insight 

There has been a bit of an awards theme to my diary the last couple of weeks……

Firstly, I was delighted to hear that Nominet has retained both our Investors in People accreditation and our Best Companies to work for star, which means that we keep our entry in the guide to great places to work in the UK. Both awards recognise the professionalism of our managers and people and the time and investment that we make to ensure that we are able to recruit, train and retain great people - so that we can continue to deliver great services. Whilst it’s nice to have some more trophies for the cabinet, the real reward is knowing that we benchmark very well against other organisations. These awards also raise our profile, make it easier for us to attract good staff, ensure that our training investment is aligned with our strategic plans and also that communication with our people remains a priority – all things that are particularly important in these challenging times.

Last week, we launched our third annual Best Practice Challenge.  We’re hoping to recognise those in the UK who have embraced the challenge of making the Internet a more secure, open, accessible or diverse experience for us all. The award winners will be showcased at this year’s Internet Governance Forum and have the chance to share their work to a wide audience, both within the UK and internationally, as well as receiving great recognition and a real sense of pride.

This week, I went to the Institute of Credit Management awards dinner. I’ve been an ICM member for many years, so I was delighted to be asked to judge their awards this year. Little did I realise how difficult a job that would be, but the reward was seeing the actual winners, who were so obviously thrilled to be recognised. I particularly liked the Unsung Hero award, which was a very popular and hard-fought category. It strikes me that many more industries have unsung heroes who could do with a little bit more recognition.

Finally, a plug for the First Women Awards, which were also launched last week. These seek to recognise UK women who have broken new ground in business life – genuine trailblazers and pioneers/glass ceiling breakers. As a previous winner, I’m honoured to be judging the awards this year and we’re looking for nominees in the following categories: manufacturing, tourism & leisure, finance, science & technology, media, retail & consumer, property, public sector, business services. These awards celebrate all that is good about the roles women have in business and the positive attributes they bring. I’d recommend entering - with the reward of a real opportunity to make a lasting and positive difference to other women in business, another thing that is so important in these challenging times.

I’m always cynical when a management blog is silent on the current challenges facing a company, particularly when they are covered in the media.

We’ve had snow storms this week in the UK, so there is much talk about storms. It strikes me that some might view the current issues at Nominet as a storm in a teacup – a small event that has been exaggerated out of all proportion. Not unsurprisingly, I don’t agree. I think that the storm has already had a significant effect on Nominet and it could well have far reaching implications for both Nominet and our Registrars. I do hope (but I’m not sure) that all involved would agree that our current governance model and all that it entails needs to change in some way in order to reflect the role that we have and the environment that we operate in. The independent governance review is due soon, so we’re waiting to see how much change is recommended.

However, I believe that this is just a part of the bigger picture of the national and international Internet Governance debate, which is set to come to a head this year. If anything, Nominet represents one minor development in this area, which, I believe, is heading towards a perfect storm – a (far from perfect) combination of events, which will ultimately change the Internet landscape.

Let me attempt to explain…..as briefly as I can:

Firstly, I see the need for change being signalled in the regulatory climate in the UK. It is well known that the UK Government has been very supportive of self-regulation in our industry. However, I do hear statements about the representation of end-user interests and the protection of end-users much more frequently than ever before. As an industry, we often respond to these statements by saying “better user education and information is the answer”. Whilst that may well help, we are going to have to accept this may not be the only answer, or one that will fully deliver. So, its currently up to the UK internet industry to figure-out how we are going to ensure that end-users are at the heart of our self-regulatory regime, otherwise regulation or legislation is inevitable. For example, the recent Digital Britain report signals possible legislation compelling ISPs to notify infringers of third party rights, and keep anonymised data, which seems to indicate a view that self-regulation has failed on this point. If self-regulation is perceived to falter in the UK, which has championed an industry lead, we can expect that more interventionist governments (both within and outside the European Union) will capitalise on this, and may use it as an excuse for heavy regulation.

Secondly, I see change being signalled at the European level, with the EU review of the regulatory framework potentially giving member states the power to regulate the Internet, particularly around quality of service to end-users.

