Kieren McCarthy [dotcom] » Podcast

Talking about Sex.com on NPR’s On the Media

kierenmccarthy — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:01:49 +0000

I recorded a show for National Public Radio’s (NPR) On the Media show earlier this week talking about Sex.com, my book about it and the domain’s upcoming auction next month.

The show played this morning. You can see the NPR page (with transcript) at http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/02/26/06. And listen to the show below:

Here’s what NPR has to say of the show:

Sex.com

On March 18th, a public auction will be held in Midtown Manhattan. On the block? Sex.com, one of the most coveted pieces of internet real estate, ever. But be warned. Sex dot com comes with a long and troubled past. It’s all chronicled by Kieren McCarthy in SEX.COM: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet’s Crown.

ICANN Board discussion of biz/org/info contracts

Kieren — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:12:29 +0000

On Friday, the ICANN Board approved some controversial renewal contracts for the .biz, .info and .org top-level Internet domains.

In a press conference a few hours later, chairman Vint Cerf urged the reporters to read the transcript of the discussion. That transcript isn’t up yet but I figured that Cerf was right about listening to it, so I have knocked up an MP3 of the 45-minute discussion and posted it below.

The most contentious issues were that the registries would be able to raise their prices, and charge different amounts for different domains (google.info is worth a little more than sausagemaker.info ); that the new contracts came with a “presumptive right” to renew the contract when it reached its end; and that the registries were able to use and sell the data of individual registrants however they want.

After a lot of argument what happened was: a cap of 10 percent a year was put on domain increases; all domains have to treated alike; the presumptive renewal is there unless there is a “breach” of the contract; the companies can sell the data how they see fit.

The contracts are bad and stupid but they had to go through because of the bad and stupid dotnet and dotcom contracts that VeriSign manage to extract from ICANN. I went on and on about how vital the dotnet contract was, and on and on and on and on and on about how ICANN had provably fixed the process to give it to VeriSign and now it has come back to haunt ICANN now and into the future.

Twomey claimed that these contracts won’t necessarily impact the new gTLD contracts i.e. all the dreadful parts will be pulled out. But this is classic Twomey stonewalling. ICANN has just written in monopoly top-level domains – you get it once, you have it forever – but insisting on a “breach” of contract, putting ICANN into a hopeless regulator role it is ill-equipped to carry out.

It has also created an oligopoly by telling the registries they can increase prices by 10 percent a year when the actual cost of domains is going down. ICANN has set the lines by which the market will run i.e. Internet domain names will become more expensive over time. It is in fact undermining, yet again, its fundamental brief to increase competition on the Internet.

And all because of the desperate need to carry through the secret deal made with VeriSign to end its lawsuits with ICANN. ICANN gave it dotnet and dotcom, and VeriSign promised to buckle under – but then VeriSign screwed ICANN yet again right at the end when it managed to get the US government to award itself dotcom renewal rights.

Twomey’s inherent desire to strike under-the-table deals has screwed ICANN here. He would have done better to get on the Net community’s side and rally against VeriSign. But then hindsight is a wonderful thing. The lesson if anyone really needs to be reminded of it yet again is: don’t do deals with VeriSign. You will come out worse off.

Anyway, here is the ICANN Board’s discussion about the biz/org/info contract extensions. Only Susan Crawford really discussed the reason why these contracts were agreed to. I don’t find that entirely encouraging. In fact, I’m not sure that half the Board even understood what the issue with the dotnet contract was.

MP3 of ICANN Board discussions over biz/info/org contracts.

How to avoid learning perhaps a little too much about Kieren’s life

Kieren — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 13:31:05 +0000

I mentioned about a month ago how I was considering setting up a second blog so I could more easily separate my personal and professional life. And yesterday, twice, I was reminded that there is a bit of an unusual overlap when I spoke to two people: one, the spokesman for a company I regularly report on; and the second, the CEO of a company I also follow closely.

Both of them made mention of my paella (I note with sadness that only one was interested in the actual recipe however). Now this was a tremendous paella, there’s no doubt about that, but I suspect that there may be a few people out there that don’t want to know about my lunch and so I am going to highlight here an easy solution to the problem: separate RSS feeds.

