News and views on domain names, the Internet and life in general
From the category archives:
There was a poll last year in which some disturbing number of Americans said that their main news source was The Daily Show – a nightly satirical show on the Comedy Channel hosted by Jon Stewart.
Having been in the US for over a year now, I have to confess that, unbelievably, I now add myself [...]
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This may well be old news by now but I’ve only just seen it having got back from a grueling two-week ICANN meeting in Mexico City.
Coldplay – well, its record company Capitol – was granted an extension for filing its response to the Joe Satriani court case where he claims Coldplay ripped off his If I Could Fly single in their single Viva la Vida.
Judge Dean D. Pregerson agreed on 20 February that Capitol would now have until 6 April 2009 to file its response.
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I’ve just seen this spoof of the .xxx registry process, ICANN, US interference and so on.
If you don’t know know what all of the above means, or who Paul Twomey, Viviane Reding, Mike Palage etc are, you won’t find it funny. If you do, you’ll love it.
The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers today announced that its board of directors voted unanimously to approve a new “.redneck” top-level internet domain.
The vote comes after a grueling three-day approval process that saw the successful registry spend almost $100 on application fees and lobbying.
“We’re very pleased with the result,” .redneck sponsor Dr Dobson Perkins said in a statement. “This new top-level domain finally cordons off a special ‘red-state district’ of the internet for every god-fearing, fag-hating patriot in the country.”
Read the rest at Texturbation…
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I’ve just got off the phone from an ICANN press conference with CEO Paul Twomey regarding the decision by ICANN to refuse the .xxx registry application.
And it has done little but confirm my already solid belief that the whole refusal was a poorly choreographed exit from a politically difficult situation.
Politically difficult for who? For the US government – thanks to a large pressure group of right-wing Christians with close ties to the US administration.
So what? A very small group of people in one country, with little understanding of the issues, has managed to bypass all the organisations and mechanisms in place and determine the future of the Internet (that global medium used by hundreds of millions of people).
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I've just learnt that Tom Cruise – you know, the Scientologist nut what does movies – has gone to WIPO to win back TomCruise.com.
The complaint – D2006-0560 – was put in yesterday and is pending a compliance review. Tom Cruise – or more likely his minions – have been very, very slow in noticing this [...]
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The future of the Internet – and how to stop it.
That was the title of Jonathan Zittrain's inaugural Oxford University lecture last night at 5pm at the Oxford Examination Schools. It was open to all, so I popped along.
And if you are interested in the Internet, I highly recommend it. It's an hour long and [...]
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There are three places on the ICANN Board that will open up in December when Hagen Hultzsch, Veni Markovski and Hualin Qian leave their positions.
ICANN has just stuck up the official request for statements of interest (as well as a revised .xxx agreement which looks pretty solid to me).
I think I might put myself [...]
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Well, I was sceptical that people would want .eu domains. What's the point? Do people really feel that European? If they want a domain, why not just buy a .com or their own country's domain. Apart from Germany and the UK, most other European countries have surprisingly few domains registered.
But boy was I wrong. By [...]
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If you feel the need to buy your own piece of the Internet today, then you're luck is in.
It is the first day that the new .eu domains are open to the general public – so get stuck in. Previously, there have been two “sunrise” periods where companies, organisations and other such creations have been [...]
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ICANN has been re-awarded the IANA contract, surprising no one, but at the same time keeping questions about the fate of the Internet's core functioning very much alive.
Strictly speaking ICANN has been granted a six-month extension [pdf], but then this is how the US government behaves when it comes to IANA. It has been extending [...]
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