Yesteraday i was officially elected to join to .ORG Advisory Council as an Asia Pacific representitive. The media release below. As a staunch beleiever of “being the voice of the people” i would like to hear from anyone in the AP region who are stakeholders in the .ORG or even if you have an opinion…

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The past week of ICANN meetings has been very productive from an Asia Pacific point of view. The most significant achievements for APRALO was the amendment of the By Laws allowing greater decision making and the election of a new leadership team. Myself elected as Chairperson for 2 years, Les Allison of PICISOC in Fiji…

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At the end of 2008, there were 177 million registered TLD domain names. Of the 240 cc TLDs there were 71.1 million registrations with 65% of them from only 10 ccTLDs according to Verisign. Of the top ten ccTLDs .cn, .de, .uk, .nl, .eu, .ar, .it, .ar, .br, .us and .au only 3 of the…

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Another example of why i am not certain the domain names will be in such heavy demand in the future. According to this article, in Japan advertisers do not advertise thier domain name just the words to search the Internet for. It certainly contradicts the online marketing and branding strategies that we use in the…

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During the recent Denial of Service (DoS) attack on a large international registrar effecting over 7.5 million web sites in 48 hours, i have learnt of an effective Internet vulnerability. I am only writing about it as once you read it, it is common knowledge and is only dangerous if you were inclined to try…

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We have almost become conditioned to the fact that we need to protect our domain name and that if we have an organisation of any description we need to secure a domain name for our online identity. Often conglomerates will register their identity across many TLD’s. ICANN will soon make it possible to create new…

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I have often wondered over the years how long the traditional paper based phone book will be in existence and how useful it is in today’s society when we are all connected to the Internet and have instant access to online phone books from all around the world as well as web sites that contain…

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There is a lot of negative discussions about ICANN’s proposed new gTLD application process. Many are saying the process is too slow, too expensive, ICANN want to know too much about my finances, who is ICANN to judge if my business plan is sustainable etc. Without writing a commentary as long as the guidelines are…

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With ICANN approving the IDN TLD for Russia, i hope this will start a “fast” flow of other TLD and GTLD’s being introduced in quick sucession. My understanding is that Russia will implement .РФ in June  2009. Then i am assuming they will offer all of thier 2LD’s in Cyrillic Russia already have 2 other TLDs .ru…

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According to this article Slingshot let a business critical domain name expire causing phone issues for their iTalk service.   How on earth did a large and respectful company such as SlingShot miss a renewal on a domain name which resulted in critical business services being lost?.  A former staff member registered the domain name using his…

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As the recently appointed Chairman of the ICANN APRALO i have the opportunity to lead an organisation during a time of much public consultation and change. One of the exciting consultations is the geographic regions policy. It seems to me that for years we have debated about having the AP region and its value. Two…

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Earlier this week i read this article from Computer Weekly regarding the proposal to create a TLD .cym for the Welsh people. To summarise, the Welsh government have voted to support the creation of a new TLD .cym to identify the Welsh population and to create further financial pathways and a safer Internet for its…

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The United Arab Emirates went live with their new Top Level Domain-TLD (Internet Name suffix such as .nz) .ae on August 03 2008. This refreshed my memory of the many opportunities Māori have to be creative when obtaining a web site address. We do not have to stick within the .nz space, not do we…

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The second round of consultation regarding implementing IDN’s in .nz closed on July 17 with only one submission from the Sate Services Commission . The one submission which is in support of IDN’s is a sign of the multi cultural society that we live in. People recognise that the Internet is not only a European…

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Google recently announced that they indexed 1 trillion urls. In 1998 when Google first indexed the web there were 26 million url’s. For any individual or group who claims the Internet is not a viable communications vehicle need to re evaluate as does any indigenous/minority culture who see the Internet as threat to their culture.…

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During the Paris meeting ICANN agreed to open up the creation of new TLD’s. I now find myself contemplating what if ICANN did not agree to this ?. I personally know of a many non speaking groups who were creating an Alternative Domain Name System that would cater to their linguistic and cultural needs. Sure,…

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At the ICANN meeting in Paris, ICANN agreed to the most fundamentally largest change on the Internet since its inception over 40 years ago. ICANN in 2009 will accept the creation of new gTLD’s. The decision has created a lot of debate and speculation that large corporations will simply use their money and power to…

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For those of you who followed the process of .xxx being accepted by ICANN then the turn around decision by ICANN not to implement .xxx will find the independent review requested by ICM as an interesting point in Internet governance. Maybe we will find out whether the US government really did interfere with the decision…

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