Thirdly, I see change being signalled by the US Government in its approach to Internet governance, particularly with the recent change in administration. There is also an end-user needs theme here and in the context of the new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD)  process, the US Department of Commerce recommends that ICANN should give greater consideration to consumer interests before creating new gTLDs and renewing registry agreements. I do have a lot of empathy with ICANN - like in Nominet, it must feel as though you just can’t please anyone at times. But with so many concerns being raised about the new gTLD process, I’d be surprised if the US is able to agree to the transition of ICANN to the private sector when the Joint Project Agreement expires later this year. Although there remains much support for removing the ‘oversight’ of ICANN from one single government, there is little consensus on what oversight should replace that of the US. I predict that some governments will therefore push even more strongly for inter-governmental oversight of ICANN.

Finally, we are coming to a crucial stage in the life of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The review of the forum has already begun and is due to report in early 2010. We view this five-year experiment in global multi-stakeholder dialogue as being very successful. The UK IGF and the Nominet Best Practice challenge have helped to ensure that the UK has great involvement in the IGF and that there are real life contributions to inform the policy debate. Whilst some would have liked the IGF to be a negotiating and decision making process, it has worked well as a space for the development of policy dialogue and the sharing of best practices. What seems to have escaped many is that this form of engagement is an innovative experiment for the UN, in that it seeks to engage all regions and all participants in policy dialogue. If that experiment is not seen to be working, there will be suggestions for alternative replacements.

I do think that there is an urgent need for greater awareness of the international issues facing the industry if we’re to avoid the storms, together with a more widespread commitment to developing both understanding and innovative solutions.

Where can we start? Well, we will all need to accept greater responsibility for finding solutions going forwards. This will require much better participation and engagement from all involved. There also remains a huge need for better dialogue, better participation, better understanding and better solutions in the interests of end-users. All too often I hear people talking to each other, but not actually listening. I also see vested interest battle-lines being drawn, without the acknowledgement that real progress will need real compromise and new ways of moving forward. This would be a good basis on which to start preventing new storms, whether they are small or large, from developing.

Today saw the launch of .tel, a domain intended to act as a repository for contact data and an information sharing platform, rather than as an address for a web site.

Owners of .tel domains will be able to populate them with their contact details, such as their phone numbers, email addresses or GPS data and store this information directly into the Domain Name System.  The data is then displayed in a standard way for anyone visiting the .tel address, no matter what browser or device they are using.

Owners of .tel domains will be able to manage their contact details via a simple dashboard and include as much or as little information as they want to.

The “sunrise” phase for trademark owners to get domains related to their brands begins today, followed by a “landrush” phase open to anyone starting on 3 February 2009. The final general availability phase starts on 24 March 2009 when the domain will be open to all comers.

There will be a number of factors that have an impact on the success of .tel, most importantly how businesses react to this new top level domain (TLD).  Businesses will need to be aware of the potential uses of .tel and how it can work for them.  They should have a clear and robust domain name strategy in place, so that when new TLDs such as these (and there may be potentially many more coming with the new ICANN process for allocating TLDs opening up next year) come onto the market they are ready for them.

As can be seen from data within our recent domain name industry report the challenge for new top level domains is to serve a particular market need, increasing their usage over time and thus sustaining long-term popularity.  For instance, our report revealed that 81% of UK SMEs choose .uk as their primary web address and consumers choose to visit a .uk site because it shows a business is local and trusted. It will be interesting to track the success of .tel.

Tomorrow brings the start of the third meeting of the United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum, a multi-stakeholder forum that debates a range of issues relating to Internet governance and works with all stakeholders to create a safe, fair and inclusive Internet experience.  This year’s event in early December will be held in Hyderabad, India.

Here at Nominet, we are saddened by the tragic events in Mumbai over the past week and offer our sympathies to the families of the victims and the wounded.

The IGF meeting is going ahead as scheduled and we wish all those taking part well.

Engaging UK stakeholders

Nominet, working with other partners, has been at the heart of preparing the UK for the Internet Governance Forum.  We see it as crucial to engage constructively with the IGF process, both in contributing to the discussions with ideas and in identifying examples of how to get the best out of the Internet.  With other UK stakeholders we are identifying “messages from the UK” and best practice case studies, using a partnership approach to making the Internet a better place, and keeping UK stakeholders engaged in the IGF process.

