Technology

So, I took this job at ICANN…

January 25, 2007

Starting 5 February, I will be the “general manager, public participation” for ICANN – an organisation I have closely followed and frequently criticised almost since its inception in 1999. I’m excited about it, and the possibilities the position holds.
Here then is a blog post about why I took the job and what I hope to [...]

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.xxx top-level domain back on the agenda

January 7, 2007

Well, Stuart Lawley won’t take no for any answer and .xxx has popped up on the ICANN agenda again, this time with such extraordinary controls and safeguards that it makes you wonder whether the business case is still there.

Contrary to common belief, the .xxx domain was never ruled out. In fact, because it had been officially approved by the ICANN Board before the US government, among others, went ballistic, the official line has always been that the contract drawn up wasn’t right.

And so ICM Registry has gone away and come back with yet more changes and yet more wording and concessions in a bid to get .xxx through. There is a lot in there and the wording is pretty uncompromising.

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Skweezer – when copy theft becomes a business model

December 13, 2006

I was surprised to find this morning when reviewing stats for my Sexdotcom.info site that a site called Skweezer.net has appeared.
I was even more surprised when I followed links through and found that this website has grabbed a large chunk of the content on my site and stored it on its own servers. This is [...]

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ICANN Board discussion of biz/org/info contracts

December 11, 2006

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.

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Online participation: the possibilities and the realities

December 7, 2006

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently building and running online participation websites – or, in English, trying to get people on the Internet learning about and interacting with physical meetings.
Both have been for Internet organisations, which should theoretically make things easier. The first was the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens in early [...]

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Online participation website for ICANN

December 2, 2006

So I was asked by ICANN’s “executive officer and vice president for corporate affairs” Paul Levins to do an online participation website for its meeting in São Paulo, starting officially on Monday.

Paul was at the IGF in Athens last month and saw the site that Jeremy and I had done for the IGF in order to try to get some online interaction both by people that couldn’t be there and by those that were there. In fact, in retrospect, the whole thing dovetailed with a conversation I had had with Paul when I visited ICANN in Los Angeles on a whim two months ago.

Despite alot of well-founded criticism of ICANN in the past (much of it from me) about the organisation being secretive, insular, opaque and whatever other term you wish to use, it struck me that ICANN had actually taken the criticism on board this time and was looking for ways to open up a bit.

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The dotcom contract and dangerous USG myopia

December 1, 2006

I am very tired so I have had to check what the new dotcom agreement – amended and then approved late yesterday by the US government’s Department of Commerce – actually says several times before I believed it.
Even now, I’m not so sure I have got it right. Which is worrying because I’ve just written [...]

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Guardian article on IDNs. Wait for the complaints…

November 24, 2006

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had an article on IDNs in The Guardian: “How engineers tamed the internet’s Tower of Babel“, which was basically an attempt to explain one of the other sides of the Internationalised Domain Names by referring to Patrik Fältström’s comment at the IGF that the technical side of things had now been agreed.

The article actually started out as coverage of the domain “£.com” but rapidly led to covering the issue of symbols on the Net, hence IDNs. I might post up my original article here as I had to cut out a lot of stuff in the rewrite focussing on IDNs. I might as well get that info up. I tried to use £.com to get across to English readers the concept of approving some “symbols” and not approving others. I think I managed it but not as clearly as I had hoped.

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

November 16, 2006

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 [...]

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Guardian article on the IGF

November 9, 2006

I’ve a piece in The Guardian today which is a broad summary of the IGF last week. It basically says that what could have been a disaster ended up being a success and finishes with Nitin Desai’s arranged marriage analogy – which I think was brilliant.

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