icann

Google appears eager to let other organizations use certain top-level domains that it wants to acquire and manage.

Last June, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers (ICANN) revealed which companies and organizations had applied for their own generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The effort is part of a move to foster competition on the Internet by allowing companies to use a greater variety of TLDs beyond just .com.

Google applied for 101 of the 1,900 available gTLDs, looking to score such obvious ones as .google, .chrome, .gmail, .goog, and .youtube. But along with those gTLDs were ones that … Read more

Goodbye ".com," and hello ".cadillac," ".vegas," and ".music." The world of Internet suffixes is about to go through a major growth spurt.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, announced today that hundreds of new Web address suffixes will roll out this year, according to the Associated Press. This will be the largest growth of Internet addresses since the 1980s.

The Web has become saturated with ".com" addresses, which has made people and businesses petition ICANN for new names.

Foreign languages will be the first to get new … Read more

news analysis When the history of early 21st century Internet politicking is written, the meltdown of a United Nations summit last week will mark the date a virtual Cold War began.

In retrospect, the implosion of the Dubai summit was all but foreordained: it pitted nations with little tolerance for human rights against Western democracies which, at least in theory, uphold those principles. And it capped nearly a decade of behind-the-scenes jockeying by a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, created in 1865 to coordinate telegraph connectivity, to gain more authority over how the Internet is managed.

It … Read more

Here's a cyberfight it seems anyone could have seen coming.

Among the hundreds of new generic top-level domains under consideration by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- everything from .Google to .music and .home -- one batch, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the U.S. federal government: applications for .Airforce, .Navy and .Army.

The company that applied to run those domain extensions is Demand Media, the content farm king behind eHow and the owner of Go Daddy competitor eNom. Demand spent $18 million to apply for 26 so-called domain strings through a subsidiary … Read more

The domain extension long associated with non-profits -- .org -- is about to ring up some big bucks.

Public Interest Registry (PIR), the not-for-profit operator of the .org domain extension, has teamed up with registrars Go Daddy and eNom to auction off 94 perviously unregistered one- and two-character .org addresses. PIR CEO Brian Cute says that the proceeds from the initiative -- called Project94 -- will go "to enhance the open development and security of the Internet, particularly in technologically underserved regions of the world."

Where exactly the money will go, he said, will be determined by how … Read more

The Internet's next big land grab, which prompted Amazon.com to apply for the .music top-level domain and Google to bid for .cloud, is likely to come with a few limits.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is accepting comments through Sunday on whether it should ban applicants from using forthcoming top-level names -- thousands have been requested -- as single-word "dotless" domains.

Translated, that means Amazon.com could use http://amazon.music but not the single-word dotless http://music alternative.

An ICANN report (PDF) from earlier this year says the group's staff "… Read more

Live and let live. Love and let love. Surf and let surf.

These are just some of the philosophical principles that are not readily accepted everywhere in the world.

Currently, some of the world's heightened sensitivities are on display during the Application Comment period for new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). There are currently 22 of these, but ICANN wants to broaden the horizons to embrace different cultures and languages.

Running through the objections at ICANN's site is like running through thistle fields in your underwear.

Some of the argumentation would make even a politician think twice. Well, … Read more

Here's another sign that the economic powerhouse of China is a rising power in online matters, too.

The 46th meeting of ICANN, the body tasked with overseeing the administration of the Internet, will take place in Beijing from April 7 to 12 of next year.

"It simply was a strong proposal," ICANN president and CEO Rod Beckstrom said during a press conference in Prague this morning. "A quarter of the Internet's users are in China...it simply makes a lot of sense."

The ICANN committee was especially keen on holding the event in China'… Read more

It's easy to dismiss Google's big play for a slice of the expanding Internet domain universe as just another side project from the Googleplex. Perhaps too easy.

Google, we learned last week, has applied for 101 domains -- or, more precisely, 101 generic top-level domains, or gTLDs -- and the number itself (surely the 101 Dalmatians reference was intentional) doesn't exactly suggest a new strategy on par with, say, Google+ or Android. The $18.7 million in application fees alone would hardly raise a single Larry Page eyebrow.

And yet this is Google, controller of so much … Read more