Here's a quick summary of some of the new features in .TEL:

1. Logo/Picture - you can now upload a logo or picture by referencing the website location (URL) of the image you want to use.

The easiest way I found to achieve this is by referencing my twitter avatar. (right click on your Twitter avatar, click on properties and copy the URL). Paste it into your .TEL where it asks for the "URL".

You can do this with any image on the internet including your logo on your website.

Other way is to click on the option to set up a Gravatar and you put your image of choice up associated with your email and it will automatically be associated with your email on any future blog sites, etc.

Give these a try and any problems, feel free to call the Webnames.ca team at 1-866-221-7878 or locally at 604-633-1142.

2. Better Looking Icons - you will notice that the icons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are now showing up rather than in the past, they all showed as "web". This makes for a much nicer look and feel to the page.

3. Colour Themes - You can go and change the colours on your .TEL page. Changing the colours isn't as intuitive as picking a template but experiment a little bit and have some fun to make a more customized look and feel for your .TEL!

4. V-Card - the mapping seems to be improved and seems to be working well.

5. Search Function - at the top right hand corner of every .TEL you can do a search within the specific .tel you are looking for or across all .TEL's in the world. Put in a search term like "webnames" for instance and you will get all the .TEL's with references to "webnames"

6. Print - there is now a quick print button so you can print out the digital business card if you want to kill more trees ;)

For those who think green is in, don't forget to download Hornet.tel for Blackberry or "Superbook" for iPhone if you want to take .TEL names with you and be fully mobile. I have tested Hornet and all works fine with the new changes. iPhone should be working well too.

Hope this helps! Come join us at our next local Dot-TEL Meetup: http://meetup.com/dottel

Webnames.ca has collaborated with Telnic, the organization behind the award-winning .TEL name, to create the first-ever domain retail card so that .TEL names can be sold by brick and mortar retailers across North America.

The new retail card lets customers purchase .TEL names, which act as a 'live' digital business card, from stores and shops. The cards can then be activated online at a later date using unique codes printed on the back of the card, making them ideal retails.

The .TEL retail card is a first for the domain industry. A perfect add-on to a mobile phone or accessory purchase, the first batch of cards can be purchased from CanTalk Wireless stores now.

Nick Ellery, General Manager at CanTalk Wireless Solutions, said: "These retail cards make it easier than ever to promote .tel.  The card and packaging are very appealing and do a great job at expressing the .TEL concept and value to shoppers. Our sales people find it easier to explain and promote .TEL by having the cards available in-store and the registration system provided to retail card users appears to be very easy to follow."

"The .TEL retail card is not only a natural fit for wireless and technology retailers," said Smith, "it also makes sense for retail outlets that offer products to small businesses or business people."

A .TEL name directs people to targeted information such as phone numbers, email addresses, websites, social media profiles and more. It keeps people and businesses connected when their contact details change and it simplifies referrals by allowing its owner to share only one point of contact, for example "you can reach me at SteveSmith.tel".

The program is ramping up with more retailers, including locations of the national coffee franchise Blenz Coffee.

To learn more about Webnames.ca's .TEL retail card program, contact:

Matt Lane, Webnames.ca
http://lane.tel 

Lisa Wills, Webnames.ca
http://lisaw.tel

Read Telnic's .TEL Names Hit Main Street press release.

Webnames.ca has been accepting pre-bookings for the .TEL domain name launch for the past few weeks and response has been great.  With the official Sunrise period for the .TEL launch date of December 3 fast approaching, there is no better time to get your list of trademarks together and submit during the .TEL Sunrise pre-booking period.  Remember it is first-come first-served, even for the Sunrise period. To have the best chance at getting your valued trademarks registered as .TEL domains you should submit them as early as possible. 

Let's review the who, what, where, when, why and how of .TEL Sunrise registrations, so we can be sure you have the necessary information to pre-book your .TEL Sunrise names.

 WHO?  Anyone with a fully registered trademark, which was applied for before May 30th 2008, and is fully registered before the official Sunrise submission period (December 3rd to February 2nd 2009) can submit a .TEL Sunrise request.

WHAT?  .TEL is the TLD set to change the way we list, share and search our contact information.  The Sunrise period is the early submission period reserved for registered trademark holders to give them the best chance at securing the brands and marks as a .TEL domain name.

