Ashwin Rangan, ICANN’s chief information officer, has quit after almost 10 years with the Org. ICANN said today that he had left December 1, after having been “on medical leave recovering from an injury sustained several months ago”. The Org said it was a “retirement”. Usually, when ICANN announces the departure of a senior executive, [...] Continue reading →

Registrars are usually very reluctant to police the content of web sites by taking down domains they manage, but they quite often make an exception when the web site in question calls for violence. But what if the site itself attempts to physically harm visitors through their screens? It sounds a bit mad, but I [...] Continue reading →

ICANN is looking for a new “Ombuds”, having quietly dropped the “man” from Ombudsman following the resignation of Herb Waye. The Org said it has hired a recruitment consultant and put out a call for expressions of interest in the role last night. The Ombuds’ job is to handle complaints independently of ICANN Org and [...] Continue reading →

The UK Parliament wants your input on a new proposed law that would give the police powers to take down domain names and IP addresses. The broad-ranging Criminal Justice Bill 2023 (pdf) would give police the ability to obtain court orders requiring registries and registrars to suspend domains believed to be used in criminal activity. [...] Continue reading →

Most of the largest domain registrars are not currently participating in ICANN’s new Registration Data Request Service, according to my research. I used the RDRS tool to check domains managed by every accredited registrar that has over a million domains under management and discovered that at least 25 out of these 40 registrars do not [...] Continue reading →

Nominet says it has won a competitive tender process with the UK government and will take over the registry for .gov.uk early next year. The registry was previously being managed by Jisc, which runs .ac.uk. Nominet was already running its DNS. The deal refers to the domains in .gov.uk, not to gov.uk, which is a [...] Continue reading →

The ICANN community will head to Türkiye for the Org’s 2024 Annual General Meeting, it has been confirmed. The board of directors picked Istanbul for ICANN 81, which will kick off November 9 next year, according to a just-published resolution. While the precise venue has not been revealed, you’d have to assume the Istanbul Congress [...] Continue reading →