Posts tagged ‘ICANN’
Talking Domain Names with Antony Van Couvering
Today I’m pleased to publish the first of a two part interview with Antony Van Couvering, of Mind + Machines. As you will read, Antony has been a force in the domain name business since before there way such a thing. The recent approval of new top level domains (TLDs) by ICANN promises to fundamentally change domaining, and Antony is right in the thick of that transformation as well.
So there is no better time to get a true insider’s take on the gTLD process. In the early 2000s Antony and I both worked at VeriSign, for different business units. The second part of this interview will be published on Tuesday, July 12.
Q: Can you give a background of your long involvement in the domain name registration business?
I began in 1997 with an email to Jon Postel at IANA to find out what these ccTLD things were. Jon and I began talking and it wasn’t long afterwards that I joined up with an English partner, Ivan Pope, to form NetNames. I ran the U.S. branch, NetNames USA. I quickly began defining what is now called the corporate market among domain registrars, the space now dominated by Mark Monitor and a few others, by contacting and working with many of America’s biggest companies and law firms. In those days people were very wary of the idea of domain names, especially ccTLDs, and were struggling to understand what it meant for their brands. It was pretty much the wild west, and I was able to help by bringing the perspective of TLD managers to companies in a way that made sense to them. Eventually Ivan and I sold the company to NetBenefit, now called Group NBT.
During that time I got quite involved with Internet governance issues, working with Jon Postel to create a proposal for revamping the .US domain and then spending a lot time helping to set up ICANN. As part of that work, I helped form the International Association of Top Level Domains (IATLD), which pushed back very forcefully against ICANN’s attempts to rewrite the ground rules for ccTLDs, and in particular to effectively deprecate RFC 1591. Then as now, the major challenge was dealing with governments, whose approach of “sovereignty” and “rights” is very different from the consensus-based, co-operative ethos that characterized the Internet then, and still does to a large extent.
I then started NameEngine, which addressed the same market and clients as NetNames, and did very well until I sold NameEngine to VeriSign. As part of the deal I worked for them for a couple of years. It was a pretty strange place to me back then; Mark McLaughlin and his team have done a great job to make VeriSign the company it is today.
Having launched several ccTLDs during my time at NetNames and having helped several others, I’ve always been very interested in new gTLDs. When ICANN first approved the development of the program a few years ago, I decided to get involved, and began blogging and consulting under the umbrella of Names@Work.
Then in January 2009 I started Minds + Machines with Elaine Pruis. We got an exclusive license from CoCCA to use their platform for gTLDs, which we rechristened Espresso, and with Garth Miller of CoCCA began developing the platform to meet the evolving requirement of ICANN for new gTLD registries — as everyone else in the industry had to do as well. Soon afterwards, our investor company Top Level Domain Holdings, Ltd., which is a public company listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, acquired 100% of Minds + Machines, and I’m now the CEO of both Minds + Machines and Top Level Domain Holdings. We’ve raised quite a bit of money and we’re looking forward to participating in the opening of the new gTLD space.
Q: ICANN just approved the introduction of new TLDs, and applications are expected by January 2012. How would you characterize the opportunity this represents, for operators and users?
The opportunity is truly historic. ICANN was set up to make new gTLDs a reality, and it’s taken 12 years of shouting to get it done, after a couple of false starts. While subsequent rounds are sure to happen someday, it’s anyone’s guess as to when: this round took six years to accomplish. For applicants, there’s suddenly a rush to get things done: applications to ICANN have to be submitted during the window that lasts from January 12 to April 12, 2012. That means that applicants have just a few months to put together a pretty complicated and serious application, and to round up the money they need. For users, it’s a great time to get a short, memorable domain name that matches their brand or their name or represents the business they’re in. Right now under .com it’s tremendously expensive, since good names have to be purchased in the secondary market.
Overall, the major benefit from new gTLDs will be to re-introduce semantic meaning into the characters that follow the dot in a domain name. While most country-code top-level domain names have a meaning, either in a geographic sense or as a repurposed gTLD (e.g., .tv), the most popular gTLDs are essentially meaningless at this point: anyone can register anything in .com, .net, and .org, and they do — those three characters after the dot no longer mean “commercial,” or “network,” or “organization.”
