Desiree Miloshevic of Afilias is talking about the history and future of the Domain Name System, including IDN, in an upcoming forum at the Oxford Internet Institute on January 28th, 2008.
The session is titled “What’s in a name? The History and Future of the Domain Name System“.
Here is a teaser video:
I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Victor Pitts of Moniker for the Domain Masters radio show on Webmaster Radio again, and spoke on the ICANN meetings in Los Angeles with a recap.
Just saw a post about blacknight.ie offering .EU domain names at 5 euros per. Unless I am mistaken, that is at cost.
 This is noteworthy, as we certainly watch pricing trategy like this suceed in the US, so it will be good to see how such a pricing model will drive organic growth and adoption of the .EU namespace.
ICANN is establishing a forum on allocation methods for single character ([A-Z0-9]) second level registrations in the gTLDs.
There are 16 gTLDs that have single character registrations restricted, of which .COM, .NET, and .ORG have only six registrations within that predated the rule to establish the restriction (q.com – Qwest, x.com – Paypal, z.com – Nissan, i.net – Oxide, q.net – Q Networks, and x.org – X Windows open source).
 The net result of the current process could allow for a thundering herd of registrants clamoring for these domain registrations, or there could be an auction process introduced to accomodate the process, should there be a change from the status quo.
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.
What are your ideas for new top level domains?
Because of my tenure in the namespace market, I have the privilege of being a person that folks trust for open feedback on their TLD applications for the upcoming rounds next year.
I’ve heard or seen over 50 different pitches or business concepts at this point for new TLDs.
Some are great and have a ton of commercial appeal, some are not bad in that there is a good premise behind what they provide as an experience for the end user, and some are not going to get over a thousand registrations in their lifetime (and they’re good with that).
Lots of duplications…  Of the over 50 that I have seen, there’s 1 that I have seen 4 separate potential applicants for, 2 that I have seen triples of, and 9 that I have seen duplicates of, and the rest are individual strings.
Great minds think alike, and I am certain I have not seen every application out there.
I know most every registry platform, the various providers who outsource these capabilities, and technical requirements for resolution and registration services, and also understand the registrar channel well, because I have operated registries and registrars.
If you are a person could benefit from a chat, I’ll put it out there that I am discretely reviewing these on a pro-bono basis, and am glad to offer any feedback privately.
