kierenmccarthy.co.uk

I’m in North Carolina for my old friend Jonny Hennessey-Brown’s wedding. I arrived last night, the wedding is tomorrow and I’m best man.
Aside from the usual fear that American TV always gives me (CNN is on as I write this – it’s the least despairing option), I feel oddly relaxed. Must be the fact that [...]

Following some very irritating problems with 123-Reg and its parent company Pipex, which, it turns out stem from the company trying to consolidate and cut costs – I have started shifting my domains to another company.
Who’s the other company? Well, thanks to reader Andrew, it is Heart Internet. Heart Internet is set up by the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Pipex is one of the UK’s biggest Internet companies and it appears to be on a determined route to self-destruction. I have already started shifted my domains and hosting deals.
I’m not a business journalist so I haven’t really bothered to follow Pipex’s business, although they do appear to be going for the bulk mainstream audience [...]

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 [...]

I’ve just made my first official complaint to the BBC over its coverage of Saddam Hussein’s trial verdict this morning.
I was watching News 24 and was appalled to hear the presenters relishing the prospect of Hussein being given the death sentence (he has been), discussing in some detail how he might be killed. They were [...]

The Internet Governance Forum will start on Monday morning but already the debate has started – and it is surrounding freedom of speech online.
There are several reports that the Greek authorities arrested a man for linking – not writing, but linking – to blog posts that had satirised a businessman (possibly a TV evangelist). The [...]

So earlier this week I received not one but two emails offering to sell me back a recently expired domain of mine – back2black.com – for a very reasonable $199.95.
I had decided to let the domain go, and I had never actually put up a site at the domain, so its shows how sophisticated domainers [...]

Nominet held a meeting over the IGF on Monday which has attracted a fair amount of attention, most of it revolving around Nitin Desai’s remarks at the end, picked up by the BBC.
I have grabbed the audio from the meeting and produced a series of MP3 files which you can download and listen to here. [...]