Industry News Summary – Week 11

Recent domain name news from the last week:

Dotcom turned 25 on Monday

Twenty five years ago last monday, the first dotcom name was registered by Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1985, a further five companies jumped on the dotcom bandwagon, which travelled at a snail’s pace – it took 12 years for the one millionth dotcom domain name to be registered.

This was largely because the web wasn’t popularised until Netscape’s Mosaic web browser was introduced in April 1993. Today, more than 668,000 dotcom domains are registered each month and it’s fair to say they’ve become a massive part of our daily lives.  Read full article here

Police propose Fort Knox Internet domains

Police proposals to prevent criminals from running shady websites will force anyone applying for a web address to follow security procedures similar to those used by banks.

The proposals will require Internet domain name registries to become strict in their collection and validation of names and addresses used by people registering websites. They will force a tricky high level debate at ICANN, the global body responsible for web addresses, where the cyber police lobby will come head to head with internet traditionalists, democracy campaigners and freedom of speech advocates who believe the police are challenging the founding principles of the web.  Read full article here

Canon set to buy .canon domain name

Canon has announced that it plans to be one of the world’s first companies to have a personalised top-level domain name.

At the moment internet users can find the Canon web site at Canon.com but eventually this will change to Canon.canon, once the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which maintains and regulates the internet’s addressing system, finally begins taking registrations.  Read full article here