Archive for October, 2006
In Paris this week Vinton Cerf, Father of the Internet, said Sunday that he feared the network’s addressing system would break down if “political gambits” by international groups or national agencies interfere with plans to expand the languages used in domain names. Welcome to the highly complex politics centered around the United Nations.At the first session ever of the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum, (IGF), Cerf said national interests had surfaced in recent weeks that would change the process for “internationalizing” Internet addresses.
Cerf noted that ICANN has moved forward on using non- Latin characters in domain names, but several large movers and shakers prefer to take another direction.
“My concern is the potential for suddenly choosing another path after ICANN has already put in six years of work on this,” said Cerf,. “Either they will fail, or they will break the Internet,†or at least Cerf vision of the Internet.
At the heart of the latest split is the issue of allowing non-Western characters to be used in Internet addresses. At present, only 37 characters can be used; ICANN is gradually implementing a plan that would expand that set to tens of thousands of characters from all of the world’s languages.
Already, several Asian character sets have been approved, but ICANN has not signed off on a system for using international symbols for the part of the Internet address that represents the top-level domain, such as .com or .net or .jp.
Cerf and other ICANN officials say that what they see as a careful and considered approach is being construed by others as stalling (wonder where they got that idea) or an attempt to undermine the use of foreign, non-English characters.
Specific-language interest groups may be “willing to accept a system that works in Country X and aren’t worried that it won’t work in Country Y,” he said. The current policies of China, or a North Korea, would be the best example.
When that happens, the uniformity of the Internet addressing system - the mechanism that allows one computer to reliably find another anywhere on the network - breaks down and fractures into separate networks that can no longer universally communicate, said Cerf.
For more information about what’s going on here and in the ICANN community, go to http://www.ICANNwiki.com and participate.
October 31st, 2006
Don’t you think it’s about time that the Internet have a domain to unify businesses and users in the Asia-Pacific region?
Why not, it’s a really big place!!
Addressing this giant opportunity is “DotAsia Organisation Ltd†http://www.dotasia.org
DotAsia is a membership-based not-for-profit corporation located in Hong Kong that was created in March of 2004 for the purpose of submitting a proposal to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to operate a new Sponsored TLD (sTLD) registry for the “.Asia†top-level domain (TLD).
The DotAsia organization is a corporation made up of different membership bodies from ICANN’s Asia / Australia / Pacific Region, including: Sponsor Members (organizations that operate ccTLD registries in the region) and Co-Sponsor Members (Internet, Information Technology, Telecommunications, non-profit, NGO or other relevant community organizations in the region). These members will make up DotAsia’s 11-person Board of Directors.
ICANN has recently approved the “.asia” domain for Internet addresses, supplementing suffixes available for individual countries, such as “.cn” for China and “.jp” for Japan. ICANN earlier approved the “.eu” suffix for the European Union, potentially a big winning sTLD.
Currently, Internet users in the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific region only have the option of utilizing a generic TLD (gTLD) whose registrants are dominated by US and European individuals and businesses, or country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) that are intended for local use. According to VeriSign Global Registry Services, (http://www.VeriSign.com), only 11% of .com and .net (the two largest gTLDs) registrants came from Asia . However, Global Reach ( http://Global-Reach.biz) estimates that over 64% of the Internet’s populations are non-English speakers and that Asian languages alone make up 33% of the online population.
While current gTLDs tend to focus on a vertical group (e.g. commercial entities, network providers, organizations, etc.), “.Asia†is billed to embrace a new horizontal perspective. Unlike ccTLDs, which provide for a local audience, “.Asia†will allow the user to express universal membership in the entire Asian community.
Made up of groups that run domain names for China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries, DotAsia with ICANN’s help, plan to explore permitting domain names in other Asian languages under “.asia” as well.
Knowing how these things go (the devil is in the details), finalizing the contract between ICANN and DotAsia could take months, and I don’t think registrations for English-language names will be expected for another year or two.
Traditionally, demand for new names like this has been low compared with old-timers like “.com,” which has about 60 million names. But we think this is all about to change as our world is now becoming so much more Flattened and Globalized.
And by the way, I also heard that DotAsia said it plans to restrict registrations to those in the Asian region, but they are including Australia. Figure that one out.
Backers of “.asia”, including me, believe that Asian businesses will welcome a separate identity, particularly as they expand beyond their own countries in this newly flattened and globalized world.
For more information about what’s going on in the ICANN community, go to http://www.ICANNwiki.com and participate.
October 20th, 2006
Danton (Dan) Mendell of ICANNwiki and Neutral Space, Inc.
Well, my good friend Ray King of AboutUs and past member of the SnapNames team has been pulling my chain for quite a while to come over full time and work on ICANNWiki. He wanted to spend more time with AboutUs while dancing around the Wiki and ICANN community. Neutral Space is the entity that will House ICANNWiki and a couple other projects I have in mind. Its mission is to more thoroughly explore Web 2.0 collaborative activities and of course promote the wiki space and it’s benefits. I’d like to tell you more, but that could someday be the subject of another story all its own.
Well, after a lot of meetings and quite a bit of refreshments, fighting off Ray’s 2 yappy dogs from nipping at my legs, I’ve decided to take the plunge and run with it. So I just left my day job as CEO of a technology marketing support company, and as such, I guess I’m committed now to the ICANNwiki space. I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the business of all things ICANN and meeting all those caricature faced people in Brazil this December.
I’m going to need a lot of your support getting up to speed with what ICANNWiki in order to figure out what really needs to be done, in what order, and where we need to take ICANNWiki so it can keep functioning successfully as a center of with the ICANN community. I would really appreciate it if any of you out there have any ideas or opinions, please contact me through the wiki or use:
dan AT NeutralSpace DOT com.
For more information about the ICANN community, go to http://www.ICANNwiki.com
October 1st, 2006