This approach has developed over the life of the IGF, and led us to launch the UK IGF in March this year.  This is an open partnership that provides a light and flexible framework for British stakeholders to work together to make the IGF a success.

We have recently launched a UK IGF web site and blog, which we hope will encourage the sharing of views and opinions of all stakeholders on the work of the UK IGF and emerging Internet Governance issues. It is also intended to be a mechanism to report updates from the UK IGF partners.

The challenge for the UK IGF is to create intelligent, collaborative solutions to problems of Internet governance and the outcomes of Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge clearly demonstrate to our international colleagues that we are making great strides in this area.

International participation

Other countries are seeing what we are doing and beginning to start running their own processes at the national level.  Each national process will of course be different, reflecting local priorities and concerns. We will be running a workshop in Hyderabad in collaboration with colleagues from Brazil, Finland and France to explore different national IGF approaches.

One key aspect of the UK’s engagement in the IGF is to work with parliamentarians.  This has been crucial in helping us develop our messages – in particular in helping understand the concerns and interests of the citizens.  Working with parliamentarians has helped us to focus our work on these key issues – like child Internet safety or fighting crime – and to engage with top decision makers from industry and civil society.  One British MP has been leading a multi-stakeholder dialogue using the IGF model to improve e-crime reduction in the UK.

The UK is proving that the Internet Governance Forum works, as a collaborative partnership between Government, business, civil society and academia, because it is not subject to Government legislation and is free from bureaucracy.

With the US election finally reaching its conclusion today, it was interesting to read an article in the New York Times recently about domain name trends for the two presidential candidates.  Technology media company IDG used DomainTools to query for domains and discovered that there were 2,357 domains registered for Barack Obama and 1,431 domains for John McCain.  When they expanded the query to domains with either “Obama” or “McCain” included in them, the results were 11,089 for Obama and 5,378 for McCain.

Digging deeper into the various domains registered revealed that there was a mixture of sites for and against each of the candidates, as well as their running mates.  Some of the domains were likely to have been registered or run by the campaigns themselves, in an effort to control the message.  Among the others, not run by the campaigns of either candidate there are a variety of sites including clear expressions of support or opposition; attempts at political satire; entrepreneurial sites selling items and inappropriate domains.

There’s lots more detail and various trend analysis available of web traffic over at Network World, which sheds a little more light on how the campaign went, much of which is of course redundant in the light of today’s result.  However, it does, of course, demonstrate the ever increasing usage of the Internet and the impact of web 2.0 in such campaigns. It also gives some pointers for brand managers (lets face it that’s what these campaigns are about) to a range of tools useful for analysing web site and domain name trends.

Today is the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) awareness day.  It’s a day when the Internet community and others come together to raise awareness of the IWF and the work they do to minimise the availability of illegal content, specifically, child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

They are reporting latest research which indicates that over three quarters (77%) of UK adult internet users who have stumbled across images of children being sexually abused are unsure how to report them. In addition, 71% of those surveyed ranked the availability of online child sexual abuse images as their top concern about the internet.

We support the IWF and wish them continued success with their awareness raising.

I was at the Centr meeting recently where a representative of JPRS, the registry for .jp (Japan) gave a presentation on the increased usage of search boxes in advertising in Japan instead of a URL.  Apparently some recent research showed that more than 35% of adverts in Japan carry an image of a search box with the appropriate search terms in the place of a URL.

I’ve started to notice advertisers occasionally doing something similar in the UK.  Here they tend to use the words “Search for” and then whatever the term is.

I guess that the advertisers are either very confident that their sites will come up as the number one on the list of responses, or they have an arrangement with the search companies to ensure it does.  There does seem to be some suggestion that this may be the case.

One of the key reasons for this practice in Japan, would appear to be that this gets around the issue of the requirement for URLs in Japan to contain both the local Japanese script characters and the latin characters .jp.  Maybe once IDNs are introduced at the root this trend will reverse?

It’s an interesting trend and we shall be monitoring whether this takes off in greater numbers here, and ultimately its impact on the domain name market.

