kierenmccarthy.co.uk

Well, Stuart Lawley won’t take no for any answer and .xxx has popped up on the ICANN agenda again, this time with such extraordinary controls and safeguards that it makes you wonder whether the business case is still there.
Contrary to common belief, the .xxx domain was never ruled out. In fact, because it had been [...]

I took place in a discussion with various notables just before Xmas for an edition of the BBC’s Digital Planet radio programme and just remembered it has now come out and you can download and listen to it from its website (although I will also stick it below for ease).
The discussion was on two things: [...]

I was surprised to find this morning when reviewing stats for my Sexdotcom.info site that a site called Skweezer.net has appeared.
I was even more surprised when I followed links through and found that this website has grabbed a large chunk of the content on my site and stored it on its own servers. This [...]

Some greater force has prevented me from doing any work today. And so this blog post is an attempt to at least do *something* constructive today. I am half expecting my laptop to blow up just before I hit “Publish”. One of those days.
Talking of blogs, I had a tour round the blogs I have [...]

On Friday, the ICANN Board approved some controversial renewal contracts for the .biz, .info and .org top-level Internet domains.
In a press conference a few hours later, chairman Vint Cerf urged the reporters to read the transcript of the discussion. That transcript isn’t up yet but I figured that Cerf was right about listening to [...]

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently building and running online participation websites – or, in English, trying to get people on the Internet learning about and interacting with physical meetings.
Both have been for Internet organisations, which should theoretically make things easier. The first was the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens in early [...]

So I was asked by ICANN’s “executive officer and vice president for corporate affairs” Paul Levins to do an online participation website for its meeting in São Paulo, starting officially on Monday.
Paul was at the IGF in Athens last month and saw the site that Jeremy and I had done for the IGF in order [...]

I am very tired so I have had to check what the new dotcom agreement – amended and then approved late yesterday by the US government’s Department of Commerce – actually says several times before I believed it.
Even now, I’m not so sure I have got it right. Which is worrying because I’ve just written [...]

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had an article on IDNs in The Guardian: “How engineers tamed the internet’s Tower of Babel“, which was basically an attempt to explain one of the other sides of the Internationalised Domain Names by referring to Patrik Fältström’s comment at the IGF that the technical side of things [...]

Monday 20 November 2006 will go down as one of those days in which I was prevented from doing anything useful through the necessity of doing a whole number of utterly forgettable mundane jobs.
Somehow today I missed the opportunity to meet and interview some of the big names in this new fabled Web2.0, plus failed [...]