a set of high value premium domains including Sydney.com.au, Brisbane.com.au and Melbourne.com.au. Australian media is now reporting that they’ve received an [...]

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