One commonly voiced criticism of new top-level domains goes something like, “No-one needs them, everyone just uses search anyway.” Even if you ignore the data that about 15% of all traffic is from typing in a URL or using a bookmark, new TLDs will actually work very well with search. I just wrote about this in a recent blog post. This is just another way that new TLDs will benefit users.
Q: Recently your company announced it was working together with Neustar for certain TLD opportunities. How will you be working together?
We have a two-way exclusive agreement with Neustar for geographical names, with some exceptions for projects we undertook before joining announcing our partnership. The deal is that we agree to use their registry platform for geographical TLDs, and they agree to refer all relevant clients to us as the front-end partner. I think it’s a great deal for both of us: we’ve been busy over the last two years making a lot of contacts with cities, while Neustar has a back-end that is very solid, and a recent success doing the back-end for .CO.
Does this mean we don’t like Espresso anymore? No, it doesn’t — we love Espresso. But as everyone who has been following the progress of the new gTLD program knows, governments are extremely risk averse, and governments are the decision-makers when it comes to geographical gTLDs. To a government, Neustar’s profile as a big public company on the New York Stock Exchange, with a $2B market cap, makes a lot of the queasy what-ifs go away. We are interested in participating to the fullest extent in the new gTLD space, and we’ll do what it takes to make that happen. In this case, we thought the partnership with Neustar made a lot of sense, and we still do.
A Conversation with Ali Farshchian, Founder of CircleID
If you are serious about issues involving Internet infrastructure, then you’re probably a member of CircleID. It’s the online community where the “big brains” of the Internet go to debate Internet technology and policy.
I’d never claim to be one of those big brains, but I’ve been a member since 2005. And during that time I’ve gotten to know Ali Farshchian, the founder of CircleID. He has put together an online community that now receives more than 60,000 uniques per month and over 1 million pageviews annually, without compromising on the quality or the focus on the content.
With so much change swirling around Internet technology these days — DNSSEC, IPv6, new TLDs, BGP hijacks you name it — I thought it was high time I caught with Ali for his take. I spoke with him earlier this week, when he was just back from ICANN San Francisco.
Q: Can you talk about how you started CircleID, and how it grew to be so influential?
AF: I studied computer science, and really just wanted to understand better how the Internet worked. Exploring that question I stumbled into domain names and DNS, really. This was pre social media days, so the main sources of information were email lists and online forums.
I learned so much from these sources, I decided there should be a central repository of these conversations. So I started CircleID to fit that need. I reached out to the leaders of these groups — people like Vint Cerf and Paul Mockapetris — and personally asked for their participation. The site launched in September of 2002.
It was tough sledding for around six months, and then the site just took off. The growth has continued totally organically since, I’ve never advertised.
Q: You’re just back from ICANN San Francisco — what were your impressions of the meeting?
AF: The first immediate impression was pure size and attendance. I helped ICANN organize its 2005 show in Vancouver, and this one was just so much larger. And now so many organizations and governments are focusing their attention on ICANN decisions. Former President Clinton speaking at the event was an example of this — and I thought he was quite inspirational talking about the centrality of the Internet in our lives today.
The other main impression was the dominance of business and political issues, not technical issues. Those are the areas of contention today.
Q: What in your opinion are the biggest issues/trends affecting the Internet today?
AF: I’d turn that question around — it’s not what’s affecting the Internet, it’s the way the Internet is affecting everything. The biggest trend I see is the way that the Internet is fused into almost everything we do today — business, life, everything. Much as President Clinton said in his speech.
What’s needed in my view is seeing the Internet as a sector, not just as communications technology or delivery channel. The Internet is now like the financial sector or the political sector in scope. It’s that significant. I think CircleID does a good job of covering a lot of Internet related news, but the sector really needs its own Economist, its own Wall Street Journal.
The other trend I’d note is the way the Internet has totally remade B2B communication. The Internet powers a “communities” approach, of which CircleID is an example. We’re totally open platform, profitable and totally scalable.
Communities are not easy to build, you need to earn the credibility and trust, and police the interactions to an extent. But once you reach a critical point in audience participation, you see people valuing the content they’ve contributed, and it almost becomes like a “nesting” phenomenon. This then builds on itself, and can be a barrier to entry for competitors.
