Three new TLDs in the Root: .KP, .ME, .RS

Please welcome North Korea (aka Korea, Democratic People’s Republic) (.KP), Montenegro (.ME), and Serbia (.RS) to the root zone.

Delegation was approved at the recent Special ICANN Board of Director meeting on September 11.

My compliments to Kim Davies and David Conrad at IANA on a smooth process from board approval to root addition.

It appears that the zones were added to the root, but the IANA whois does not yet list the administrative entities for these published yet.

.KP was delegated to “Korea Computer Center”.

.RS and .ME are going to be replacements for the former .YU namespace (formerly Yugoslavia – and YU left the ISO3166-1 list), with a 2-3 year responsible transition of that namespace as .YU is sunsetted. .RS is to be operated by the same adminstrator of the .YU ccTLD.

Registry Failover Planning Should include Registrar Provisioning

I commented on a public document.   Let me be more specific…

Recently, there has been some talk over what a registry failover would need to look like, in the event that a new registry provider would need to be designated.

As new Top Level Domains (TLD) are introduced, many of them include failover testing or have described their disaster recovery plans, but these typically are focused upon natural disasters or acts of god, etc.

It is vital infrastructure, to be sure. As vital as the number of registrants or users that utilize the TLD, at least.

I spent some time reviewing the current registry failover plan, and noticed that it was very well written and prepared. I commend ICANN staff for their very thorough and hard work.

The place where I commented about perhaps adding some specificity is in trying to ensure that registrars can quickly unplug and re-plug their connections (and I am super-oversimplifying the actual process) to minimize registrant impacts for domains under management.

I’d also note that the likely driver of this document was not natural disaster or act of god, but rather the potential financial failure of the publicly-traded parent company to the registry.

While the circumstances that were likely driving the urgency of this planning have been relieved in the near term, this is an important proactive measure to ensure that effects to the namespace and users are minimized to the fullest extent, and then all of that security and stability is present in transition.

Marrakech . . . On the Road to Morocco…

Morocco ICANN meeting in Marrakech was a great experience, the weather was warm, plus I brought my better half and her sister along for the conference, and it was good to have all of my industry friends meet my great Melissa.

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion on the Domain Name Marketplace Workshop, which I thought was very visionary on behalf of ICANN to have as part of their schedule.

Domain Roundtable 2006

The second year of the conference, which I had the priveledge and honor to be executive producer on, has gone famously!

We had some great highlights, such as both Paul Twomey and Vint Cerf of ICANN as keynote speakers, plus Matt Bentley of Sedo and Marc Ostrovsky of iReit.

There was so much amazing content, fantastic speakers, and a great experience for everyone who participated in the event.

Sponsors, Speakers, and Attendees all had a positive experience, and I am grateful that this was such a great show as a result of it all.

One never knows what interesting things will happen when you put together so many different interests together under the same roof for the purposes of eduction and networking, but if the different emails that I saw afterwards were any indication, this was an amazing success!

Thank you to all the staff at Name Intelligence for their hard work and efforts on making this a wonderful conference for all the attendees.