We were delighted to welcome one of the ‘fathers of the internet’, Vint Cerf, to the Nominet offices in Oxford earlier today. As many will be aware, Vint was the co-designer of TCP/IP and basic infrastructure of the internet. After discussions about international developments and domain name developments in the UK, he very kindly offered to meet Nominet staff for a Q&A session. Questions posed to Vint included: IPv6 adoption, which he feels should be a matter of urgency, new top level domains - where the possibility of thousands of new suffixes raises concerns for brand holders, current internet risks - botnets, IPv4 exhaustion etc, etc, the future of the domain name system, Google’s position re search in the Chinese market and the new Google browser - which is open source. As always, Vint provided all the answers as well as some entertaining and interesting insights.

He then went on to give an excellent presentation at the Oxford Internet Institute on the future of the internet, noting that there are now 1,464 million internet users, which represents just 21% global penetration. He warned that IPv4 addresses will run out in the summer of 2010, which means that there needs to be a real push on IPv6 before it becomes a matter of dire urgency. He forsees geo-location based services growing rapidly as the number of mobile users increases and users will want local information directly relevant to their location. He also predicted the growth of the ‘internet of things’, where devices will increasingly link to the internet to deliver added value to users. I can see my family using the digital photo frame which automatically downloads and shares your latest snaps with friends and relatives, but probably not the electronic scales that link to your fridge in order to recommend heathier menus!

Vint also touched on the idea of an ‘interplanetary internet’, which I had previously thought of as an internet for the star ships and planets of the future. However, the penny dropped today when I understood that the protocols and tools being tested that facilitate connectivity over vast distances and frequent disruptions are of course the very things that could allow the global internet to be much more mobile and versatile in the future.

Last week we were pleased to note that our Director of Legal and Policy, Emily Taylor had her membership of the Internet Governance Forum’s Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group renewed.The United Nations IGF is a multi-stakeholder forum that debates a range of issues relating to Internet Governance. The IGF works with all stakeholders to create a safe, fair and inclusive Internet experience.  The role of the Advisory Group is to advise the UN Secretary General on the agenda and it’s made up from people from government, industry, civil society from all around the world.

As part of a regular review, about a third of the group’s membership has been rotated and Emily is pleased to be amongst those who have been retained.

The main task of the group is to provide advice on the preparations for the next meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from 3 to 6 December.

Each member of the group serves in a personal capacity, but they are expected to have extensive interaction with our respective stakeholder groups. Emily has played an integral role in the creation of a UK IGF, and she believes that national IGFs are vital to the future development and success of the IGF as a whole, helping to turn the IGF from a ‘talking shop’ into a ‘thinktank’.

The success of this work in the UK has led to other opportunities and Nominet is collaborating with others, including the French and Brazilian governments, to present workshops showcasing the UK IGF experience, and the Best Practice Challenge in Hyderabad.

We look forward to supporting these efforts, with initiatives such as the Nominet Best Practice Challenge, which showcases examples of best practice in Internet Governance by organisations and individuals in the UK.

I’m asked all the time what I think is a good idea for a TLD.   The answer depends on how you judge success.  If it’s high volumes of registrations and huge profits you’re after then I’m not sure there is a “good idea” any more, except of course running the root registry, which could be more successful, by those criteria, than any registry before.

The possible route to take is looking at entirely new ideas for TLDs, in the same way that .tel is attempting something completely new.   So in that spirit here is my idea for a completely different TLD that I’ve been shamelessly promoting for the last year.  Not do anything with, you understand, but to get people to think “outside the box” on domains names, because that it where the future may well lie.

My idea then is very similar indeed to TinyURL.  What you register is not a domain, but a URL, which gets translated into a short code and it is that short code that then becomes the domain name.  So you would register the URL “http://blog.nominet.org.uk/insight/2008/06/icann-paris-new-gtlds/” and get given the domain name 6hgntn.l in return.

The domain name would not be a delegation though, just a URL redirection on my huge specially written webserver (easy to do).  You might be able to choose from a variety of redirection techniques and you may be charged differently depending on how much data you allow the registry to keep.  If you let them keep everything then it might even be free.

If you wanted to choose the domain for the redirection, instead of having one assigned then that would certainly cost a lot more, but then the registry would have to do dispute resolution and all that so maybe it is not worth selling these.

So, why .l?  Well obviously, because it is so short and actually any one character TLD will do, l for link or u for URL or r for redirection, it doesn’t really matter.  Some might even say this is the downfall of .mobi, at four letters for the TLD it is three letter too long and should really be just .m.