Q: There are so many significant changes being debated right now — what’s your 12-18 month view for Internet infrastructure?
AF: First, let me say that the expertise on CircleID doesn’t come from me or my staff, but from the contributions of the community.
Having said that, I’d say that new TLDs will happen. There has been too much work and debate for them not to. Brand TLDs in particular are going to have a huge effect on how online marketing is done. Brands will now have total control of their domain, and this will help address some current problems like cyber-squatting.
Generics will be similarly powerful, and in that case one company or organization could potentially brand an entire vertical. So deciding on those names promises to be contentious.
The focus on improving the security of key Internet protocols will continue. IPv6 is an example of this, and will continue to grow in importance. Scarcity of IPv4 addresses is becoming a real concern — witness the purchase by Microsoft of IPv4 IP blocks from Nortel.
Strange Broadband Bedfellows — Google and Verizon
The debate around Network Neutrality is sometimes simplified as carriers against content providers, the owners of networks against the businesses that have grown due to Internet connectivity. So it was interesting to read that Google and Verizon filed a joint submission to the FCC last week, laying out in detail how the two companies agreed on many issues regarding an “Open Internet.”
Was this done as a PR move (nothing wrong with that, of course!), or was there really something substantive here policy-wise? I took a read, and here are the interesting nuggets.
First off, it sounds really good. Apparently the two companies are of like mind on lots of important issues, or “several overarching values” as the submission states. These include:
- Understanding that the Internet is unique and has thrived in an environment of minimal regulation
- A person should be able to connect to any other person he or she wants to, with no central authority imposing rules
- Public policy should provide appropriate incentives for commercial investment
- Users should have control in how they use the Internet, and the transparency to make informed decisions
- Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs) should be established to mediate disputes
- Communications laws and regulations should not apply to Internet applications, content or services.
- There should be some mechanism for federal authorities to address “bad actors” (italics mine) when competition and self-regulatory efforts are unsuccessful — but only on a case-by-case basis.
- Acknowledge that broadband network providers, in addition to offering traditional Internet services, should have the ability to offer users the choice of service options in addition to traditional Internet access services.
- The focus of any nondiscrimination rule should be to prevent harm to users or to competition
- Verizon and Google disagree whether mobile networks should be part of an Open Internet framework — oh well, can’t agree on everything!
It would be hard to disagree with any of the above in principle. But from a policy standpoint, trying to discern what these companies are trying to communicate, three of those “overarching values” seem most interesting to me — network management/new services, the TAGs, and the point about communications laws not applying to Internet applications or services.
The network management/new services point is critical to carriers, and Google I think is being realistic in agreeing. It’s just feasible to say a carrier can’t treat certain traffic differently, since some services demand network management to work properly. A VoIP call needs more consistent bandwidth than an email or http query, for example. Carriers would also have no incentive — beyond market competition, that is — to continue to upgrade their networks if they could not monetize that investment through new services.
TAGs are an interesting concept, and I hope they get implemented. I do think Google and Verizon are over-estimating how much agreement can be reached just by pulling together some technical experts. You can look to the wrangling within ICANN, or the disagreements between the IETF and the ITU and see the limits of this approach.
Finally, there is the innocuous line about communication laws not applying. For those not steeped in FCC vernacular, this is a huge point. Currently phone services provided via circuit-switched networks are subject to all sorts of regulations built up over decades. One the other hand, phone service provided via digital networks — think Vonage, or a cable company — is classified as an “information service,” and not subject to all that regulation.
So, what Verizon and Google are saying is sure, we’ll submit this to you FCC, but guess what? You don’t have any authority in this area to regulate the Internet. Pretty cheeky of them, huh!? Based on an interview given by Chairman Genachowski (post on that here), I don’t think he agrees.
If you’ve reached the end of this post and are still interested, Drew Clark at Broadbandcensus.com recently launched a new publication tracking these issues in great detail. It’s called BroadbandBreakfast.com, and here’s their story on this submission.
