New Internet top-level domain name claims

Icann reveals new internet top-level domain name claims

Icann has received applications for .music, .miami, .insurance and .online among others

US-based organisations accounted for nearly half of all applications for new net address endings, according to the body in charge of the expansion.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) said it had received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.

By contrast there have been 40 such applications from the UK, 303 from the Asia-Pacific region and 17 from Africa.

Details of who applied for what will be revealed in London later.

Ahead of the press conference, Icann also revealed that 166 of the claims were for what it termed "internationalised domain names" - generic top-level-domains (gTLDs) that are not in the Latin alphabet.

"That means that if you're a person living in China or in somewhere in India then you might have the opportunity to use the internet purely in your native script," Icann's president and chief executive, Rod Beckstrom, told the BBC.

"It's going to make the internet more approachable for people. Also we're seeing a trend on mobile devices to people liking short names and there will be opportunities for shorter names here, just because what was previously a second-level name now becomes first-level."

An example of this would be if the web address www.canon.com/products switched to www.products.canon.

Generic names
 
The Japanese camera maker is just one of several organisations to have confirmed it has paid the $185,000 (£118,800) fee to take part in the application process.

International breakdown

North America: 911 applications

Europe: 675 applications

Asia-Pacific: 303 applications

Latin American and the Caribbean: 24 applications

Africa: 17 applications

(116 in non-Latin alphabets)

The not-for-profit .uk domain name manager Nominet has also revealed it had applied to run .wales and .cymru while Google said it had applied for .google, .youtube and .lol.

Other less well-known bodies are also taking advantage of the move.

The firm Top Level Domain Holdings has spent more than $13.5m applying for 92 applications on itself and clients. These include claims for .hotel, .cricket, .london and .music.

Dubai-based Directi told the BBC it had also applied for 31 "mass market" gTLDs including .law, .bank and .baby.

Conflicting claims
 
Organisations face a minimum $25,000 annual renewal charge to keep their suffix, but not all applications will succeed.

"Community-based applications" - those from trade associations or other organisations representing recognised, sizeable groupings - will take precedence over "standard applications" - those from stand-alone businesses and others.

So for instance, if PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and the Grocery Manufacturers of America have all applied for .cola, the GMA should be given priority.

If two or more applicants of equal status have requested the same name a resolution process is triggered.

"We would notify them that they have been approved and who else has been approved and say they have 60 days to go figure out how they are going to resolve this," said Mr Beckstrom.

"If they don't resolve this in 60 days then we are going to put it up for auction where each of them can bid for the term. The proceeds of that auction will go to a new charitable or non-profitable entity."

The process has proved controversial. 87 companies and business associations sent a petition to the US Department of Commerce last year claiming "excessive cost and harm to brand owners" and the "likelihood of predatory cyber harm to consumers".

But it will take a while to find out if such fears prove true.

Because of the volume of requests Icann plans to divide and evaluate the applications in batches of about 500.

It says the first is expected to go live some time between April and June 2013.

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Malaysians are always an ‘exception’?

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We are always an ‘exception’

Musings By Marina Mahathir

Malaysian policies often state that we are different and therefore cannot be compared with others. Yet those who join peaceful marches are likened to British rioters. Suddenly we are the same?

ARE we getting progressively schizophrenic? Judging by current responses to events around the world, it would be easy to conclude that we are.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses and to behave normally in social situations.

If you read up on Malaysian policies and statements on various issues, the one striking factor is our insistence on exceptionalism. That is, we are different and therefore cannot be compared with any other country.

Fiery aftermath: The violent riots in London left many properties in ruin. — AFP

In the early years of the AIDS pandemic, we thought we were protected because we were different. If non-Muslims in other Muslim countries use the word “Allah” for God with no fuss, ours can’t because we are different. We are apparently unique and incomparable to anyone else in the world.

Which is why it puzzles me that all of a sudden our citizens, or at least the ones who want to voice their opinions with peaceful assemblies and marches, are being compared to British rioters and looters.
If we are always different, how come suddenly we are the same?

Going by the statements of our leaders, basically we are nothing more than savages who would rob, rape, loot and pillage given half the chance. Therefore, we need all sorts of laws to keep us in check and not venture in groups of more than five outside our homes.

Now, this is why that schizophrenic inability to think logically comes into play. Despite evidence that none of the 30,000 or so peaceful marchers last July robbed, raped, looted or pillaged, our leaders insist that we would have. They must be looking at mirrors.

Just a few days ago the fellow who demonstrated how inconvenient a protest is by inconveniencing everyone in Penang declared that he would burn down two online news portals whose reports he disagreed with. Now if that’s not London rioter behaviour, I don’t know what is.



More disturbingly, after already having insulted all the good citizens who exercised their right to peaceful assembly, our leaders go on to insult them some more.

Instead of being proud that we did not have the type of violence that the UK experienced, instead of talking about how so much more civilised our people are, our leaders liken us to rioters who have vandalised, stolen and killed.

Talk about the inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

A certain amount of hypocrisy also rears its ugly head. What if Mark Duggan, the man who was shot by police in London and whose family’s peaceful protest became the original rallying cry for the rioters, was Mohamad Duggan?

Between 1987 and 1993 and 2000 and 2005, the Palestinian people went through two uprisings against the Israeli government, known as the First and Second Intifadas, respectively. Both Intifadas involved demonstrations, protests and, yes, a certain amount of violent rioting.

They were met with an even more violent response from the Israelis that resulted in many deaths and the eventual blockade of Gaza, still in force today.

Our government supported the Intifadas then. Does that mean that our government supports the right of Palestinians to demonstrate, protest and riot, but refuses its own people’s right to do much less, that is to just march peacefully?

Or is the logic that when governments are democratically elected, its people then lose the right to protest against them?

Conveniently ignored, too, is the fact that in the UK, protests and demonstrations are held all the time without the type of violence we saw recently.

One of the biggest was in 2003 when hundreds of thousands of people marched against the Iraq war. At the time we looked benignly at this because we had the same stand. Did we tell the Brits and others round the world that they should not demonstrate against the war?

So what is the message here? We may be trusted to peacefully protest as long as the subject of our protest is in sync with the Government’s. Otherwise, if we should protest for free and fair elections, against corruption or anything else that the Constitution gives us the right to, we are labelled as unpatriotic thugs out to disturb the peace and destroy the economy and image of our country.

Looking at the UK riots, are we even talking about the same thing? What cause was the UK rioters espousing?

Some wide reading instead of political posturing might be more beneficial here. The UK rioters did not loot bookshops, and some have suggested it’s because they don’t like to read.

Perhaps they are not unlike some of our politicians.