Certain domainers are suddenly finding common ground with trademark owners over ICANN’s introduction of new gTLDs. For someone with no dog in the hunt, it promises to be entertaining.

AFNIC, the French registration authority, has seven ccTLDs from their colonies that they keep dark and non-functional. At least three of these seven functioned at one point before being shut down under pressure from France. Whether they were turned off, or never turned on, their absence from the active Internet effectively denies their inhabitants any separate identity. In September of last year, the ISO-3166-1 list was shuffled around, adding two new items to the list, .BL (St. Bartholomew) and .MF (St. Martin - French side). These two are also dark, bringing the total to nine.

Now, in an apparent about-face, they are considering starting them up and adding two more. I can only speculate on their intentions. Are they finding it useful to have more votes in the CCNSO?

How many applications will ICANN receive for new top-level domains? An informal poll from people who are supposed to know about domain names…

ICANN constituencies were always a bad idea. It’s high time we got rid of them. Constituencies flout the fine pronouncements by ICANN about transparency and representation, they are highly inefficient, and they serve to ensure that consensus is rarely achieved. The net effect is to concentrate power in the ICANN Board. Bottom-up decision-making? Not even close.

So you’ve decided to start a new top-level domain! Congratulations! Have investors? Are they asking how long it’s going to be before they see a return? Careful now…. Having spoken with ICANN staff and others who keep an eye on these things, here’s my best (current) guess for the timeline for new TLDs.

VeriSign raised the wholesale price for .com domain names? Everywhere else, prices for technology items fall, especially when they are produced in volume. Why is this not true for domain names?

There are only two undelegated top-level country-code domains, aside from those darkened by colonial diktat. One of them, .KP, the TLD of North Korea, is in the tender grip of the Dear Leader — enough said.
Western Sahara (.EH) is another matter. The nearest thing they have to a paranoid strongman who hates the [...]

Have you been drinking government Kool-Aid recently? Do you believe the nonsense emanating from ICANN Board Members about how allowing .XXX would get them involved in regulating content (as if rejecting the application were not exactly that)? Do you think ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (whose website uses an IP address instead [...]

Word of the day: astroturfing.
Microsoft will provide free wireless access to Portland, Oregon.
Microsoft’s move, and similar initiatives sponsored either by municipalities themselves (Philadelphia) or commercial providers (Google in Mountain View), may be the first step toward making mobile content really rock.
City-wide wifi isn’t just about being able to get a [...]

A new British law bans Denial of Service attacks.
And Islamic law bans killing.