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 to that statistic – and I’m a professional journalist for chrissake. But this isn’t just an indication of how bad US news is – and it is really, unbelievably bad – it is also how increasingly sophisticated and journalistic Stewart has become.

Jon Stewart shows Jim Cramer his place

He is really starting to get up there with the best journalists through his incisive, powerful questions and his articulate and fierce questioning. It just so happens that whenever it reaches an uncomfortable point, he also throws in a joke.

Watch Stewart tearing into Cramer and financial journalism now

Never has this point been so clear as the painful-to-watch destruction of TV financial advisor Jim Cramer last night. Cramer hosts an extremely daft show called Fast Money on CNBC. Last week, Stewart was laying into all these dreadful “fun” financial shows on US TV at the moment when people are really suffering financially and Jim Cramer unfortunately got upset about it.

This led to a peculiar and equally appalling US TV trait – obsessive personality fake-fight nonsense masquerading as news – which has consumed American TV and fallen over into printed newspapers for the past week. So with appalling inevitability, Cramer appeared on Stewart’s show last night. And my god, did he get a roasting.

And thanks to the wonder that is the Internet, you can watch it all below (and on this page). I have to say I am impressed with Stewart. When he tires of comedy, I want to see this man front a serious news show (he has to get over the swearing though).

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.

Related link:
Satriani vs Coldplay: court docs and audio links

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).

Should I care? If you use the Internet (which you do because otherwise you couldn’t read this) then yes you do because the organisation that everyone has put their trust in to expand and oversee the future of the Internet for the good of mankind has shown that it can be manipulated 100 percent by one government for short-term political ends.

Mr Twomey denied this interference outright. Instead, he explained, there had been a large amount of public opinion against it; a big pornographer (Larry Flynt) didn’t like it [jpg]; and the UK government sent a letter saying it may hold ICANN responsible if anything went wrong with .xxx.

What Twomey said (just prior to the questions) was: “When it came to national laws relating to pornography there was going to be such a diversity there was some concern, according to the contract in front of them,  how could this be complied with.

“This concern was compounded, at least in some people’s minds, by the communcation from the United Kingdom government which made it clear that the UK government would consider that if the applicant registry could not force compliance then it expected ICANN to intervene and force compliance.”

What the letter says is: “It will be important for the integrity of ICANN’s position as final approving authority for the dot.xxx domain name, to be seen as able to intervene promptly and effectively if for any reason failure on the part of ICM in any of these fundamental safeguards becomes apparent.”

Claims that the decision was made because of US government interference were “unfounded and ignorant”, Twomey claimed. When it was pointed out the EU itself had stated this (spokesman for Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for information society and media, said: “We see here a first clear case of political interference in ICANN”), Twomey explained that was “ill-founded and surprising”.

ICM Registry’s request for the ICANN Board to vote on .xxx was apparently given the highest priority. But that respect appeared to diminish when no less than five letters were received in little more than a week before the vote on 10 May – all of which were subsequently used in Twomey’s justification for denying .xxx, and all of which arrived after ICM Registry’s request.

Why didn’t ICANN delay the vote – just as it has three times already? What are we to make of the literally hundreds of people on the ICANN public forum decrying .xxx? How did so many people know that .xxx was going to a vote so late in the day? And how come they are all from America?

What is this 48-hour delay in any of the Board members being allowed to talk publicly about the decision?

All this and more was asked at the press conference, and you can hear Paul Twomey’s response here, in a 26 minute 14 seconds excerpt [MP3, 10.5MB] of all the questions asked over .xxx.

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 Internet thing. The domain was registered in November 1996 – nearly ten years ago!

And there have been dozens of famous people going to WIPO or the courts to get back their namesake domains. The most Net-savvy was doing it back in 1999. I know because I've been following domain disputes closely for years.

I have little doubt that this sudden interest in the Net is because Tom Cruise is increasingly becoming a figure of ridicule on the Net. There's my favourite – TomCruise is nuts.com – and then the video of him killing Oprah Winfrey. And then FreeKatie.net. And then all the sites that go on about him being gay. And the South Park episode thing… It goes on and on, and no doubt Mr Cruise had just noticed that people aren't being as respectful as they should be. Just wait for those lawsuits online friends.

