It’s not every day that ICANN comes to town. As an employee of Tucows, the third largest ICANN accredited registrar, I’m a little more tuned in to what’s going on with ICANN than the average person. But in my nearly three years at the company, I’ve never attended an ICANN meeting in the flesh. Instead, [...]

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Variant top-level domains (TLDs) and how they are managed is one of the most hotly discussed topics we are facing at the moment. What are variant TLDs, you ask? Well, that’s where the discussion begins… ICANN’s staff is currently producing implementation plans for both the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process and the New gTLD Process. [...]

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One particularly important aspect of ICANN’s launch of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) will be the availability of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) at the top level. That eagerly anticipated enhancement to Internet participation has also raised some issues. For example, current practice dictates that gTLDs contain at least three characters – two-character Latin TLDs are [...]

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One of the consistent pieces of feedback I receive as ICANN’s Chief Financial Officer is that people want to know what it is that the organization is spending its money on. We have been been working hard to come up with ways of showing this clearly, especially so over the past year. ICANN is a [...]

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In the past few days, we have been receiving a large number of emails and phonecalls about the web address YouTubeIslam.com, and a dispute over its ownership. Because we coordinate the domain name system, ICANN is sometimes wrongly seen as the ultimate authority over anything that happens with the domain name system. The reality is [...]

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