On Wednesday we asked if you had any questions for Rod Beckstrom, the freshly-minted chief executive of internet bigwigs Icann - and one of the architects of the deal announced this week that saw Washington cede control of the organisation.
Though I wasn't sure whether we'd have time to run through your questions, I did get to ask him queries posed by three readers. Here's what he said:
(a quick note: I paraphrased the questions)
Nippon8: Is there a danger that the expansion of domain names (gTLDs) and the move to include international characters in domain names (IDNs) are two issues that are being conflated? Shouldn't there be more emphasis on getting IDNs working?
Rod Beckstrom: The IDN project is moving along very well - it's in the test phase right now and should go before the Icann board in Seoul in October. It's very popular, because everyone sees the benefit: there are plenty of technical and policy hurdles, but everyone agrees. Hopefully it will be rolling out shortly thereafter - we're talking a small number of months.
As for the generic top level domains, there's still a range of opinion. They are a little more complex, because there will never be a solution that suits everyone - we're doing it to create competition, and the people who don't want more competition don't like it. But we are moving forward with an aggressive time frame.
Nevali: What's the benefit of gTLDs? Why doesn't Icann forget about expanding the number of top-level domains and just oversee what the country code administrators are doing?
RB: The owners of those country codes already have the power to do pretty much anything they want. But it's not an answer because if you open up the root, you open up new gTLDs anyway. It's in our mandate to create new top level domains, so we're doing the right thing - but it's a very difficult problem.
EllyD: How is Icann trying to improve the arbitration process for victims of domain theft?
RB: We are proposing a new mechanism - uniform rapid suspension. There is a proposal and we're deliberating it.