WHERE?  Webnames.ca is taking pre-bookings for the Sunrise period as well as the Landrush and General registration periods for .TEL Domains.  Webnames.ca is one of the first and biggest champions of the .TEL domains. Our expertise in domain names and their management makes us your #1 choice for .TEL domains.

WHEN?  The .TEL pre-booking is happening right now, you can already send in your Sunrise, Landrush and General registration requests to Webnames.ca by visiting us at http://www.webnames.ca/tel/.

WHY?  As a registered trademark holder it is important to protect your trademarks, by submitting your application during the Sunrise Period you will ensure the best chance of successfully registering your registered trademarks as a .TEL domain name.  As the .TEL domains are not website based and do not allow for visual customization, using your logos and visual identifiers will help prevent your names and marks from being used by others, thus preventing dilution of your brand.

HOW?  Visit http://www.webnames.ca/tel/, email corporate@webnames.ca or call us for more information on .TEL domains and how to submit your Sunrise, Landrush and General requests.

I checked the forecast for the next few weeks and it look like the .TEL Sunrise is coming so don't get left in the dark.

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Click here for more information on .TEL

Using .tel is like having your own personal switchboard operator.  "Miss Havisham - connect me with a camel place in Cairo."

 What if you are actually in Cairo (and your partner has frowned on you bringing Miss Havisham) - you enter camels.tel into your iPhone. You choose Cairo from the list of cities that appear.  From the list of companies you choose One Hump or Two.  Their English language support number appears. 

You click on it and, voilà, you are off to the races - the camel races that is. "Connect Me" technology has never been easier.

.tel - Bridging the Global Gap

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Click here for more information on .TEL

By now, you've heard about .TEL and how it will revolutionize the way we connect with each other by using the existing DNS architecture to store phone numbers, email addresses, map links, and dozens of other types of contact information.

 As you may suspect, .TEL is more than a traditional top-level domain; it is more like a system or a set of standards. I was curious about the system's technical workings, so I read all the documentation I could get my hands on.  My sources were the guides available to accredited registrars like Webnames.ca, the publicly-available RFC's (request for comments) describing features of the DNS, and various Google/Wikipedia search results. 

I will try to summarize what I learned.

Storage of Contact Information

The DNS routinely stores many different types of data for each domain name.  These are called Resource Records, and the most common is the A record, which associates a domain name with an IP address.  Another common type is the MX record, which tells email programs where to send mail that is addressed to a user at a particular domain. 

To store contact information, the .TEL registry mandates the use of NAPTR  records.  NAPTR records provide a flexible, generic way of storing arbitrary text in the DNS, with more structure than simple TXT records.  They do this by specifying a service type which, in the context of .TEL, maps to an ENUM  "E2U+" service, and a regular expression  that specifies how to rewrite a domain name into a URI  that describes how to access the service.

For example, the following record says that for the domain you just looked up, you should replace the entire domain name with the URI "sip:information@pbx.example.com":

IN NAPTR 100 10 "u" "E2U+sip"  "!^.*$!sip:information@pbx.example.com!i"

Of course, in this example, the power of regular expressions goes mostly unused, but it is easy to imagine service URI's that would demand more complex NAPTR records.  See RFC 3403 for a full description of NAPTR records, along with several examples.

Storage of Other Information

The .TEL registry mandates the use of TXT records to store information about a domain that is not contact-related.  This can be either:

• free-form text, intended to be displayed to the client as-is

• a "Structured Keyword" list prefixed by ".tkw", and containing one or more keyword type/value pairs, something like this:

IN TXT ".tkw" "1" "s" "Mr" "fn" "James" "fn" "Fenimore" "ln" "Cooper" "jt" "Technical Author" "g" "male" "dob" "15/09/1789"

• a "Structured System Message" prefixed by ".tsm"

 Software Support

Telnic has been hard at work developing free, open-source (FOSS) plugin clients for popular communication platforms, including Microsoft Outlook®, Windows Mobile® and BlackBerry®.  

When publicly available, these plugins will allow users of those platforms to simply enter a .TEL domain name - for example, emma.tel -  click the Mobile Phone button, and place a call to Emma's published mobile phone number.  If Emma ever changes her phone number, the caching and delegation architecture of the DNS comes into play, and within a few hours, the same procedure would result in a call being placed to her new mobile phone number. 