What is also interesting is that, surprise, surprise, it is Jeff Burgar, this time under his dba Alberta Hot Rods that owns the domain. Mr Burgar has to be the most notorious cybersquatter in the history of the Net. He also isn't scared of fighting his corner and often hires a lawyer to push his point. He's had some notable success, including beating Bruce Springsteen to BruceSpringsteen.com and Kevin Spacey in court for KevinSpacey.com (although he lost KevinSpacy.com).

More interesting from a UK perspective , Jeffrey Archer – yes, the shamed Tory peer, liar, perjurer, prostitute user and briber, ego-maniac and author – has also gone to WIPO, again against Burgar to get hold of JeffreyArcher.com. Archer filed his complaint on 18 April. We'll see what happens.

I've done a story for The Register, complete with links to previous stories I've done on this area.

And as a quick update, the man who noticed the WIPO request first – George Kirikos – has been looking about and discovered that Cruise has also gone for – and won – TomCruise.net. It's now in the hands of domain specialists Trout & Zimmer.

Interestingly, Trout & Zimmer's own site is dead: “Account for domain troutzimmer.com has been suspended.”

The site as it was previously can be seen on the Wayback Machine – it has basically always been a placeholder, most recently – and for at least two years – stating simply: “If you are interested in purchasing this domain name, please email me at: officergray1039@aol.com.”

Mr Cruise is on a mission. And this one isn't impossible.

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 is available for viewing at the Oxford Internet Institute's website. Here is the OII's webpage for it, and here's is a direct link to the lecture [Real Player]. Usually the OII sticks up a downloadable MP4 of its lectures after a few days.

Why should you give up an hour of your time? Because it was a surprisingly good, interesting and thought-provoking lecture. It was broad and deep but with a coherent thread running through it.

There were lots of points made, but two which made particular impact on me were Zittrain's dismissal of ICANN, the ITU, WSIS, WGIG and so on as pretty irrelevant in the wider scheme of things, merely bodies that kept busy-bodies usefully busy. Although I have still to find out what he thinks about the IGF – which to me sounds pretty much like the Manhattan Project he said the Net needed in an article earlier this year.

And the second point: a brave and cheeky but earnest criticism of how little Oxford University was doing with its network, with the technological interactions that the Internet made possible.

Who is Jon Zittrain? He co-founded the Berkman Center at Harvard which keeps track and reviews and analyses how the law is interacting with the Internet. He is the OII's Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation and Harvard's Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Oxford, whatever the hell that means.

He is also a nice, smart bloke. Don't take my word for it. Check out the lecture. (You can see me at the start of the webcast incidentally in what looks like a black top, furthest back on the left hand-side, nearest the aisle).

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 forward.

This was just a daft thought about two hours ago but while tapping away at my Sex.com book, it's been whirring round my mind and I think I might do it. I can think of alot of people that would hate me to be on the Board but then the identities of those people are precisely the reason why I should show willing.

Off the top of my head, this is why I – or at least, someone like me – should be on the ICANN Board. If I do do this, these points will no doubt form the foundation of my application.

• ICANN Board transparency is the biggest priority for the Board of Directors at the moment – they have admitted as much. And, from the people I have spoken to, they do seem to be determined to be more open. It strikes me that alot of the Board are unsure, even scared, of how to open up. Transparency is my business. It's what I do for a living.

• Tied in with this: communication. Communication within nearly all ICANN processes is terrible. It's often only after a big row that people finally understand what the other party is trying to get across. As a reporter covering the whole political processes surrounding the Internet, the most useful role I have played it not so much telling the outside world what is going on within ICANN, as informing people within the process of what others think in a non-confrontational third-party way.

• Awareness. It is surprising how unaware different sections of the ICANN community are of what is going on outside their sphere. Lawyers always see (and so therefore self-edit) the legal side of things. Registrars only see the domain business. Board members, incredibly, often seem surprised when faced with angry stakeholders. It's partly because of the culture that has been built up where there is a palpable fear of getting “too close” to any particular group. I know all the groups (even some of the government folk), and have that odd position of not being part of any group – nor of having the slightest fear of ever being seen as biased to one group or another.

