ICANN's "Office of the CTO", which of course ends up being called "OCTO", does quite a bit of technical outreach around the world. They've recently announced that they are expanding the team in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The new role will be based out of ICANN's office in Uruguay, though I'd suspect that whoever gets the gig will end up spending a lot of their … [Read more...] about ICANN’s Technical Team Hiring in Uruguay
ICANN Pitching Panel for SXSW
ICANN's North American team, in conjunction with Access Now and ISOC, is trying to put together a panel for South by Southwest (SXSW) which is being held in Austin, Texas next March. The panel session being proposed is entitled: "Can we save the global internet?", which is, I suspect, intentionally provocative: Expansion of the Internet has slowed. And the next billion … [Read more...] about ICANN Pitching Panel for SXSW
WordPress Buying Tumblr
Tumblr is to be acquired by Wordpress' parent company Automattic. Yahoo! bought Tumblr in 2013 for $1 billion dollars, whereas reports are citing numbers below $3 million for the latest sale! Yes, that's "million". The blogging service makes a logical choice for Automattic who already own a growing number of companies serving the blogging space, as well as the .blog … [Read more...] about WordPress Buying Tumblr
AFRINIC Hiring Head Honcho
AFRINIC is one of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). In very simple terms it looks after the IP address allocations for the Africa region, while RIPE does Europe and the Middle East, ARIN handles North America, LACNIC Latin America and APNIC does Asia Pacific. However the role of an RIR within the broader internet eco system is often a lot bigger than simply … [Read more...] about AFRINIC Hiring Head Honcho
Centralnic Swallows IWantMyName
Centralnic has been on an acquisition trail for the last couple of years and has been happily gobbling up as much as possible. Earlier today it was announced that they've just acquired New Zealand based IWantMyName (Ideegeo). The deal is valued at £2.75 million and it looks like it's already closed, as the IWantMyName site is already sporting a Centralnic logo. So who … [Read more...] about Centralnic Swallows IWantMyName
Radix Report Strong Results
The guys over at Radix Registry have been doing very well with their premium domain sales. They released their bi-annual report earlier this week and the results are truly impressive: $1.36M in revenue; at par with H2 2018 .online, .tech and .site were the highest-grossing TLDs with respect to premium sales 80+ names sold with a price tag of $2,500 or more 78% of premium … [Read more...] about Radix Report Strong Results
Namecon Global Changes Dates and Venue
Namescon Global will be held in Austin Texas in January of next year for the first time. The event organisers had originally chosen a venue in the downtown area which was fairly central, but in the last few days they contacted ticket holders to let them know of a change of location as well as dates. Originally the event was scheduled to run from January 26th to January 29th … [Read more...] about Namecon Global Changes Dates and Venue
IGF Berlin Registration Now Open
The upcoming IGF (Internet Governance Forum) will be held in Berlin this November. The theme of this year's event is "One World. One Net. One Vision." The event's programme this year will focus on three key topic areas: Data GovernanceDigital InclusionSecurity, Safety, Stability & Resilience Registration for the event is now open. If you've never attended an IGF … [Read more...] about IGF Berlin Registration Now Open
New Zealand’s ccTLD Release Q1 Snapshot Report
While pretty much every registry operator out there will put out a full annual report at some point there are a few who also release a variety of shorter reports over the course of the year. In the case of .nz, the country code for New Zealand, they've started publishing short snapshot reports on a quarterly basis. There's some interesting insights in the report: 710982 … [Read more...] about New Zealand’s ccTLD Release Q1 Snapshot Report
EU Domains in the UK Post-Brexit Just got More Confusing
While many domain name registries are run privately quite a few country code registries (ccTLDs) have links to government. In the case of .eu, however, the registry is operated under contract to the European Commission, so it is operated on behalf of the entire European Union. The impact of Brexit on the .eu ccTLD is something I've spoken about a few times in the past. The … [Read more...] about EU Domains in the UK Post-Brexit Just got More Confusing