I have the blog set up so that you can grab individual automated RSS feeds and so avoid having every post appear if you subscribe. I will stick the links below so at least people have an option. Of course, if you want to continue to know a little too much about my life, feel free to stick with the main RSS feed. I don’t mind in the slightest.

Main blog feed
Domain names feed

Internet feed

You can subscribe to as many or as few as you like.

Nominet IGF meeting audio recordings

Kieren — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 18:56:45 +0000

Nominet held a meeting over the IGF on Monday which has attracted a fair amount of attention, most of it revolving around Nitin Desai’s remarks at the end, picked up by the BBC.

I have grabbed the audio from the meeting and produced a series of MP3 files which you can download and listen to here. I will also post them on the IGF200.info blog. All files below:

Opening Panel: Emily Taylor (Nominet), Alun Michael MP, Nitin Desai
MP3 file (22 mins)

Security Panel: Jean-Jaques Sahel (DTi), Mark Sunner (Messagelabs), Dave Evans (Information Commissioners Office), Guy Hosein (Privacy International/LSE), Richard Allan (Cisco)
MP3 file (35 mins)

Child Abuse Panel: Peter Robbins (Internet Watch Foundation), John Carr (NCH), Camille de Stempel (AOL/ISPA)
MP3 file (22 mins)

Openness Panel: Andrew McLaughlin (Google), Dr Yaman Akdeniz (Cyberliberties UK), Prof Jonathan Zittrain (OII/Berkman)
MP3 file (34 mins)

Emerging Issues Panel: Howard Williams (Worldbank), David Harrington (Communications Management Association), Malcolm Hutty (LINX), Chinyelu Onwurah (Ofcom)
MP3 file (42 mins)

Closing remarks by Nitin Desai
MP3 file (10 mins)

I have also done a file combining just Nitin Desai’s opening and closing remarks, which you can grab here (mp3, 20 mins).

I should add that I was hoping to post videos of each sessions but have been thwarted by the combination of video formats and video editing software. I have a (very large) grab of the whole event in .asf format but have given up on editing after wasting hours trying to get it into a more usable format and only ending up with out-of-sync pics and audio.

Hopefully Nominet will ask the webcast company to do the split and post them in .avi or .mpeg files. The pictures are not that important anyway and are huge files so the MP3s are more useful and shareable.

Interviews with the Nominet Board candidates

Kieren — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:03:52 +0000

There are two Board positions going at UK registry Nominet that will be decided on Wednesday (27 September) at the company’s annual general meeting in London.

Last week, Nominet announced that there were six candidates and released a statement from each. Despite the extremely tight time period (for example postal votes have to be with Nominet tomorrow (Monday)), I thought it would be a good idea to do very brief interviews with each candidate asking what I hope are the questions that Nominet members would wish to ask and then post them on the Net to help people arrive at a decision.

So far I have done and edited four of the six, and I have just received an email from Lord Erroll so will hopefully talk to him this evening and post his tonight [Update 8.30pm: Done and now up]. I have yet to hear from Andrew Bennett which is a shame, but if he wants to get in contact and get his points across, there is still time [Another update 12pm: Andrew got in touch and his interview is now also up].

You can read each candidate’s statement here [pdf], but below are MP3s of the interviews. They are slightly different in length but average at around four minutes, and I don’t believe I have given anyone an advantage one way or another, although I may have been a little more aggressive with Fay Howard due to tiredness.

Also during Angus Hanton’s interview either myself or he was called by someone else so there is “call waiting” blip at various points (just in case you were wondering). And Fay Howard was on her mobile so the very beginning is slightly garbled.

In alphabetical order:

Andrew Bennett (mp3)

Gordon Dick (mp3)

Lord Erroll (mp3)

Peter Gradwell (mp3)

Angus Hanton (mp3)

Fay Howard (mp3)

If anyone has any problems getting or listening to these files, please leave a comment below or email me.

Update: Yes, the MP3 player has started playing at odd speeds again. It must be the recorded bitrate, or maybe the fact it’s a variable bitrate. Anyway the files themselves work fine, so click on the MP3 link to listen while I try to sort out the problem.

Second update: No, I’ve wasted 40 minutes on it, so I’ll kill the Flash player until I can get it working without mishap.

