U.S. travel ban disrupts ICANN Meetings

ICANN’s meetings may be affected by the recent controversial U.S. travel ban ordered by President Donald Trump, multiple representatives of the organization have indicated that the U.S. travel ban will cause disruption to its upcoming schedule of meetings. Kaveh Ranjbar is one of ICANN’s board members, and on Monday he missed his flight to Los …

.blog Landrush: Domain open to the general public as of 21 November

WordPress.com owner Automattic is making .blog available to the general public as of 21 November, following a somewhat controversial landrush period. Earlier this month, the registry opened domain registrations to non-trademark owners for the seven-day landrush period, but was accused of pre-registering and keeping the best keywords for itself. Automattic responded to the criticism on …

Council of Europe Paper discusses .Africa legal process from a human rights perspective

The new gTLD process has created many precedents, apart from being the largest ever single expansion of domains; it has also raised pertinent issues that touch on many spheres of ethics, human rights, ownership, brands among others. .Africa is among the most controversial domains having gone through an unprecedented path of accountability. The domain has …

.shop domains go live

More than 600 new generic top-level domains—the characters that appear after the dot in website addresses—have been released to the public since 2014, but few have been of broad interest to online retailers. The addition of  .shop and .shopping may spark retailers’ interest. Both go on sale to the general public later this month—.shop on …

DCA Trust dismisses ICANN’s Enforcement of The Purported AUC Endorsement withdrawal as a Rearguard Action

“At no time until after it had rejected DCA’s application, did ICANN assert that the AUC had properly “withdrawn” its endorsement. – DCA   Geographic new gTLDs in the ICANN application round were required to have endorsements of upto 60% from counties in the applying region. Many applications in the new gTLD program were therefore …