Today I’m at DOMAINfest in Hollywood. It’s the last day of a two-day conference all about the domaining side of the domain name industry - the sale and resale of domain names and associated websites.
Doug Brent, ICANN COO, is here to talk about policy issues and the work ICANN is doing this year - some of which is likely to impinge quite heavily on this fresh industry. But I wanted to come and learn about this aspect of the DNS and hopefully encourage people to get involved in ICANN.
So, if you are here and you see me, come over and chat. I’ll be here and writing blog posts throughout the day.
I am going to have to make a determined effort to update this blog more often. I always feel better when I am writing. Anyway, just as an update: I am currently in New Delhi in the Maurya Hotel following a busy conference week. I’ll be heading to the airport soon to go to Paris, where I hope to meet up with various folk that are integral to the next two conferences coming up both in June: the OECD ministerial in Seoul, followed immediately afterwards by the next ICANN meeting in Paris.
But in between, and for Thursday and Friday this week, I will be at Domainpulse in Vienna giving a talk partly about my book, Sex.com, and partly about the history of making money from domain names. You can see the full programme here. It should be interesting: Wolfgang Kleinwachter, Peter van Roste, Sabine Dolderer, Patrik Faltström, Daniel Karrenberg plus a number of people I have yet to meet and look forward to doing so. If you’re going, see you there.
I’m writing this in that neverworld of an airport waiting for a slightly delayed plane.
And, of course, as it always is, that airport is Heathrow. I hate Heathrow. I’ve always hated Heathrow. Even as a kid, I remember the sensation of life ebbing away from you as you sit in uncomfortable chairs next to grumpy people, eat dreadful food and get annoyed with snooty staff. It’s Heathrow, it’s British Airways, it’s delayed, and I’m flying economy, seat 49J, which means no sleep, cramped legs, and an incredibly frustrating effort trying to do work on my laptop for the next nine hours.
It’s been six weeks since I last posted here. That can’t be good. And I have a ton of stuff to get out of my mind through my fingers. The one-day trivia brain of Los Angelenos; the US presidential election process; the insane bureaucracy and mind-control of this peculiar and remarkable country. Plus, lots of pics - some with world famous stars of the screen. And the tale of trying to get hold of my possessions after 16 weeks now.
Why is this material still in my brain and not on the page? Because of work. Too much work. Far too much work. This job is a constant invitation to burn-out. I think it is the three international meetings a year that is what really makes the workload impossible: there is never more than a week in which you can get on with all those things that need quiet periods to get done. I thank god that the cycle ride home (along the beach - it’s nice, even in crap weather) is 35 minutes. It’s the one conscious hour of the day I can’t be at my laptop. Although I did take two phonecalls on my way in this morning. How long before I’m balancing the Dell on my handlebars, trying to pick up WiFi signals from the beach houses?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So earlier this week I received not one but two emails offering to sell me back a recently expired domain of mine - back2black.com - for a very reasonable $199.95.
I had decided to let the domain go, and I had never actually put up a site at the domain, so its shows how sophisticated domainers have become in exploiting the millions of dollars that expire every year - some in the full knowledge of their owners, many not.
Of course the email told me it was a “Limited Time Offer…!!!” - and we all know why that is - because if Webnamesolution.com doesn’t hand it back within five days, it isn’t going to get its $6 back. All of this of course neatly fits into the hot news of the moment: domains and their rightful owners.
With my book out the way, I now have lots more time to, er, read books. And one of those near the top of the pile was Who controls the Internet? by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. The book has frequently cropped up in conversations with various Net people since it was published in March, and so I have been itching to read it.
I finished it this morning. And my gut feeling is that this is a very important book. Not only does it cover a big hole in knowledge and understanding of the Internet, but it is also well written, easy to understand, concise, coherent and thoughtful. I strongly suspect it will be ones of those books that informs opinion and so has a lasting, global influence far beyond what you could expect from 226 pages of text.
Being a journalist and knowing a thing or two about the subject though, I also have a number of criticisms. It has a dangerous US bias despite its avowed international outlook, it completely misses a fundamental plank of Internet governance, namely ICANN, and it has missed recent changes that will come back to haunt it.
