Making a binding policy at ICANN takes about the same amount of time as gestating a human fetus, but only when the organization and community are working at their absolute fastest. It’s much more often comparable to an elephant pregnancy. That’s according to a timetable researched by ICANN senior policy director Marika Konings and circulated [...] Continue a ler →

Tucows has started offering .jobs and .aero domain names through its OpenSRS reseller channel. According to a blog posting, resellers will have to opt in to offering these gTLDs. Prices are $125/year for .jobs and $50/year for .aero. It’s potentially good news for both registries, particularly .jobs. Both are restricted, sponsored gTLDs, but .jobs has [...] Continue a ler →

The .nxt conference on new generic top-level domains, planned for London next month, has been postponed until later this year, the organizers have announced. .nxt CEO Kieren McCarthy blamed the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the new gTLD program timetable following ICANN’s six-week TLD Application System outage. McCarthy wrote on the .nxt web site: Our main goal [...] Continue a ler →

At least one new generic top-level domain applicant has requested a full $185,000 refund of its application fee, according to ICANN. This exchange is from last night’s Twitter chat with ICANN executives: @icann Has anyone asked for a refund yet? #icannchat — Kevin Murphy (@ DomainIncite) Maio 22, 2012 It’s interesting that the answer was [...] Continue a ler →

Customers of major UK domain registrar 123-reg suffered a couple of hours of downtime this afternoon due to an apparently “massive” denial of service attack. The attack targeted its DNS servers and originated in China, according to a report in The Register. Users reported sites offline or with spotty availability, but the company managed to [...] Continue a ler →

Adrenaline TLD has confirmed that it no longer plans to apply to ICANN for the sport-themed top-level domains .surf, .skate, .bike and .board. The news was implicit in the announcement from Starting Dot that it has partnered with Adrenaline for .ski earlier this week, but the company today confirmed as much. In a statement this [...] Continue a ler →

ICANN held a Twitter session tonight during which executives answered questions about the new gTLD program in that notoriously restrictive 140-character format. Unsurprisingly, in light of the frustration borne out of ongoing delays, most of the questions were about timing. New gTLD applicants wanted to know when ICANN plans to host its Big Reveal event, [...] Continue a ler →