Domain Incite is five years old today

Five years ago Domain Incite published its first story, with the introductory line “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”
I went on to describe how I’d registered the name domainincite.com and thrown up a live, resolving web site in less than one hour.
But that wasn’t quite the beginning.
What I neglected to mention were the eight hours I spent sitting with my father that weekend, brainstorming domains that captured the slightly acerbic tone I expected to use and which were also available at a reasonable price.
That was also when we came up with the tag line “domainincite.com n. because all the good domains were taken”, which has sat at the top of DI’s “About” page since day one.
Dad died last October, and I’d be lying if I said I’ve had an easy time getting over it.
Watching somebody you love dying of cancer is, needless to say, traumatic. Many readers will understand this all too well.
It can leave you with their final weeks indelibly at the forefront of your memories, whereas you should be remembering the enjoyable times you spent together.
I wouldn’t dream of blaming Dad for my eventual choice of domain, but we had fun collaborating on its conception.
That was something we did together, which gives DI’s birthday this year a bittersweet flavor for me.

Crocker caught with his pants down, literally, at ICANN 52

Here’s your daily WTF moment, courtesy of ICANN’s official YouTube account.
If you’ve ever wanted to see ICANN chair Steve Crocker without his trousers — and let’s face it, who hasn’t? — now’s your chance.

Don’t ask. I’m just as baffled as you.

ICANN 53 will be in Buenos Aires

ICANN has picked Buenos Aires, Argentina, for its 53rd public meeting.
The choice of city was approved by the ICANN board late last week.
The meeting will be held June 21-25 next year, sandwiched between February’s return to Singapore and October’s first foray into Dublin.
The BA venue has not been disclosed yet, but it’s possible ICANN will return to the Sheraton hotel and convention center.
It’s the third time ICANN has held one of its public meetings in Argentina. It visited BA last year for ICANN 48 and the sleepy seaside town of Mar Del Plata in 2005.
Having attended both previous meetings, I’ve discovered that it’s possible for a vegetarian to quickly become seriously malnourished in Argentina, so it’s quite likely DI’s coverage of ICANN 53 will heavily leverage the excellent remote participation facilities.
BA’s great if you love steak, however.

Is this the longest and stupidest new gTLD name yet?

Thank goodness for the new gTLD program.
Without it, there wouldn’t be the opportunity for chaps like Guo Xiufeng to express themselves with names like ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.ooo.
Note, I was forced to add a hyphen to fit the domain into this column. It’s just a string of 63 Os, — the maximum length of a second-level domain permitted by the DNS — followed by the inexplicable .ooo gTLD.
The domain resolves to a site posing the question “Is Showfom sexy?”.
When I asked Google that question, I found this February 2014 tweet from Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling.

We're still all learning the best way to display new G's. This progressive early customer may have the formula : ) http://is.showfom.sexy/

— Frank Schilling (@Frank_Schilling) February 27, 2014

Bizarrely, the registrant of showfom.sexy appears to be somebody else entirely.
If you want the answer, you’ll have to click the link.
The long .ooo domain is currently the 1,303rd most-trafficked new gTLD domain and the 919,853rd most-popular domain on the internet, according to our Alexa-derived popularity stats.

Cowley, one foot out of the industry, joins Architelos

Former Nominet CEO Lesley Cowley has become a consultant for Architelos, as part of a raft of domain and non-domain industry positions she’s taken on.
Primarily, Cowley has become chair of the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency — a public-sector role with a vague conceptual relationship with domain names (ie, managing lots of unique identifiers).
At Architelos, a provider of registry management software and services, she will be a “executive coach and consultant”, Cowley wrote in a blog post.
She will also remain a volunteer with ICANN, where she’s the former chair and current councilor of the ccNSO.
Cowley has also been named a non-executive director of aql, a data center in Leeds, UK.
She announced her resignation in May, after 12 years as Nominet CEO. Her replacement has not yet been named.

Fight over ICANN’s $400,000 Hollywood party

Corporate sponsors raised $250,000 to fund a $400,000 showbiz gala for ICANN 51 next month, but ICANN pulled the plug after deciding against making up the shortfall.
Sources tell DI that the lavish shindig was set to take place at Fox Studios in Los Angeles on October 15, but that ICANN reneged on a commitment to throw $150,000 into the pot.
Meanwhile, a senior ICANN source insists that there was no commitment and that a “misunderstanding” is to blame.
ICANN announced a week ago that its 51st public meeting would be the first in a while without a gala event. In a blog post, VP Christopher Mondini blamed a lack of sponsors and the large number of attendees, writing:

One change from past meetings is that there will not be an ICANN51 gala. Historically, the gala has been organized and supported by an outside sponsor. ICANN51 will not have such a sponsor, and therefore no gala. ICANN meetings have grown to around 3,000 attendees, and so have the challenges of finding a gala sponsor.