Will the US hand over control of Internet? Here’s your answer

Kieren — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:47:51 +0000

So far the US government has been explicitly urged by just about every speaker at the [tag]NTIA[/tag] meeting in Washington discussing [tag]ICANN[/tag] that it transition its own role on the Internet to a more international body.

Commerce assistant secretary John [tag]Kneuer[/tag] – the man that matters – was asked straight out whether the US was prepared to transition its role, especially considering the famous “principles” announced last year. (The key sentence being: “As such, the United States is committed to taking no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the DNS and will therefore maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file”.)

This was his response.

“I think the fact that we are gathered here today and we are entering this process is a clear indication that we are committed to this transition.

“I think that there has been a lot of reading into that statement very, very expansively. The historic role that we announced that we were going to preserve is fairly clearly articulated in that statement – it is the technical verification and authorisation of changes to the authoritative root. That is a function of IANA that is limited, extraordinarily technical in nature, and very explicitly tied to security and stability from a technical standpoint.

“That should not be read so expansively so as to say that we are going to retain all of our historic roles. We clearly have an incentive and long-standing policy to complete this transition and that our oversight role of ICANN should transition away.

“That being said, we will take no actions that will call in question the security and stability of the Internet. And in that context we have announced our intention to retain this function under which I think is distinct.”

Listen to it here.

Or here (I am having strange problems with the playback speed though):

[http://kierenmccarthy.co.uk/mp3s/ntia-icann-26jul06/kneuer-response-to-principles.mp3]

I read this statement as the US government recognising that it has to hand over its current role. Thank god for that. But it remains determined to cut a deal where it retains final control over the root zone file (aka the IANA function).

That’s the negotiating position. The US government will step away from everything else but it wants final say over IANA. Will this scale-back work? Only time will tell.

Podcast: Interview with Nitin Desai

Kieren — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:27:53 +0000

The IGF formation meeting is over, at least in terms of formal consultations.

In the next few days, the dates of the first inaugural Internet Governance Forum in Athens will be announced. It will be either late October of middle of November. In the next 10 days, all interested parties have been asked to send their own view of how the “preparation committee” for that meeting should be formed.

The Secretariat – mostly Markus Kummer – will then decide how the meeting will be structured and the new preparation committee will decide what topics are to be covered in Athens.

That aside, I had a brief interview with the chairman, and the man chosen by Kofi Annan, to get the IGF to its first meeting, Nitin Desai. In it, he spoke of how he saw the discussions progressing, what the Forum would end up reviewing and what it’s real value may prove to be.

I have put it here as an MP3 podcast [mp3]. It’s just over 10 minutes in length. I think it neatly captures the entire two-day conference and, crucially, looks forward to what we can expect from the IGF proper.

[http://www.kierenmccarthy.co.uk/_attachments/1768470/nitin-desai-igf.mp3]

Net governance podcast

Kieren — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 09:09:30 +0000

I have finally found time to produce a podcast covering the controversial topic of Internet governance, piecing together some of the most important remarks made tome during the PrepCom3 conference in Geneva.

Included is the EU radical announcement of a new co-operation model to run the Internet, the response of the US government and short interviews with: the US ambassador, David Gross; UN special adviser Nitin Desai; Brazilian ambassador Antonino Porto; ICANN head Paul Twomey and lastly UK/EU representative David Hendon.

It stretches to 27 minutes but it’s all pretty important and relevant stuff. If anyone wants to give me some feedback on length, it would greatly appreciated. My feeling is that 15 minutes is optimal, but I wonder if with a big topic it’s worth stretching it that bit further.

Anyway here is:

[http://www.kierenmccarthy.co.uk/mp3s/net-governance-podcast.mp3]

Podcast from Geneva

Kieren — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 12:58:20 +0000

I’m at the WSIS meeting in Geneva where the future of the Internet is being decided by the world’s governments. I spoke to the US Ambassador and the Pakistan Ambassador – both of whom will be vital to the issue of who gets to run the Internet, and have done a podcast of those interviews plus some background and musings on the current situation.

I will try to piece together another podcast later with more interviews and hopefully reporting agreement on the functioning of the Net.