This country truly is at a communications crossroad, moving into an all IP future. There is nothing “wrong” with our old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), which was once the envy of the world – and still delivers better phone service than many countries enjoy. But the future is in the advanced services carried over end-to-end IP networks, and the FCC needs to balance the needs of the providers and the needs of users. If every interested party ends up a little unhappy, then maybe that would indicate such a balance. The next chapter is the FCC’s national broadband plan, due in March. Stay tuned!
What the Heck is ICANN Doing with Domain Names?
Last week stories broke about a significant change in the way Internet addressing will be managed. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened up the process of assigning new top level domains (TLD’s), such as .com and .net. Potentially any string of letters could be a TLD — maybe we’ll see www.products.walmart? However there appears to be lots of procedures to iron out before any prospective new TLDs hit the market.
Here’s some coverage:
Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080626-confusion-icann-opens-up-pandoras-box-of-new-tlds.html
NY Times:
Here’s a very detailed read from John Levine at CircleID:
http://www.circleid.com/posts/86299_icann_new_top_level_domains/
Clearly nothing is going to happen right away, and the devil(s) will be in the details. Plus there are already at last count 162 million registered domain names, so a lot will be required to produce a new TLD that actually makes a difference. Here’s my early list:
- User adoption — the old chicken and the egg. An organization with a lot of money and influence will have to invest both to change user perceptions of Internet addressing. It’s a steep hill to climb. Combined, .com and .net total around 85 million domains (with .com about 74M of that) and will be the TLD leaders for a long time to come. (Granted both China’s .cn and Germany’s .de are now bigger than .net)
- You’ll need a solid sales channel. The successful TLD operator will need good connections to the existing base of registars, and a compelling value proposition for registrars to sell the new extension over other, more established ones.
- Global resolution is a big responsibility. The new extension will have to always work, anywhere on the globe. That means servers and data centers in multiple locations, load balancing, maintenance, etc. etc.
- Domain names in foreign languages sound very interesting. But as Levine notes these could get hopelessly bogged down in litigation, and many countries particularly in Asia have been forging ahead with their own fully native language solutions while ICANN has dithered over this question for years.
No doubt this will be a very interesting story to follow. If I had to bet my lunch money today, I’d say that the established players in the registry market who already know how to operate and support TLDs will be the main beneficiaries of ICANN’s decision. They’ve made the technology investments and mastered ICANN esoterica. Any newcomer will have to partner with one of them if a new TLD hopes to attract wide spread adoption.
Five Years Later, a SiteFinder Patent?
Saw an interesting news item that broke Monday courtesy of DomainNameNews and SlashDot that hasn’t been broadly covered yet. Apparently VeriSign has been awarded a patent for the resolution of mis-typed domain names. This was at the heart of the controversy back in 2003 around their SiteFinder Service. Amidst a storm of criticism ICANN insisted VeriSign shut down the service, and the company eventually agreed.
Patent: http://www.domainnamenews.com/registries/verisign-receives-sitefinder-patent/1559
SiteFinder: http://www.itworld.com/Man/2681/031006sitefinder/
Personally I believe if VeriSign had been less secretive about its plans and had briefed important Internet constituencies beforehand about this change to how the Internet operated, there would have been less criticism. VeriSign and ICANN eventually settled their differences re SiteFinder, and as part of the re-awarding of the .com franchise VeriSign promised never to bring a SiteFinder-like service back. But, this patent is interesting for what it means in the present, not the past.
Many companies currently resolve incorrect domain names to pages that contain advertising. They don’t do it the way VeriSign did it, by changing the way the root server operates for .com addresses. But the result is the same, and would seem to be covered by the patent. Companies like Earthlink, Verizon and OpenDNS bring their customers to advertising pages every time they “fat-finger” a domain name. Just think about how often we all do this, and you can imagine the amount of Internet traffic potentially involved. Some of these companies weren’t re-directing this traffic safely — there were security problems with the ad partner Earthlink chose to deal with:
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/04/21/Hackers-Can-Exploit-Error-Page-Ads
So, the government seems to have handed VeriSign a new revenue stream. Letters may be going out shortly demanding a licensing fee — or maybe they’ve already been sent.
UPDATE — AP wrote story: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080514/techbit_internet_typos.html?.v=2
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