This explanation irked some of those involved in the aborted deal. They claim that the post was misleading.
Sources say that sponsors including Fox Studios, Neustar and MarkMonitor had contractually committed $250,000 to the event after ICANN promised to deliver the remaining $150,000.
But ICANN allegedly changed its mind about its own contribution and, the next day, published the Mondini post.
“The truth is there were sponsors, the truth is it wasn’t too big,” said a source who preferred not to be named. “There was enough money there for a gala.”
The venue was to be the Fox Studios backlot, which advertises itself as being able to handle receptions of up to 4,000 people — plenty of space for an ICANN gala.
I’ve confirmed with Neustar, operator of the .us ccTLD, that it had set aside $75,000 to partly sponsor the event.
But Mondini told DI that ICANN had not committed the $150,000, and that claims to the contrary were based on a “misunderstanding” — $150,000 was the amount ICANN spent on the Singapore gala (nominally sponsored by SGNIC), not how much it intended to spend on the LA event.
“There was no ICANN commitment to make up shortfall,” he said. “It was misheard as an ICANN commitment.”
More generally, ICANN’s top brass are of the opinion that “we shouldn’t be in the business of spending lots of money on galas”, Mondini added.
“ICANN paying for galas is the exception rather than the rule,” he said.
He added that he stood by his blog post, saying that a failure to find sponsors to cover the full $400,000 tab is in fact a failure to find sponsors.

No gala at ICANN 51

One thing ICANN’s thrice-yearly public meetings never lack is free booze, but there’s going to be a little bit less of it at ICANN 51 in Los Angeles next month.
ICANN said yesterday that the gala event, which is typically held on the Wednesday night, will not happen in LA.
ICANN veep Christopher Mondini blogged:

Historically, the gala has been organized and supported by an outside sponsor. ICANN51 will not have such a sponsor, and therefore no gala. ICANN meetings have grown to around 3,000 attendees, and so have the challenges of finding a gala sponsor.

LA is of course ICANN’s home town, hence the lack of need for a local host/sponsor company.
There have been some really spectacular galas over the years — and some not-so-great ones — so the lack of such an event this time around may be mildly disappointing to some attendees.
On the bright side (arguably), Music Night, which was introduced in the Beckstrom era but hasn’t appeared at the last few meetings, is rumored to be making a return for LA.
Usually a Tuesday-night event sponsored by PIR and Afilias, Music Night sees musically inclined ICANN community members jamming together, followed by a bit of karaoke.
Facebook has it that the ah hoc band GEMS (Global Equal Multi-Stakeholders) will be making an appearance to play a selection of bottoms-up, consensus-based classic rock numbers.
Unfortunately, personal circumstances are very probably going to keep yours truly away from ICANN 51, but gifts of whiskey sent to the usual address will of course be consumed in solidarity on the appropriate evening.

Verisign probes name collisions link to MH370

Verisign is investigating whether Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went missing due to a DNS name collision.
The Boeing 777 disappeared on a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, March 8. Despite extensive international searches of the Indian Ocean and beyond, no trace of the plane has yet been found.
Now Verisign is pondering aloud whether a new gTLD might be to blame.
The theory emerged during Verisign’s conference in London two weeks ago, at which the company offered a $50,000 prize to the researcher with the best suggestion about how to keep the collisions debate alive.
Chief propaganda officer Burt Kaslinksiki told DI that the decision to launch the investigation today was prompted by a continuing lack of serious interest in name collisions outside of Verisign HQ.
“We cannot discount the possibility that the plane went missing due to a new gTLD,” he said. “Probably something to do with .aero or .travel or something. That sounds plausible, right?”
“The .aero gTLD was delegated in 2001,” he said after a few minutes thought. “Is it any coincidence that just 13 years later MH370 should go missing? We intend to investigate a possible link.”
“Think about it,” Koslikiniski said. “When was the last time you saw a .aero domain? The entire gTLD has vanished without a trace.”
He pointed to a slide from a prize-winning Powerpoint presentation made at the London conference as evidence:

“We’re not saying new gTLDs cause planes to smash into the ocean and disappear without a trace, we’re just saying that it’s not not un-impossible that such a thing might conceivably, feasibly happen,” he said.
He added that it was also possible that name collisions were to blame that time Justin Bieber got photographed pissing in a bucket.
Verisign is proposing that ICANN add “modest” new registration restrictions to all new gTLDs as a precaution until the company’s investigation is concluded, which is expected to take four to six years.
Specifically, new gTLD registries would be banned from accepting any registrations for:

• Any domain name comprising a dictionary word, or a combination of dictionary words, in any UN language.
• Any domain name shorter than 60 characters.
• Any domain name containing fewer than six hyphens.
• Any domain name in which the second level is written in the same script as the TLD.
• Anything not written in Windings.

