ICANN Paris – New TLDs, ipv6, Dottel and dotme

Last week’s ICANN meeting proved to be incredibly busy, both in terms of number of attendees and the number of announcements made.
From our point of view there were a number of topics that are relevant and important to our business and I’ll be posting about some of these in the coming weeks both here and on my personal domain blog.
Last Thursday morning I was on the panel for a workshop on IPv6. There were four of us on the panel talking about our experiences from very different angles. If nothing else I definitely feel that I learnt something from it.
Of course the big announcement of the week was in relation to new Gtlds. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to have cherrypicked from the announcements and now seem to think that all sorts of crazy domain extensions will now be available. They won’t. (I’ll follow up on this over the next few days).
As John mentioned on his blog, ICANN have finally taken steps to mitigate “domain tasting”. It won’t stop it outright, but it should curtail it quite a bit. It will also have the handy side-effect of stopping Network Solutions’ practice of “holding” domains for “clients”, as they won’t be able to do it without incurring a fee.
The Afilias team were at ICANN Paris in full force and held a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of dotme (Montenegro).
Closer to home (relatively speaking), Telnic announced their launch timeline. They’ve also started rolling out demo applications so that both users and developers can get a “feel” for the things you can do with a dottel domain (.tel).
The next few months should be an interesting time for the domain industry!