Domain name

The end of Latin Characters dominance of website addresses

I cannot think of the types of security risks and implications this new change of website address naming scheme would bring but the challenge is great.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday — the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.

The full article:

SEOUL, Oct 26, 2009 (AFP) - The Internet is about to get more accessible for millions worldwide with the imminent approval of a new multilingual address system that uses Asian and Arabic scripts, a global regulator said Monday.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters for website addresses on Friday — the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.
“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board in charge of reviewing the change, told a press conference.
Thrush said he expected ICANN’s full board to grant approval on Friday — a day after the 40th anniversary of the Internet’s birth in a computer experiment by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.
When the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from other languages — such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese — for a full Internet address, instead of just part of the address as now.
ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said the change — designed to serve the growing number of non-English-speaking Internet users — would come into effect in the middle of 2010. ICANN aims to start receiving applications next month.
“It will take some period of time to process the applications and then introduce the successful applications,” Beckstrom told the news conference.
“Of the 1.6 billion Internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” Beckstrom said.
“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the Internet continues to spread.”
He said Internet addresses would no longer use limited “Generic Top-Level Domains” such as .com or .org, and instead use more flexible “Internationalised Domain Names” such as .post or .bank.
Beckstrom said the change would also allow Internet users to type fewer keystrokes to access a website which will “give companies a quicker way to get directly to their customers”.
He said the world would be able to “save roughly 60 to 100 billion human keystrokes a day” by getting rid of keystrokes that are currently needed to find Web addresses ending, for example, in individual country codes.
Thrush said that under the new system, all Web addresses ending .bank would only be available to “authorised” banks.
“Consumer confidence can be greatly enhanced,” he said.
The Seoul meeting will also debate cyber-security threats.
ICANN said in a statement the “threat to the domain name system is always increasing, as the world saw several months ago with the threat from the Conficker worm”.
It said this prompted an unprecedented collaboration between ICANN and top security experts from Microsoft, Symantec and dozens of other companies, software vendors and organisations.
Malicious code such as Conficker can be triggered to steal data or turn control of infected computers over to hackers amassing “zombie” machines for criminal ends.
ICANN, formed in 1998 by the US government, was recently given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the Internet is run.

http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidANA20091026T112400ZIOP73/lok112415091026?weeklynewsletter&zawyaemailmarketing

Domain name ownership rights

In my last post, I talked about the problem facing my company regarding our domain name, basically, some IT guy who worked with our company as IT consultant decided to register our company domain under his name, and now he is black mailing us, asking us to pay him money in order for him to release the domain to us.

This case got me thinking about the latest development in this field, what the law says about domain names? Are they protected by any copy rights? If the company business name is officially registered with the local chamber of commerce or the local court, would that automatically give them the rights over companyname.com domain name?

We all heard in the early ages of the internet about how big corporations would pay millions for domain names; Is there any development on the legal side of this issue?

How can we re-claim our domain name?

I have a legal question concerning the ownership of a domain name.

While back our company setup e-mail accounts and registered its domain name. The person who did the accounts setup and domain registration was an IT consultant who was hired by some of our company’s managers, at that time, no one at the company new much about domain name registrations or about IT in general.

Now when I was trying to setup our company’s website I found out that the IT consultant registered the domain name under his own company name and not our company name. When I contacted the IT consultant and asked him how come he registered the domain name under his own company name and not under ours, he said “no one at your company cared”, and when I asked him to release the domain name to us, he sent me a long bill and said he wont transfer the domain to us unless we pay our bills. Keep in mind he is still hosting our e-mail accounts and we work with very big government agencies and for security and confidentiality, our e-mail accounts must be hosted under our own company name.

My questions are:
1- Are there any laws that regulate these matters?
2- We have proof that we have paid him for his services. Will that bind him to release the domain to us, will the domain reseller take this as a proof that the domain belongs to us?
3- He is hosting our company’s e-mail accounts up to this moment, and we use them daily, will the domain reseller or domain registrar take this as a proof that we are paying this IT consultant and he actually took advantage of our company’s staff members not being IT savvy and registered the ownership of the Domain and the e-mail accounts under his name?
4- The last thing I may add, I have asked this IT consultant “Are you trying to make money out of us by trying to sell to us our own domain name? and his answer was “YES.”