Telnic will also be providing a FOSS platform that implements a TelHosting server, to give registrars some help as they take on a new role.

Administration

The traditional role of a registrar is to allow registrants (end-users) to manage the terms of their domain registrations, update their WHOIS contact information, and specify their DNS servers.  Many registrars also allow registrants to point their domains at the registrar's DNS server, and manage typical addressing, hosting and forwarding scenarios as they please.

 With .TEL, the information being stored in the DNS for a domain is much more extensive and complex than with other TLD's, so the registry has defined another role called a "TelHosting provider".  This entity provides the registrant with the ability to manage their contact information through a web-based front end (or a SOAP API). 

The TelHosting provider is also responsible for hosting the web proxy, which displays the contact information for its domains in a clear format, as at http://emma.tel/.  For .TEL domains, the A record always points to the IP of the TelHosting provider.  (Registrants are not allowed to point the A record at an arbitrary IP address, or to add arbitrary CNAME records to bypass this restriction with aliasing.)  It is expected that many .TEL registrars will also perform the TelHosting role but, as with DNS services, there is nothing preventing a registrant from obtaining TelHosting services from another entity.

You might wonder what role the .TEL registry itself plays in this system.  From the above information, it would seem that a registrant of any domain, regardless of TLD, could conform to the system standards and store extended information in the DNS.  Technically, I suspect this is true, but client software support for TLD's other than .TEL may be spotty.  Also, there is a whole area of contact information publishing that is not addressed by the standards above: privacy.

Privacy

An IETF draft submitted by Benjamin Timms and Jim Reid from Telnic specifies how we can encrypt NAPTR records  to prevent contact information from being read by untrustworthy clients.  But how do we pass the encryption keys around?  That is where the .TEL registry comes in.  Telnic, or its delegated registry manager, Neustar , will provide the central infrastructure for a system that tracks consumers of private .TEL contact information. 

The system will allow a user to create an account protected by a password and automatically generate a public/private key pair.  The user can then send a "friending" request to a .TEL domain.  If the administrator of the .TEL domain agrees to the friending request (typically through the TelHosting provider's web interface), a sub-domain will be created, with the private contact information encrypted using the public key of the friending requester. 

As you can see, the NAPTR information can only be decrypted by the friending requester.  If the domain administrator no longer wishes to be friends with the requester, they can simply remove the sub-domain (an interface will be provided to do this through the TelHosting provider.)

On the face of it, .TEL looks very promising in its utility. Are there additional aspects workings of .TEL you want to know about that are not covered here? Let us know.

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Click here for more information on .TEL 

Dear 411,

Our affair has lasted for years and we've had some really good times. 

Remember when you helped me cook a turkey?  Or that time I called from Germany looking for the Montreal office of Air Canada because I was big baby and wanted to come home early? 

Or that time in the 80's when I called in drunk looking for Bob Geldof's number.  You and your British cousins were useless but at least you tried.

I'm not a fair-weather girlfriend - we've had 30 good years. But now we're over, we're done.

You're a butter churn, an 8 track, a "Vote for  Pedro" t-shirt - you're history.

I've got a new boyfriend now - his name is TEL and he's swell.

He's everything you're not - fast, global and doesn't force me to find a pen.

Finally Bob and I will be able to have that drunken heart to heart I wished for 20 years ago. I punch bobgeldof.tel into my phone and Bob's home phone number comes zinging down to my phone.  And that's cool.

Oh 411 - you're nice, but you're a horse and buggy compared to .TEL and I need a better ride.

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Click here for more information on .TEL

ICANN Posts Proposed 2007-2008 Budget - ICANN has posted its proposed budget for 2007-2008. Expenses are budgeted to be $US 43 million, an increase of more than $13 million over the current budget year's projected year-end total.

