From the category archives:

ccTLDs

If you are a regular ICANN community member, it is likely you are currently feeling overwhelmed by the amount of material that has appeared in the past week. So here is a quick guide to help make sense of it all.
Sections are:

JPA/Affirmation
Applicant Guidebook/new gTLDs
Fast Track/IDNs
Public comment periods
Seoul meeting
And the remainder

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Local communities … not just governments.

by Kim Davies on September 24, 2009

As ICANN staff, it is hard to avoid the news when your organisation is the subject of a hearing held by the United States Congress. This week we saw another such hearing, where the House Judiciary committee discussed the future deployment of new top-level domains.
A number of people testified, including my colleague Doug Brent, but [...]

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Community view: Bled ccTLD meeting review

by Jon Lawrence on September 16, 2009

Last week I attended the “Second International Conference for ccTLD Registries and Registrars of CIS, Central and Eastern Europe”, held in the picturesque lakeside town of Bled, in Slovenia. Bled is one of the most beautiful places I’ve had the pleasure to visit and the conference, despite its rather cumbersome title, was similarly [...]

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Managing variants at the top-level

by Tina Dam on August 21, 2009

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. What [...]

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How we ensure full public discussion of IDN issues

by Kurt Pritz on August 21, 2009

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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A small gauge of diversity

by Kim Davies on June 18, 2009

In managing the root zone, recently we clarified some of the technical conformance criteria for the name servers top-level domain operators use. Before we put the adjusted criteria in place, we did some research to find out real world compliance against some of the metrics.
One of the more interesting insights involved looking at network diversity. [...]

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How many top-level domains are there?

by Kim Davies on March 1, 2009

Hands down, the most common question I get at an ICANN meeting is “Where are the restrooms?” A close second is “How many top-level domains are there?” Occasionally they are more specific — how many are there of a certain type.
Here is the current answer to all of those questions.

Restrooms are just past the elevators [...]

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Every year there are new world events that see possible border changes and a restructure to the way the world’s countries and territories are configured. Think back to 50 years ago, and the world’s map was very different. There are literally a hundred countries that exist today that did not exist a hundred years ago. I wonder what country code the Ottoman Empire would have?

As these events occur, ICANN invariably receives requests to recognise new sovereign entities. In some cases we see very inaccurate press reports by “experts” on how country codes will be assigned. Thankfully, we have a very clear process for this that it is worth repeating.

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It is sometimes said that ISPs do not offer IPv6 transport and equipment vendors offer just partial IPv6 support because there is no customer demand. The counter argument is often made that consumers can only buy what is on offer so people prefer to buy production quality services and equipment.

Unfortunately, even when production quality IPv6 transport and network infrastructure are available it is not always possible to deploy a completely IPv6 accessible network. One problem is the difficulties domain name registrants have when they ask their domain name registrar to include their IPv6 glue in the DNS. Not many domain name registrars support glue registration for IPv6 addresses. This limits their ability to provide an IPv6 DNS service.

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What is Afghanistan?

by Kim Davies on June 9, 2008

Tonight on American television quiz show Jeopardy, a piece of IANA-esoterica was the “Final Jeopardy” question of the night:

On March 10, 2003 this nation got control of the .af Internet domain

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