New Domains – London Event

ICANN, the top level body responsible for the internet, is holding a consultation in London this July.

The consultations will facilitate on-going discussions with the Internet community regarding workable solutions to some of the outstanding, overarching issues, particularly trademark protection and malicious behavior, on the proposed new tranche of domain name extensions.

All events are free of charge and you can find out more and signup at the ICANN website

Telehouse West Progress

The construction of the newest central london datacentre, Telehouse West, is well underway.

We don’t have to visit  the datacentre very frequently, but when we do we’ve been taking the odd photo of the construction work. As you can see, the progress of the build has been impressively fast.

telehouse-west-progress

Once complete, this datacentre will be one of the Greenest around. Waste heat (and there’s a lot of that in a datacentre)  from the $180 million Telehouse colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. It also features solar cells on the roof to help with the massive electricity costs.

They have provided a live feed from two webcams so you can watch diggers and cranes all day if you want.

ICANN updates

ICANN has approved a new contract for it’s registrars.gradlogo

One addition that caught my eye was the curious wording regarding requiring domain registries to use ICANN accredited registrars. Up to now it’s been a requirement that anyone running a top level domain has to offer that domain only through ICANN registrars. They’ve now clarified this as follows

ICANN has ordinarily required gTLD registries under contract with ICANN to use ICANN-accredited registrars, and ICANN will during the course of this agreement abide by any ICANN adopted specifications or policies requiring the use of ICANN-accredited registrars by gTLD registries.

I find the wording rather tortous. It’s NOT saying they WILL require registries to use ICANN registrars. It’s leaving it open to future amendments and policies.

New Domains

How successful have recent new domain launches been?

.me relaunched to the worldwide public in June 2008, and now claims to have 250,000 registrations.

.tel launched to the general public only on March 23 2009, and claims 200,000 registrations.

.eu  launched April 2006 and has reached 3,000,000 domains.

Are these numbers are success? And by what standard do you rate success?

Let’s compare with other country-code domains. The statistics indicate that most country-specific domains have 1 million or less domains registered. Only a few countries have more than this (China, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands are notable). For the registry operators in these regions, a large number of domains registered is counted as a mark of success.

However other registries with relatively small numbers of domains registered also boast of success. Their view is that countries like the UK have a large number of inactive or ‘parked’ domains registered. In Ireland however every domain registration must be justified, leaving a much ‘cleaner’ registry – there are just 125,000 .ie domains registered.

So from the point of view of the consumer, typing in a .ie domain means you more likely to end up where you expected, rather than a .uk or .de domain where you may well end up on a page full of ads.

Do we really need more domain extensions? The idea behind ICANN’s push to allow anyone to come up with an idea for a new extensions and start selling domains is arguably fair, and levels the playing field against incumbent gorillas like Verisign (.com and .net), but what will consumers and end-users get out of it? So far, .tel is the only new domain that has tried to offer something different.

.tel is not about websites or email. It’s like a people directory – you store your contact information in your .tel domain (hosted on .tel’s servers) and the idea is that future communication devices will lookup your contact information from the .tel domain. So far there’s little penetration of .tel software onto mobile phones and PDAs, but if they are to succeed this is essential.

We look forward to other innovative uses of new domains – more of the same would be a waste of this opportunity.

New gTLD sightings

Installing PHP on IIS

The fastest and easiest way to install PHP on IIS is using Microsoft’s Web Platform installer. It completely automates setting up IIS, FastCGI and the latest version of PHP from the php.net site. To install it, just click this button:

Web Platform Installer
Web Platform Installer

Also included in the installer are ready packaged popular web applications currently including:

Drupal, DotNetNuke, Photo Gallery, Wiki, SilverStripe CMS, Umbraco and WordPress.

Now we just need Microsoft to add MySQL and we’re sorted!

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