Owner of .TRAVEL Registry Reports Financial Difficulties - Theglobe.com, which acquired .travel registry operator Tralliance in 2005, states in its quarterly Securities and Exchange Commission that it may not be able to fund its operations beyond May 2007 unless it receives additional capital, and that "management believes that the Company will continue to be unprofitable in the foreseeable future." (From Edward Hasbrouck's blog.)

auDA Releases .AU Issues Paper, Calls For Comments - auDA's 2007 Names Policy Panel has released an issues paper and is calling for public comment. Issues include: whether .au should be opened up to direct registrations (eg. domainname.au), whether the policy rules for domain names should be changed, and whether registrants should be allowed to sell their .au domain names. The closing date for submissions is June 15.

Picks To Click

• Monday, May 21 is the deadline for applications to the CIRA Nomination Committee
• The agenda of the June 1, 2007 meeting of the CIRA Board of Directors.
• The minutes of the April 24, 2007 meeting of the CIRA Board of Directors.
• Nominations are open for the Board of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), registry operator for the .org domain

Earlier this week Entrepreneur.com (a great resource for business startups and entrepreneurs - bookmark it if you fall into this category) published an article with tips on "How to Find a Good Domain Name". The article challenges the popular perception that 'all the good domains are gone'. While we certainly know that isn't the case for .CA domains, with over 65 million .COM's registered, it's getting increasingly difficult to secure a good, evocative .COM domain in the primary market. Here are Entrepreneur.com's tips and recommendations, with our own suggestions thrown into the mix.

1. Starch the Search

Utilize domain search to check the availability of words, terms and phrases. If the domain name you want is already registered, see if it's associated with a legitimate website or if it's merely parked. If it's parked, you might want to inquire about it by looking up the Who-Is information.

If you're prepared to pay a couple hundred to thousands of dollars, try searching for pre-owned names in the domain aftermarket. Websites specializing in aftermarket domain sales like Sedo.com have a large inventory of names that can be searched by category.

2. Get the .com extension

Entrepreneur.com says: "In a hurry to go to market, eager entrepreneurs decide to take the available .net or a hyphenated version of their name...Be patient and get a name that's unique, distinguishable and memorable - and one that's a .com."

We say: Absolutely, get the .com if you find one that is clear, communicable, relevant to your business and available, be it in the primary or aftermarket. Remember though, if you do business in Canada or have any kind of Canadian presence always get the .CA also. If you're primarily a Canadian presence, the .CA is equally relevant and important to have.

3. Be Creative

"Here's another cold, hard reality: The simple one-word domain names are either gone or tremendously expensive. "(Again, while this quite accurate of .com's, it's not necessarily the case with .ca's) While it's always best to aim for a unique domain name your competitors haven't already registered a variation of, the folks at Entrepreneur.com also suggest taking your naming idea, and adding a suffix - ex. Group, Inc, Agency, Systems, Solutions, etc - or an industry-specific modifier, such as - Media, Medical, Tech or Capital."

4. Combine Evergreen Words

"One of the best domain-name-creation strategies is combining simple, positive words in a unique fashion." To do this, create a list of basic words that describe your business or industry. Then add a positive or evergreen word that will make the name stand out. What is an evergreen word? A word thats meaning has a universal quality and never gets old, or staid, for example: Star, First, Cool, Bright, etc. We like this suggestion and agree that it can open the door to a lot of interesting, catchy domain names.

5. Consider using a phrase

Surprisingly, many memorable phrases, as well as industry specific phrases are often available. It just takes a bit of resourcefulness to search them out. "An example was an online jewelry company we named SeaOfDiamonds.com. By using the metaphor of an ocean, we created a 13-letter domain name that's easy to say and recall. This approach does require a lot of thinking and digging. But if you hit on the right name, it's worth it."

6. Invent new names

While totally invented names start off with no inherent meaning (think Google), you can make invented names more memorable by using "familiar parts of speech that contain some sense of feeling or emotion you can build your brand on". Flickr.com, the photo sharing website is great example of this.

7. Run a legal search

Sound advice. If you find a domain name that's available and meets your criteria, find out if you can trademark it. Do a Google search to see if anyone is currently using the name/phrase, as well as a trademark search, then consult with a trademark agent to make sure you are in the clear to use it.

8. Hire a specialist

We say - Or try talking to a one of our specialists for free at 1-866-221-7878. We've been doing this for years and have helped hundreds of customers find domain names to meet their needs.

