insight 

Domain Name Front Running (DNFR) is a new buzzword acronym for the alleged practice of monitoring someone’s intentions to register domain names and then jumping in and registering them first.

Every now and again we get complaints about this sort of thing and we’ve investigated some of those in some depth in the past.  Our conclusion is that DNFR does not happen but that there are important characteristics in the way domains names are sought that many people do not know about that lead them to believe in something like DNFR.

You can read our full position paper here.

This is an issue that has recently been passed to the ICANN SSAC for them to study but it may turn out to be a waste of their valuable time.

On Wednesday last week, we launched our domain name industry report at our first .uk registrar conference. This seems to have been well received by all in attendance and has got a couple of mentions in the media.

Some, though by no means all, of the content was already in the public domain. The challenge for us was to bring together a large amount of disparate information and present an overview picture of the .uk domain name industry within a global context, including some previously unpublished statistics (.uk renewals, registrant and registrar trends).

Since presenting this information, we’ve had some requests for other data to be presented in the future and are already investigating various strands of research. We’d like to know what you think of the report and what other data you’d be interested in seeing us produce. So if there’s data you think we’re in a position to obtain and publish, then please ask and we’ll see if it’s possible to get at it.

The conference itself was also a first for us. We wanted to present a day that would be of interest to our registrars, increase the understanding of the various issues that we are all faced with in the market at the moment and impart some of the latest information about how we’re trying to support our registrar community. Judging by the feedback on the day, we seem to have hit the mark for most people.

If you were there and feel we could have done better then, let us know how and we’ll bear it in mind for future events.

If you weren’t there and want to know what happened then take a look at the presentation slides here.

The much anticipated panel session on the subject of critical internet resources took place yesterday at the Internet Governance Forum in Rio. It’s a shame that this issue seems to overshadow debates about how we can improve internet security and global access, which were the strongest concerns voiced by UK users at our pre-IGF discussions the other month. Read more

In amongst all of the preparations for the IGF this week, we managed to snatch a quiet moment to draft our formal response to the request for comments on ICANN’s draft Strategic Plan.

There was a packed room in Los Angeles just the other week when we made some verbal inputs on the plan and the future direction of ICANN seems to be a hot topic at the IGF. Increasing participation in ICANN and improving ICANN’s transparency and accountability have been popular themes. So why then are there only 2 comments (of which ours is one) on the most recent draft?

The link to our input is here:

http://forum.icann.org/lists/stratplan-2008/index.html