North Atlantic Treaty Organization

United Nations, ITU, IMF, NATO and others ask for special protection in new gTLDs

by Kieren McCarthy | 14 Dec 2011 |

The United Nations, ITU, IMF, NATO, OECD and 23 other international organizations have requested special protection in next year's expansion of the Internet.

In a letter send to the organization overseeing the expansion, ICANN, the lawyers of the international organizations, which also include the World Health Organization (WHO), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and World Trade Organization (WTO), argue that special exemption rules agreed to earlier this year for the Red Cross and Olympic Committee should be extended to them.

They propose that their names and related acronyms be subject to a "targeted exclusion of third party registrations" at both the top and second-level of the domain name system i.e. neither www.nato.example or www.example.nato would be allowed.

Internet principle hype: how softlaw is used to regulate the Internet [full article]

by Wolfgang Kleinw... | 25 Jul 2011 |

No government took note when Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva published a short summary of his WorldWideWeb project on the alt.hypertext-newsgroup on 6 August 1991. The world was busy with the end of the cold war and the Internet was widely ignored by political leaders.

Twenty years later, more and more governments are struggling how to get the consequences of Berners-Lee invention under control. The year 2011 could go into the Internet history books as the year of "Governments for Internet Principles".

The Internet has climbed up the ladder of political priorities and has now even reached the G8. When the leaders of eight powerful nations - Obama for the USA, Medvedev for Russia, Sarkozy for France, Merkel for Germany, Cameron for the UK, Berlusconi for Italy, Harper for Canada, Kan for Japan and Baroso for the EU - came together in the French sea-resort Deauville at the end of May 2011, Internet Policy was a top issue on their agenda.