• I know how the system works. And I have been more than happy to point out where the problems are. I am also not afraid of confrontation. And I have nothing to lose or to gain from either keeping quiet or standing up and being counted.

• Of course you could make the charge that as a journalist I couldn't be trusted with confidential information. In actual fact, I would argue the opposite. I am trusted with confidential information every single day, and because I publish for public consumption information related to the subject, I have become highly skilled at making swift and complex decisions on what information to relay and not to relay. I don't think there is anyone that could or would accuse me of breaking their confidence.

• I am not compromised. And I am utterly uncorruptable. You only have to look at my salary. I have no interests in anything except the promotion of the Internet for the good of all. I am also very approachable. Tied in with that, I have grown up with the Internet. And I have made most of my living from covering what is happening with the Internet. As such I have a very broad knowledge of changes within the Internet, and how those changes relate to the law and to society in general.

• I understand how the Net works. I have a Masters in Engineering. I have learnt about the infrastructure of the Net and how it can be expanded from chatting with Paul Mockapetris and Bob Kahn. I have pointed out to Steve Crocker how Sex.com was *really* stolen. And I have argued with Vint Cerf over, well, lots of things. I have also built at least a dozen websites, know HTML, XML etc, have learnt some JavaScript and so on.

• The media remains under-represented at the highest levels of the Internet. God knows why, but it is telling that of all the stakeholders constantly mentioned in the WGIG, WSIS and now IGF processes, that the media never gets in there. People have a fear of the media. But it is largely a fear of the unknown. The simple fact is that the media is absolutely vital to all of us. And the Internet is actually expanding the media far beyond the handful of powerful people that have disproportionate power. All the media is is the wide dissemination of information. The Internet is therefore the perfect host, and it's daft not to have someone that understands that process at the top of the tree.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. I think I am persuading myself into applying.

The question is: who would actually act as a reference for me? I can think of dozens of the Internet great and good that I could call up and ask, but would they really want to stick up for the nosy British journalist?

Anyone that reads this, feel free to comment – or send me an email if you'd rather not appear below.

Right, back to the Sex.com book…

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 the end of the first day – the first day! – of .eu domains being open to the public, EURid had sold over one million of them. I called EURid up and they admitted that while they were expecting to sell one million, they had expected it to take a few months.

This morning it is now at 1.27 million (plus 300,000 registrations during the sunrise period) – making it the seventh biggest Internet registry in just two days. Here's a list I've knocked up from the most recent stats:

And what is even more remarkable is how popular .eu has been with those of us in the UK. As a country that has always had a difficult relationship with Europe, it's hard to see why the new domain would be so popular with Brits. Even EURid was stumped.

I think the simple answer is that the UK is very Net-savvy. After four hours of .eu domains being available it was the UK that had registered the most. But this has now changed to Germany out in front (394,000), followed by the UK (265,000), then the Netherlands (150,000), Italy (80,000), Cyprus (?! – 73,000), Sweden (62,000) and France (50,000) in that order. You can see the latest stats here.

I suspect there is alot of buy-to-resell going on. There is a value to a .eu domain, a big chunk of it provided by the fact that it has got a fair amount of coverage – much more so in Europe that the releases of other new top-level domains like .info or .biz.

In fact, you can put a pretty good figure on the degree of speculation inherent in domain names by looking at the number of active domains against those that have been deleted in different Net registries. Obviously lots of people buy domains for a daft reason and then never get around to using them and then don't bother to pay to renew them when they come up. But that is a small chunk of it, most of it is speculation.

And that figure is 1:2. Or, put it another way, about a third of domain registrations will be used. Dotcom is obviously the most extreme – it has 50 million active domains but 115 million deleted domains. But dot-net has 7.4 million active and 13.3 deleted. Dot-org has 4.5 and 10.5 respectively. The more recent registries where the renewal process hasn't been through two iterations yet have a lower ratio. Dot-info has 2.7 million active and 3.5 deleted. And dot-biz, 1.4m active and just 761,000 deleted.