Kalenskiskiski denied that these restrictions would unreasonably interfere with competing gTLDs’ business prospects.
“Nobody seemed to care when we managed to get 10 million domains blocked based on speculation and fearmongering,” he said. “We’re fairly confident we can get away with this too.”
“If ICANN puts up a fight, we’ll just turn The Chulk loose on ’em again to remind them who pays their fucking salaries,” he explained.
“In the rare instances where these very reasonable restrictions might prevent somebody from registering the new gTLD name they want, there’s still plenty of room left in .com,” he added.

ICANN 48 travelers face chaos after plane crash

Nobody was hurt. Don’t worry.
But dozens of ICANN 48 attendees experienced huge delays, frustration and anger after a plane skidded off the runway at Buenos Aires, temporarily closing the whole of the Ministro Pistarini International Airport and sending travelers off on diversions totaling thousands of miles.
The early-morning “incident involving a plane”, which is what my own flight crew only ever referred to it as, did not cause any injuries and was apparently cleaned up quite quickly.
But there seems to have been barely anyone flying into Ezeiza on the eve of ICANN 48 yesterday that was not in some way affected.
Consider these stories, collected from the conference floor and Twitter, strictly anecdotal.

• Several flights carrying ICANNers, due to land at around the same time, found themselves diverted to large cities in neighboring Latin American countries. Many found themselves sitting in hot metal tubes on airport tarmacs in Montevideo, Uruguay, Santiago, Chile and Rio De Janeiro, Brazil before finally turning back to BA.
• One flight, carrying several delegates from Washington DC, was diverted to Santiago — a 2,000-mile round trip — not once but TWICE, leaving passengers ultimately delayed by well over a day. After the first diversion, and sitting on the Santiago runway for two or three hours, the plane returned to BA only to be told by air traffic control to stay in an hours-long holding pattern while the airport cleared up the backlog. Realizing he lacked the fuel (and apparently the foresight) to do so, the pilot decided to return to Santiago instead, where passengers eventually had to spend the night. They finally started rolling into BA this afternoon.
• Another, diverted to Montevideo, apparently had to divert for a second time when, moments away from landing, the pilot realized the “runway wasn’t long enough” and had to pull up.
• My own British Airways flight from London Heathrow, carrying at least a dozen ICANNers, was diverted to Rio de Janeiro, a three-hour flight away. After four hours on the Rio runway and another two sitting in the departure lounge without instruction or information we were finally told that we’d have to wait another eight hours before we could leave, on a newly scheduled flight getting into BA in the wee hours, some 17 hours late. Some stayed at the airport and waited it out. Business class passengers (you know who you are) were safely smuggled away to a hotel to avoid the scuffles that almost broke out over the pallets of flavorless refugee-camp MREs the remaining economy class passengers were offered to keep them quiet. Some of us jumped into taxis and hit Copacabana beach instead.

So it all worked out okay in the end.
Bwahahahaha!

DNS Women Breakfast and other photos from Durban

DI covered the ICANN 47 meeting in Durban remotely last week, but I’m happy to say that we have some photos from the meeting to publish nevertheless.
These pictures were all graciously provided by award-winning freelance photographer and long-time ICANN meeting attendee Michelle Chaplow.

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade delivering his keynote address during the opening ceremony on Monday.

Representatives of the first new gTLD registries to sign the Registry Agreement and the first registrars to sign the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement line up on stage to sell their souls to ICANN, also during the opening ceremony.
One of these men reportedly shed a tear as he committed his John Hancock to paper; whether through happiness or grief, it’s impossible to know for sure.

Attendees of the DNS Women Breakfast, which gives members of the under-represented gender an opportunity to plot world domination over coffee and croissants three times a year.
From humble beginnings a few years ago, we’re told that over 70 women attended the Durban brekkie.

Three participants on the second “What the Journalists Think” panel, which this time was exclusively made up of African journos.

Finally, Akram Atallah, president of ICANN’s new Generic Domains Division, smiling despite an apparently busy week.