Managing Critical Internet Resources
________________________________________________________________________
REAL TIME TRANSCRIPT: Managing Critical Internet Resources
Hong Kong IGF
14:15-16:15, Friday 18 June 2010
Hong Kong
DISCLAIMER: Due to the inherent difficulties in capturing a live
speaker’s words, it is possible this realtime transcript may
contain errors and mistranslations. An edited version of the
realtime transcript which amends the inherent errors, will
be posted later. LLOYD MICHAUX and APrIGF accept no
liability for any event or action resulting from the
contents of this transcript.
________________________________________________________________________
>> : Welcome back.
Before the start of the session, may I invite you to
fill in the feedback form for us, which you may find on
your seats.
If you do not have one, please ask from our
volunteers.
If you finish the form, please return to the
registration counter.
Thank you.
This session is about managing critical internet
resources. May I now invite Mr Jonathan share, Chief
Executive Officer, of the Hong Kong internet
registration, Hong Kong corporation Ltd, to start the
session for us.
>> Jonathan Shea: Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome back
to the conference.
I’m happy to announce that this is the last session
of these two day conference.
Of course, as the last session, we are still looking
for participation and more engagement with you, with our
audience.
Without further ado, I will just get our session
started.
Just some logistics, just some administrative
matters that I have to remind all of you about.
Firstly, remote participation is available for
video, for presentation and for on-line chat.
For those who are going to join remotely, you can go
onto the website webcast.rigf.asia.
Also, at the end of our presentation, we welcome
questions from the floor. If you have any questions,
you can just firstly raise your hand and someone,
a helper, will bring the microphone to you.
Also, when you start asking questions, we would
appreciate that you first state your name, so that the
transcription can take record of your name, so that we
have a complete record of the discussion.
Also, just like all the other sessions, earlier on,
we welcome questioning in English, Cantonese and
Putonghua.
Feel free to use any one of those three languages
that you are most comfortable with. We have instant
translation among these three languages.
The topic of our session is managing critical
internet resources.
Just to set the scene and to set the context right,
by critical internet resources, we mean those unique
identifiers or numbers that are essential for the good
operation of the internet.
The topic by itself has quite technical substance in
it.
But in the spirit of the forum, we just want to let
the internet users know and have better understanding of
those critical resources and see how these resources
relate to use of the internet.
In particular, we talk about, in terms of resources,
mainly two things. The first one is called domain
names. The second resource is IP address. They are
very closely related. When you surf on the web or when
I you are answering or reading an email, actually the IP
address and the domain names are closely sort of
cooperating with each other, to ensure that the whole
thing works, the connection works, and your application
can work very well on the internet.
I have to say, this is the first Internet Governance
Forum in Hong Kong. If you have been to the other
Internet Governance Forums before, the global one,
actually, they talk about quite different things
compared with what we are going to talk about today.
They really talk about the management, the global
allocation of these resources.
But in our case, we are trying to do it a little bit
differently.
As the first conference or as the first Internet
Governance Forum, we want to firstly introduce what we
are talking about, in terms of domain names and IP
address and to flesh out the relationship with users,
with your day-to-day use of the internet.
Then we will explore the area of interest that maybe
our Hong Kong users have, in relation to those domain
names and IP addresses.
Therefore, our presentation today will be more of an
introductory nature and to relate the use of these
resources to aspects, which are more prevalent to the
use of the internet.
Now may I introduce our panel today, on our
left-hand size, the first one is Stephen Lai. Stephen
hay more than 10 years of experience in digital
publication industry and he’s also very experienced in
digital marketing and campaigns and he has helped
a number of regional and international companies with
their digital marketing strategies and campaigns.
At this point this time, Stephen is working for
Melbourne IT, in particular in relation to corporate
domain management, new gTLD consulting, as well as brand
promotion matters.
Then we have also Ms. Zhang Jian. Zhang is the
General Manager of APTLD, Asia Pacific Top Level Domain
Association. Before joining APTLD, Zhang is the
director of international business with Chinese Internet
Network Information Centre.
As director of international business, Zhang has
been quite instrumental in restructuring the partnership
arrangement with all the stakeholders in the industry.
She’s also the key driver for the development and
implementation of internationalised domain name for the
country code top level domain. Especially her effort
has been more on the introduction of non-English domain
name at the top level,.
In addition to her role with APTLD, she is also
sitting on the board or the council of Asian Pacific
internet information centre, APNIC.
She is also a council member of the CCNSO, the
country codename support organisation of ICANN.
Further to the left is Mr Christopher To.
Christopher is now the executive direction of
construction industry council in Hong Kong. Christopher
is also an expert and a long time advocator of dispute
resolution and arbitration.
Also, Christopher has voluntary role in quite
a number of associations, such as Inter-Pacific Bar
Association, as well as Hong Kong International
Arbitration Centre.
Also, Christopher is our ex-chairman. He’s the
exchairman of Hong Kong Internet Registration
Corporation.
Christopher has a lot of experience in terms of
dispute resolution and arbitration with domain names and
he is also an exmember of ICANN.
The last one on our left, maybe I don’t have to
introduce him for too long, Mr Edmon Chung. If you are
around for the last four days, you will see him quite
often.
Edmon is the Chief Executive Officer of DotAsia
Organisation.
I first met Edmon in 2001 or 2002, when I first
started my role in the Hong Kong Internet Registration
Corporation, looking at the .hk domain registration.
When we first met, we talk about exactly .asia.
That was already nine years ago. Now we are very happy
to see that .asia is now legal up and running for a few
years with big success. In addition to being a founder
for the DotAsia top level domain, Edmon has a lot of
contribution to internationalised domain name as well.