ICANN Seeks Public Comment On Its Performance - ICANN is seeking community feedback about its performance. Of particular interest to ICANN are comments on transparency, accessibility, accountability, operational performance, policy development, international participation, its multi-stakeholder model, technical coordination, and dispute resolution. Comments will be received until June 5.

CIRA Criticizes ICANN Performance Consultation - CIRA has posted a response to ICANN's call for public comments on ICANN's performance. The response notes that ICANN's steps to increase transparency are encouraging, but goes on to state that this request for public comments "represents a clear step backwards in ICANN's journey towards becoming a truly transparent and accountable organization."

ICANN Seeks Input On New Generic Top-Level Domains - ICANN is calling for public input on the development of "a new process for creating, approving, and adding new gTLDs (generic top-level domains like .com, .org etc) to the Internet." According to ICANN, the new process "will lay out how gTLDs are proposed and approved, and should allow for a much wider variety of them to be added in a timely, predictable, and efficient manner.' New TLDs could be added between June and August 2008.

Picks To Click

• An interview, including a YouTube video, with outgoing ICANN chairman Vint Cerf has been posted in which he asks people to apply for open Board and Supporting Organization positions.
• An AP article, "Profiteers snap up domain names related to Va. Tech tragedy."
• The Estate of JRR Tolkien wins a dispute over silmarillion.eu and thesilmarillion.eu.

CIRA Calls For Nominations For Board Election - The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has a issued a call for individuals to be considered by the Nomination Committee for the Board of Directors election to be held this September. The last day for applications to the Nomination Committee is Monday, May 21. The 2007 election, to be held this September, will be a split ballot composed of candidates selected by the Nomination Committee and nominated directly by Members. The Member nomination process will take place during July.

CIRA Issues Fraud Alert - CIRA has issued a fraud alert, advising .ca domain holders not to respond to communications from DAD Deutscher Adressdienst GmbH, a German company, under the confusing banner of the Registre Internet du Canada (Canadian Internet Registry). According to CIRA: "The scam is targeting CIRA Registrants in Quebec with French language faxes or letters containing official looking forms requesting Registrant contact information. While the forms appear to be required to update domain name Registration records, they are actually luring unsuspecting Registrants into a $1457 package of marketing services offered by DAD Deutscher Adressdienst GmbH."

ICANN Proceeding With RegisterFly Termination - A US Federal Court judge has issued a preliminary injunction granting ICANN the right to terminate registrar RegisterFly's accreditation as soon as possible. RegisterFly has been ordered to provide current and accurate data for all of its domain names. ICANN is inviting statements of interest from other accredited registrars to act as a transfer provider, to temporarily hold the domain names and help registrants to transfer to any accredited registrar of their choice. The court decision also requires RegisterFly to post a notice on its website; as of this writing, this has not been done.

.BIZ Registry Price To Increase - NeuStar, registry operator for the .biz domain, has given notice of a 7% price increase, from $USD 6.00 to $6.42. The increase is scheduled to take effect on October 19. Individual registrars will decide whether or not to change their retail prices.

Picks To Click

• The 2007 board election is under way for Nominet, the .uk registry.

More Registry Price Increases - Following VeriSign's registry price increases announced for .com and .net, Public Interest Registry and Afilias have announced registry-level price increases for .org and .info names, respectively. The increases for each are 2.5%, from $US 6.00 to $6.15, and will take effect in October. Individual registrars will decide whether or not to change their retail prices.

.ASIA Domain To Launch - DotAsia Organization, registry operator for the .asia domain for the Asia/Pacific region, will begin accepting .asia domain name applications in June. According to DotAsia documents, the launch will begin with a sunrise process separated into three main phases: the first for governments, the second for Registered Mark owners, and the third for registered companies.

.EU Domain Is One Year Old - The .eu domain for Europe has turned one year old, and has more than 2.5 million registrations. It is the third most popular European TLD, after .uk and .de.

Picks To Click

* GoDaddy.com, Inc. wins a dispute over godaddy.ca.

* The agenda of the April 24, 2007 meeting of the CIRA Board of Directors.

ICANN Board Rejects .XXX Domain Application - By a 9-5 vote with one abstention, the ICANN Board has rejected the .xxx domain application from ICM Registry. The decision came nearly seven years after the proposal was first made. ICM Registry is reportedly considering court action.

