Domain Names

Are you European (yet)?

With the Lisbon Treaty about to be ratified, is it time you looked at getting your name or company brand in .eu? The .eu domain was launched in 2006 and is now an established domain extension. Here in the UK there are about 300,000 .eu domains registered which means there’s still plenty of choice, unlike .co.uk and .com.

Your European Identity
Your European Identity

Other interesting statistics include that the domain has an 81% renewal rate, which indicates its established nature, and 75% of .eu domains have an active website or email.

Even if you don’t look to expand into Europe in the near future, it’s worth looking at registering your name or brand now, as the registry is still growing so choice is falling.

Technical

Tales from the Helldesk

Not sure if this qualifies as urban legend or not:

A phone call was received from a customer wanting to know why they were unable to log in to the computer system – The nice old lady was asked if she could go to the server to check it and nice as pie she said “oh no, we’ve been flooded, it’s under 3ft of water”

From TheRegister

Domain Names

ICANN Independence Day

Today is a historic day in the evolution of the Internet. On 30 September 2009, the JPA (Joint Project Agreement) between ICANN, the Internet governing body, and the United States Government expired. Many commentators believed the US Government would not allow the agreement which maintained their ultimate control to simply lapse, but it appears in all the ways that matter that it has.

ICANN is a multi-stakeholder organisation in which anyone can have a say. 2020Media regularly attend ICANN meetings, and compared to say, Nominet, the bottom-up approach is refreshing and stimulating.

The announcement by ICANN today includes an Affirmation of Commitment which we believe is ICANN’s way of promising to ‘be good’ in the future. In it ICANN promises to do periodic reviews of their accountability and transparency – but crucially these will report to the GAC, an ICANN constituency body representing all governments, not just the US government.

Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf commented: “[The agreement] fulfils a long-standing objective of the original formation of Icann: to create an organisation that can serve the world’s interest in a robust, reliable and interoperable internet.”

Technical

Internet Updates

Network Meeting
Network Meeting

Last week we had the opportunity to catch up with our fellow network operators. Amongst the interesting topics discussed were IP address depletion updates – suggestions that broadband providers might NAT their entire customer bases!

As most users have NAT on their broadband already, this effectively means double NAT – if you rely on a fixed IP address to the outside world, this has major consequences.

If you’re one of our broadband customers, we’d like to hear what you think. Let us know.

We also enjoyed a humourous talk on care of fibre optic cables. Unfortunately the detailed warnings on only using specialised cleaning equipment costing thousands of dollars was left a little deflated after a quick wipe on someone’s jeans gave excellent results!

From dirty to clean via trousers
From dirty to clean via trousers
Domain Names

Domain Tasting is over

Tastes Funny
Tastes Funny

New data released this month by ICANN shows a 99.7% drop in domain tasting since it changed the fees back in April 2009.

Domain tasting is the practice of registering a domain name for a few days, seeing if it can make any money through advertising, then deleting it for a full refund.

ICANN changed it’s rules so that the ICANN refund didn’t apply, and most registries changed their terms so that registrars could only return about 10% of their monthly registrations.

To give an idea of the scale of this practice, in June 2008, nearly 17.7 Million gTLD domains were tasted. Now in June 2009  just 58,000 were returned (probably due to errors in registrations)

The net result – should mean more domains are available for the general public to buy.

Image by Gaspirtz

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