But getting away from all the stats – there is clearly something big that has happened here. Every-day people have gone piling in to this new domain. Have we unknowingly hit a moment of wider societal awareness of the Internet and its variations? Has the .xxx controversy made people more aware that there is more than just dotcom?

Or are these massive registrations an indication of wider anti-American feeling? It's something that people do their best to ignore but the simple fact is that a very, very large number of people across the world hold the current US administration in contempt because of the War on Terror and all the associated events of the past five years. Do people feel a sense of pride in having something that isn't American – something that is “Europe”?

Or is it just a sense of excitement in there being a new domain that you are likely to be able to get the name that you want? After all, only people in the EU are allowed to buy the domains, so competition is far smaller than a truly global top-level domain.

I think it's a combination of all of the above: speculation; awareness; anti-Americanism; and the chance of actually getting what you want.

What the huge success of .eu does highlight however, and again, is the inadequacies of Net overseeing organisation ICANN. There is this faintly ridiculous game played with new gTLDs at ICANN. One, it restricts the number of top-level domains people can have, then it creates an opaque and at time ridiculous system for deciding what new TLDs there can be, and then it points and laughs at the domains when they don't do as well as the existing domains, claiming that it is right not to release any more domains.

The huge registrations of the .eu domains say one thing very, very loudly in my view: ICANN – YOU DO NOT KNOW BEST WHEN IT COMES TO TOP-LEVEL DOMAINS!!!    

The .eu domain did not come from any ICANN process. In fact, it would never have emerged from the US-centric, US-blinkered organisation. It was pushed by the European Union, and ICANN was wise enough not to stand in the EU's way. It has taken bloody ages to get up and running, but it demonstrates if nothing else that ICANN is in fact getting in the way of people wanting to use the Net the way they want, as opposed to aiding them.

I think ICANN really has started to realise this, although its instinct is still to control every element, because it has somehow all become about power. The most stupid control element it has just put in place is the requirements it expects everyone to reach in future if they are even going to be taken seriously for a new TLD bid. They need this number of staff etc etc – it works out at $250,000. And then there is ICANN's fee for even deeming to consider the new TLD. ICANN is getting right in the way.

The next round of new gTLDs will be the most interesting yet. It will really see the Internet pushed and pulled in ways it never has been before and if ICANN doesn't get the system right for approving them, it won't survive the ordeal.

The new, shiny .eu domain – despite having come from the stultifying world of European bureaucracy – has demonstrated the world wants the Internet its way – and that is fast, flexible and open. Another new season of the Internet is upon us.

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 able to grab their namesake in this new part of the Internet, but now everyone is welcome to join in.

I wonder whether these sunrise periods over a form of protection to someone that registers a domain that a company subsequently puts claims to. After all, they have set aside a special time period to register the domain – you only have to show they were aware of this and then you could argue that they have demonstrated their lack of interest in the name by not registering it.

Not that I'll be going Microsoft.eu any time soon. Actually, that has of course already gone – although you wouldn't know it as EURid's Whois appears to have collapsed under the strain at the moment.

Do people really want a .eu domain? I suppose we will get the first indications on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy these odd .eu facts I dug up for an article in The Times a fortnight ago – Sex.eu and other domain stories.

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 ICANN's contract since day one, with an occasional modification.

So why is this one any different? Well, aside from the world political tectonic shifts of the past year, the US government actually put out a “Sources Sought Notice” at the end of February for IANA, which was widely viewed as a warning shot across ICANN's boughs.

And the extension is only for six months – to 30 September 2006 – which means it will end at the same time as the main Memorandum of Understanding that ICANN has with the US government and which provides it with all its authority. Previous extensions have been for a year. You can see the whole history on the NTIA's website.

As ever, we can only guess what is really going on because both ICANN and the US government go very, very quiet as soon as you start asking about the MoU. Which is obviously incredibly comforting for the rest of the world.

Just what is going to happen with the running of the entire Internet's infrastructure in September this year? Nobody seems to know.

I note as well that the post in which the US government announced its “sources sought” request for IANA has now been wiped off the Internet – it was here.

Or perhaps we can read something into the fact that the extension to the contract was awarded on 1 April. Maybe Michael Gallagher was just joining in on the April Fool's Day fun.