Personal domain names for individuals became available in .IE on October 31. Their availability came after a seven week notice period to allow time for sole traders, professionals, politicians, trademark holders who have not already registered their .IE domain name to do so under existing non-personal domain categories. … more

.CAT reached it’s 25,000th domain name registration today (October 31), less than two years after launching.

“It is a marvellous achievement,” said Jordi Iparraguirre, Director General of Fundació puntCAT, “but we are even more pleased with the number of pages in Catalan as well as our ratio of pages per domain name which is in the top ten for TLDs around the world. … more

The Washington Post has published a story from its Foreign Service that begins, “After ignoring the Internet for years to focus on controlling traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Kremlin and its allies are turning their attention to cyberspace, which remains a haven for critical reporting and vibrant discussion in Russia’s dwindling public sphere.” The article goes on to say “ there is talk of creating a new Russian computer network — one that would be separate from the Internet at large and, potentially, much easier for the authorities to control.” … more

ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee is “investigating suspicions that insider information is being used to snatch desired domain names before an individual or business can register them.” The practice is referred to as “domain name front running” and likened to a stock broker buying or selling shares ahead of a client’s trade, in anticipation of a movement in price. … more

There’s an interesting story from Associated Press on Vint Cerf stepping down from his position as chair of ICANN. His last moment in charge is the upcoming ICANN meeting in Los Angeles next week. Vint Cerf has been one of the people responsible for developing the internet’s technical foundation and is often regarded as the father of the internet as we all probably know. This article looks at ICANN and how it has grown, developed and its role in the current day internet. … more

IPv6 Factsheet

Download the IPv6 factsheet here [PDF, 402K].

ICANN today released a factsheet covering Internet Protocol 6, or IPv6. The factsheet is intended to provide an explanation of the protocol upgrade for a non-technical audience in the hope of enlarging public understanding surrounding this and related issues. … more

Independent officer’s report examines successes in dispute resolution

The Ombudsman for ICANN released his annual report today, which lays out how his office has helped individuals and organizations with disputes come to a resolution while avoiding formal processes like the courts. … more

I don’t know if this affects anyone, but .AERO have announced they will be releasing currently reserved special industry and other reserved domain names for registration by eligible members of the aviation community. Has anyone been involved in registering a .AERO domain name? … more

TELNIC has a problem writes Milton Mueller in this posting on the Internet Governance blog: ICANN’s contracts require it to display all the personal contact data of its registrants through a service known as “Whois.” But unrestricted access to personal contact data, aside from being a rather bad idea, is against the law in the UK. It follows European, not American, privacy and data protection rules. So after consulting with the UK’s data protection authorities, TELNIC asked ICANN to modify its Whois requirement. But the US government, responding to trademark and copyright interests, won’t let it, and is manipulating ICANN to get its way. … more

Wendy Seltzer writes on her blog, “Doc’s post and the impending comments deadline for the next iteration of ICANN’s never-ending WHOIS saga finally pushed me to write up my thoughts on the latest iteration of ICANN debate. As Doc points out, much of the current debate is very inside baseball, tied up in acronyms atop bureaucratic layers. Small wonder then that ordinary domain name registrants and Internet users haven’t commented much, while the fora are dominated by INTA members turning out responses to an “urgent request” to “let ICANN know that Whois is important to the brand owners I represent”: see the call reproduced in this response. … more

With another disaster happening in the world, this time the bushfires in California, undoubtedly scammers are registering domain names to set up websites and take advantage for appeals to raise money through fake charity appeals. Be warned!

VeriSign’s Digital Branding Blog has announced “Unrestricted registrations for .GY domain names are available once again. The registry had previously suspended requests. Requests may be made for both second- and third-level domain names, including .GY, .COM.GY, .CO.GY and .NET.GY. There is no limit to the number of domain names that may be registered.” … more

It pays to check out what you are bidding for in an auction, and the Dallas Cowboys certainly got a shock when they realised what they had bid for cowboys.com! Thinking they had bid US$275, they were rather surprised to find they had bid $275,000!

Speaking to ComputerWorld, Rich Dalrymple, the Cowboys spokesman said, “We didn’t realize what the price was. Our representatives misunderstood what the pricing system was, and it was a simple mistake,” he said. “So we just said we didn’t understand the structure of the auction and we basically withdrew our bid and decided we weren’t going to pay that amount.” … more

Karl Sultana has an article with a number of steps that he claims will allow you to beat a competitor who is in the number one position in Google for a certain keyword. However Karl writes you still need to find keywords that does not have too many competition if you do not have someone to help you doing optimization. … more

Alex Tajirian, writing in Circle ID, says:
There are two types of domain name appraisers, designated here as type “1” and type “0,” with the former being appraisers who rely on a scientific approach. A large number of domain owners use the services of type “0”—the nonscientific—or do the appraisal themselves. Approaches used by scientific appraisers include regression-type statistical modeling, discounted cash-flow analysis, and reliance on the Law of Large Numbers. … more