VeriSign To Raise .COM/.NET Registry Fees - VeriSign has announced that as of Oct. 15, the registry fee for .com domain names will increase by 7% from $USD 6.00 to $6.42, and that the fee for .net domain names will increase by 10% from $3.50 to $3.85.

Major .AU Policy Changes Being Considered - auDA, Australia's .au domain administrator, is considering changes to .au policy, including: allowing second-level registrations (e.g. xyz.au), changes to .au eligibility and allocation policy rules, and allowing registrants to sell their .au domain names. As part of the process, an online survey is being conducted.

Picks To Click

• A summary of the busy ICANN meetings at Lisbon, Portugal.
• ICANN's current information on the RegisterFly situation.
• The minutes of the February 27, 2007 meeting of the CIRA Board of Directors, including approval of a compensation package for Board members as supported by a membership consultation.
• A tutorial [PDF] by Rob Hall of Momentous.ca on how the marketplace for expiring domain names has changed.
• The optional .eu registrar Code of Conduct is in effect as of March 29.
• The .info domain has surpassed 4 million registrations.
• Yellow Pages Group loses [PDF] a dispute over yellowpage.ca.
• The Motley Fool Inc. loses a dispute over fools.com.

ICANN Terminates Registrar Accreditation Agreement For Registerfly - ICANN has issued formal notice of termination of its accrediation agreement with registrar Registerfly.com. According to the letter, Registerfly.com will no longer be allowed to operate as an ICANN-Accredited Registrar effective March 31.

Whois Task Force Issues Final Report - The Whois Task Force has sent its final report on Whois services to ICANN's GNSO Council. The task force was in agreement that new mechanisms to restrict some contact data from publication should be adopted to address privacy concerns, but did not arrive at supermajority support for any of the proposals it considered.

Picks To Click

• McAfee SiteAdvisor: a global road map of the riskiest and safest TLDs.
• ICANN launches a public participation site for the Lisbon meetings.
• A co-chair of the IETF ENUM Working Group describes four ENUM camps.
• Current CIRA members must re-enroll to maintain their membership status.

Today on DomainNameWire.com, Andrew Allenmann stresses the importance of a good domain name and points to a $1 Million lesson.

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal confirms that the domain name Topix.com was purchased for $1M in January. The new owner is Topix.net, which receives 10M visitors per month. The company understood the user confusion of not owning the .com version of the domain and negotiated the purchase.

Topix.com was owned by a Canadian computer graphics and animation facility that specialized in character animation, special effects, film titling, and type and broadcast design. The domain was originally registered in 1995. Terms of the deal, including if the $1M price was all cash or included stock, are not available.

When entrepreneurs start a web site they frequently overlook the importance of a good domain. They think that if the site takes off they can always buy the more expensive domain they want. But Topix.net is a good example of why this is a bad strategy. Buying a good domain name from the get go pays off in the long run.

Andrew's analysis is bang on. A lot of start-up ventures are strapped for cash and don't protect the most important extensions of their domain name when just starting out because it's not in their budget. Had the former owner of Topix.com only registered their .CA name (they still have it), that would have been a Million dollar mistake. Lesson learned.

Update On Registerfly - During the past week, ICANN has posted in its blog several updates on the RegisterFly situation, and many unhappy customers have posted followup comments. On March 8, a U.S. District Court judge handed control of RegisterFly back to Kevin Medina, the original CEO, resolving a dispute over ownership of the company. ICANN has indicated that this resolution "does not alter RegisterFly obligations to immediately cure the breaches of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, as noticed by ICANN." On Feb. 21, ICANN had sent a letter to RegisterFly giving 15 working days' notice of several breaches of contract. ICANN could give notice of termination of the registrar's accreditation as of Wednesday, March 14.

.MOBI Domain Tops 400,000 - DotMobi, the registry operator for the .mobi domain, has announced that more than 400,000 .mobi domain names have been registered in 104 countries since the .mobi launch last fall.

Chinese Registry Promotes .CN Names - The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), registry for China's .cn domain, has decreased the first-year registration fee for .cn domain names to one yuan (approximately $0.16 Canadian) until May 31.

