After much worrying, talking, arguing and hesitating, ICANN has gone and done the right thing. Despite certain security concerns from participants from countries like the United States or the UK, the Nairobi meeting is on.

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom confirmed Nairobi after Friday's special meeting of the ICANN Board, convened specifically to discuss the situation.

"We recognize that many developing country cities have higher ambient levels of street crime and much of the world (the U.S. and Europe included) faces international terrorist threats and attacks," Beckstrom explained after the meeting. "Both are simply facts of life."

It's good to see some measure of common sense returning to this Nairobi debate. Yes there are risks, risks are everywhere. But ICANN is a global organisation and as a member of that organisation, I would rather not see it slap Kenya or any other country in the face by snubbing it (this would have been the second time for Kenya, a fact which would have understandably irked the Kenyans).

"Given that ICANN is committed to "One world. One Internet. Everyone connected." we have engaged and will continue to engage with the whole world," concludes Rod Beckstrom.

I couldn't agree more.

Although unconfirmed at this stage, the ICANN grapevine has been buzzing the last few days with the news that ICANN's Vice President for policy development Denise Michel was about to be replaced.

Former Manager of public participation Kieren McCarthy has just confirmed the news on his personal blog with a scathing piece. "Of the hundreds of people I have worked with, some of them very difficult, I have only truly disliked two," writes Kieren, before going on to explain that Denise was one of them and that she "infected the whole work environment with destructive and negative behaviour."

Since becoming a GNSO Councillor, the GNSO being responsible for setting policy for the generic namespace, I have obviously worked with Denise on several occasions, but never closely enough to know whether Kieren's words are an exaggeration or not. 

But I did work closely with Kieren on several projects within ICANN. I know him to be an extremely fair and honest person that will always tell it like it really is. So if he thinks that "when, in six months’ time, everyone is much happier about the process used to decide vital policies for the global Internet, you will be able to track it back to this day," adding "the Internet has become a better place today" I tend to trust his judgment.

Kieren names David Olive as Denise Michel's replacement and the new person in charge of what is one of ICANN's key departments.

What's going on in China? After taking everyone totally by surprise when they closed .CN to individuals on December 14, 2009, the Chinese authorities then went one step further and announced that, starting January 6, 2010, non-Chinese registrars would be barred from registering new names.

What brought this on? The new rules are a complete turnaround in policy from the laissez-faire attitude exhibited by the Chinese government and enacted by the national registry CNNIC ever since .CN was opened up as a top level domain on March 17, 2003. From that point on (previously the Chinese namespace was only open at the 3rd level, e.g. .COM.CN), China has seemingly had but one goal: amass as many .CN registrations as possible. And when the 14th million .CN domain was registered during 2009, the Chinese TLD became the world's most prolific country code.

Then came chaos. China claims the new ultra-restrictive registration rules are to limit the "authenticity, accuracy, and integrity" of its namespace. Chinese netizens have even been encouraged by the authorities to report offending websites and the domain names behind them.

However the new rules look more like a kneejerk reaction than anything carefully planned. After China's initial announcement, no-one at CNNIC or elsewhere seemed to know exactly who could register what. Not a day has gone by since during which accredited .CN registrars like INDOM haven't heard contradictory reports of what they can and can't do.

Last week, it finally seemed clear that only registered entities such as companies would now be eligible for a .CN domain and that foreign registrars could no longer register new names but could continue to manage their existing names.

Then, just as the dust finally seemed to be settling, I chanced upon this little gem. It would now seem that CNNIC has reversed the rules and will allow individuals to register domains after all. (Although INDOM's registry liaison team has been unable to confirm this and no official announcement has been made by CNNIC). "If we stop individuals obtaining domain names, they will register abroad or fake themselves as company applicants anyway," a director at CNNIC is quoted as saying, as if no-one could have thought of that 3 weeks ago…

Someone hand me that bottle of aspirin, please!

Now here's a good idea. This site gives a list of new gTLD initiatives that are known to exist. You get the TLD itself, plus related web Facebook and Twitter pages. Not all the entries in this list are up to date, but in the fast moving world of new TLDs, that's hardly surprising and certainly not a major problem.

Came across this weird domain name google.aero, which doesn't belong to Google and points to a rather farcical web page. I just have 2 questions. Why isn't Google doing anything about this? And what's the owner of this domain playing at, risking the big G's wrath by registering a Google domain and then using it for… nothing much really?