Author: Kieren McCarthy

Kieren McCarthy is an acknowledged authority on the Internet and Internet governance. He has written extensively about both for a wide range of national and international newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, The Sunday Times, New Scientist, The Register, PC Week, Techworld, and others.

An engineer by training, Kieren has spent more than 10 years as an IT journalist and has, at some point interviewed, just about everybody in the Internet industry. The official blogger for both the inaugural Internet Governance Forum and an OECD conference on the Participative Web, and author of the book Sex.com, he was also ICANN’s General Manager of Public Participation, tasked with coordinating communication between the organization and Internet users for three years.

He is CEO of .Nxt. Inc, and created both the company and the conference to provide a space for positive information-sharing about the future of the Internet's infrastructure.

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Column
3 April 2013
Stumbling in the wrong direction

ICANN needs to get back to its technical mission before it does real damage to the Internet

It wasn't that long ago - in the days before new gTLDs took up every waking moment of its life - that the most frequent concern expressed about ICANN was "mission creep".

ICANN was set up to administrate the Internet's naming and numbering system, but continually found itself unwillingly pulled into other issues from trademark protection to market regulation, to privacy and legal enforcement concerns.

Story
8 March 2013
Olympus joins brand TLD exodus

Camera maker follows Heinz and General Motors

Camera maker Olympus has become the latest household name to withdraw from the new gTLD process, pulling its only application for dot-olympus.

Olympus joins Heinz and General Motors in pulling out completely from plans to add over a thousand new Internet extensions in the next year, with the first due to be approved by the end of next month.
Story
4 March 2013
WhatBox? chooses auctioneer for dot-menu domains

Announcement marks start of a busy year and changing industry

WhatBox? has announced it will use a joint collaboration of NameJet and Afternic to auction domain names under its dot-menu gTLD.

The announcement marks what will soon be an explosion in efforts to sell "premium" domain names to the highest bidder as well as encourage large businesses to register domains under certain extensions.
Story
28 February 2013
Living in a talk-shop bubble

How the MAG is undermining the IGF's credibility

Despite increasing relevance in the uncertain post-WCIT world, the advisory group to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) remains incapable of fixing long-identified problems and is undermining its credibility.

Story
27 February 2013
Atallah responds to industry anger over ICANN contract changes

If you have a better solution to the issue, let's hear it


Atallah: Surprised at the strong reaction to suggested contract changes.

ICANN COO Akram Atallah has responded to a wave of angry responses from the DNS industry over proposed changes to new registry contracts by asking it to "step up to the plate" and provide solutions to real problems.

Over 30 responses arrived on the last day of a public comment period on the revised contract, most of them highly critical. Key groups within the organization accused the organization of imposing top-down solutions, that the proposal contained "serious and fundamental flaws" and the revisions amounted to "nothing more than a power grab by ICANN staff".
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