From Lesley Cowley, chief executive at Nominet

Welcome to the October edition of Nominet News. A lot has happened in the Internet industry since the last issue, including a new agreement between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the US Department of Commerce. As ever, this puts Internet Governance at the forefront of our minds, especially as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) fast approaches.

In the run up to the IGF we held a forum known as ‘The road to Athens’ on the 9th October. The event was a great success and presented an opportunity for UK Internet community stakeholders from a range of backgrounds to consider and discuss some of the main themes of the IGF, namely, openness, security and emerging issues. Emily Taylor, our director of legal and policy, has provided an overview of the event in her article.

‘The road to Athens’ also featured a joint presentation from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and NCH, the children’s charity, on combating child abuse images online. As a member of the IWF, we wholeheartedly back the organisation and have details of its ten-year anniversary road show in this issue.

We have been as busy as ever internally at Nominet. Having held our Annual General Meeting on 27 September, Gordon Dick and Fay Howard were re-elected to serve on our Board for a period of two years. We also introduced lower prices for tag changes and registrant transfers, and took industry-leading action to stop ‘domain tasting’. This puts us firmly ahead of many other registries around the world, some of which have yet to tackle this growing problem.

Furthermore, demonstrating commitment to high standards of customer service, we were finalists at the National Customer Service Awards in the ‘customer service team of the year – general companies’ category. This builds on our continued work to reduce processing times and increase customer service levels. In our most recent customer satisfaction surveys we gained impressive index ratings of 85.2% from our registrars and 84.3% from our registrants.

We were also shortlisted for the 2006 CEDR Awards for Excellence in Alternative Dispute Resolution in the ‘business’ category. This underlines the hard work carried out by our Dispute Resolution Service. Nominet was the first Internet registry to offer a resolution service for domain name disputes, enabling companies and individuals to challenge rights of ownership for .uk domain names.

At a more global level we have witnessed the creation of a new top level domain name for mobile devices, .mobi. This has sparked debate about how useful or necessary new suffixes are in comparison to existing ones such as .uk, which we have outlined in a feature article. As with the introduction of the .eu domain name, covered in our last issue, the new suffix is likely to lead to disputes as people realise that their trademarks have been registered by third parties.

Now that the summer is over, we are looking forward to exciting activity throughout autumn. With the upcoming IGF taking place from 30 October to 2 November, there will be plenty of developments in the world of Internet Governance, which we will update you on in our next issue.

This entry was posted in October, 2006.
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