Picks To Click

• ICANN publishes an interesting factsheet describing the root server attack on February 6.
• Nominum president Tom Tovar describes how next-generation Internet applications are causing a substantial growth in the number of Domain Name System (DNS) queries.
• In his blog, John Levine explains why he left the ICANN At Large Advisory Committee.
• Laboratory tests on internationalized (non-ASCII) top-level domain names show no technical problems. The tests were done under contract to ICANN.
• Musician's Friend, Inc. wins a dispute over musiciansfriend.ca.
• ICANN publishes a note on "How to Get Help When You Have a Problem with Your Registrar".

ICANN Publishes Revision to Proposed .XXX Agreement - ICANN has posted for public comment a revised appendix to the proposed .xxx registry agreement. Acccording to the preliminary report of the recent ICANN Board meeting, "a majority of the Board has serious concerns about whether the proposed .XXX domain has the support of a clearly-defined sponsored community as per the criteria for sponsored TLDs".

British Users More Likely to Choose .UK: Survey - According to a survey carried out by YouGov, British Internet users are loyal to local websites and have higher levels of trust for the .uk domain name.

Picks To Click

• The preliminary report of the February 12 meeting of the ICANN Board of Directors.
• The ICANN Ombudsman has a blog, including an entry critical of how the ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) handled an application for At-Large status.
• The agenda of the February 27, 2007 meeting of the CIRA Board of Directors.

Root Servers Attacked - On Feb. 6, root nameservers were flooded with queries due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Reportedly three of the 13 root server clusters were significantly affected, but the attack went largely unnoticed by users.

VeriSign to Strenghen its Internet Infrastructure - VeriSign has announced an initiative to expand and diversify the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by ten times by the year 2010. It plans to increase its DNS query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day, and to increase bandwidth from over 20 Gbps to more than 200 Gbps.

Network Solutions Sold - Domain registrar and service provider Network Solutions has been sold to General Atlantic.

Picks To Click

• Craigslist wins a dispute over craigslist.ca.
• Country music star Keith Urban has filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey man named Keith D. Urban over the domain name keithurban.com.
• Geoff Huston posts an article in CircleID on "Addressing the Future Internet." Huston was a participant at the January 31 NSF/OECD workshop on Social and Economic Factors Shaping the Future of the Internet. Short position papers are available, including one from Internet pioneer David Clark.

.COM and .NET Registry Price Increases Expected This Year - VeriSign expects to increase the annual registry fees for .com and .net domain names this year, according to CEO Stratton Sclavos. Presently the annual registry or wholesale price for a .com name is USD $6.00, and the price could rise 7% to $6.42. The registry price for a .net name could increase 10% from $4.25 to $4.67. Each registrar will determine whether or not to pass on price increases to registrants and resellers. VeriSign must give six months' notice before increasing prices. (Note: By my reading of the .net agreement, the registry price consists of two components, a $3.50 service fee and a $0.75 ICANN fee, and it appears that the 10% maximum increase may apply only to the service fee. This results in an increase from $4.25 to as much as $4.60.)

Registrars Surveyed on Domain Name Suspension - CNET News.com has surveyed a number of registrars following GoDaddy's action last week to suspend service to security site Seclists.org. Among the questions was: under what circumstances will you suspend a customer's domain name based on the content of his or her Web site, in the absence of a court order? GoDaddy participated in the survey.

.UK Registry Conducts Governance Consultation - Nominet, the registry for the .uk domain, is updating its Articles of Association and is conducting two consultations on proposed changes. The first consultation runs until May 2, and concerns modifying the composition of the Board, enshrining the practice of consulting on policy matters in the articles, and giving the Board the power to make all fee changes rather than having to refer some changes to a membership vote.

Telnic Selects NeuStar To Operate .TEL Registry Systems - Telnic, registry operator for the forthcoming .tel domain, has announced that it has selected NeuStar to operate the registry and DNS systems for .tel.

Picks To Click

• The Government of Canada comments on the proposed .xxx domain agreement, expressing its concern that ICANN may venture beyond its core technical functions toward "an ongoing policy-making and oversight role governing Internet content."
• An association for UK domainers and a magazine for domainers are set to launch.
• Best Western International wins a dispute over best-western.ca.
• The CBC wins a dispute over hockeynightincanada.ca.
• The 2007 ICANN Nominating Committee issues a call for statements of interest.