He holds some patents in relation to the
internationalised domain name, as well as non-English
email addresses.
Without going into a lot of the detail, Edmon also
has some other awards in relation to his invention and
also his effort in founding the company Neteka. That is
a company providing registration systems software a .
That was cooperation with the university of Toronto.
Maybe I should stop here and let me firstly
introduce the subject matter of domain name and IP
address.
I will try to go quickly, because some of you may
have known about this already.
IP address is very simple. It just like the
telephone network. Every telephone, you need a number,
so that the telephone, individual phone lines and mobile
can be uniquely identified.
IP address is serving the same purpose.
Every computer on the internet has an IP address, so
that you can locate exactly which computer you want to
talk to.
But, of course, I am simplifying the whole matter
quite a lot. We are talking about also services,
protocols and things like that.
But unlike telephone number, which we are quite used
to, we have eight digits in our number starting for 9
for mobile, starting with 2 for direct line.
IP address is a lot more or is more complicated.
With what we call the IPV4, the IP version 4, the IP
address is actually four 8 bit numbers separated by
dots. You may ask why the technical people did that,
why did they design it in this way.
It’s because I guess with the dots, you can separate
the whole network into certain hierarchies, so that you
can have a hierarchical structure in the network, so
that it can be better managed.
But of course, there are some other reasons why they
firstly invented the IP address in such a way.
It has been introduced since the internet was
invented back in the 1970s.
Everyone though the initial number of addresses is
quite large, I mean the initially you can perceive that
with 32 bit number, the space is actually quite large.
But after all these years, you know, some of the
organisations have actually got themselves, reserved
some ranges of IP addresses and also new companies and
new organisations start taking their own IP addresses,
according to APNIC, the whole IPV4 address space will be
allocated probably by 2011.
What that means is that after the whole address
space has been allocated, then we will be left with no
more there to be available for allocation.
But I should apologise at this juncture, because we
have one more speaker which is not sitting, who is not
sitting here.
He’s Sanjay from APNIC in Brisbane and he’s going to
present remotely. I just want to make sure that Sanjay
is on-line. Sanjay, can you hear us?
>> Sanjay: Yes, Jonathan. Thank you.
>> Jonathan Shea: Let me apologise to you. I should have
mentioned you as well.
>> Sanjay: That’s not a problem. I’m invisible anyway.
>> Jonathan Shea: Thank you. Anyway, let’s go back to the
slide.
I will let Sanjay talk more about the IP, what is
IPV6 and how would that solve the problem and why is
that so urgent for us to change.
I will also let Sanjay talk about that part, but
I just want to point out that there is actually
a mechanism, a global mechanism, whereby these addresses
are being allocated right from the top to the different
end users.
We have ICANN and then there are regional internet
registries which are given blocks of the IP addresses
and you will imagine these blocks will be subdivided
into smaller blocks, given to national internet registry
and then to the local internet registry and then to the
end user.
This is just to give you an idea, that how we manage
the distribution of these addresses globally, right from
the ICANN, where this is all centrally managed and then
regional, national to the local level.
I will skip this one and let Sanjay talk more about
IPV6.
Domain name is actually something coming hand in
hand with IP address.
While we may still be able to remember our friends
telephone number, it’s getting more and more difficult
now. We rely on the phone book. We rely on the address
detail on our mobile phone.
It’s actually the same problem with the internet.
If all the websites are only coming with their IP
addresses, how can we remember so many of them?
Therefore, back in the 1980s, two genius in the
internet industry, invented the domain name system.
In a nutshell, what we do here is just to assign
alphanumeric string, a name, to an IP address.
So that will help us remember and the service or the
computer or the website much more easily and also the
website will have their own identity and you know
straightaway which company manages the website,
et cetera.
So it’s just a mapping from a number to a text
string, so that it is easier for people to remember.
Of course, therefore, the main use of the domain
name will be for naming of websites and also email
addresses.
Therefore, as you can see, on this diagram, you can
see the IP address for twitter.com, for some of the
famous websites, for example, Facebook, their IP
addresses are very hard to remember, but with the domain
name facebook.com or twitter.com, things are much more
easier for users.
Right from the beginning, domain names are
classified into two major types. The terms are pretty
cryptic, but it’s not hard to understand.
There are two types. Generic top level domain and
the country code top level domain.
You can guess from the name, top level means the
suffice, the part of the name which is to the right, the
right most part of the name.
You can also see domain name is separated by dots,
so that you can put a hierarchy, a tree structure, for
the whole thing.
For the top level domain, we have a generic top
level domain and this is .com representing company or
commercial. Also, we have .org for organisation and .ed
for educational institution.
But there are also some of those not many people
have heard of, for example, .museum, .aero for the
aeroplane or airline industry. Also, maybe more famous
one is .asia, which is also one of the generic top level
domains.
Edmon is doing to explain to you an initiative from
ICANN to open up this space, so that more people can
register their top level domain name later on.
Another type of top level domain is country code and
the numbers are much more than the generic one, because
these are used for representing countries or economies.
There are about 250 something country code top level
domains and they are two characters long. If it is in
English. Therefore, we are talking about because
different country are using different languages, in
order to narrow the digital divide for all the different
countries, we are advocating very hard for
internationalised domain name. Zhang will talk about
development, especially the Chinese domain name.
Similar to IP address, for domain name, there is
a global mechanism to allocate or to firstly create the
new names and also to allocate the names, so that we
know which organisation is responsible for administering
which top level domain.
In terms of numbers, we have something like
110 million registration of gTLDs and about 76 million
registrations of ccTLDs.
Actually, in the past two years, the ccTLDs are
catching up pretty quickly. It used to be a minority
and as you can understand, most people register.com,
because it is the one most well known to the users.
But the numbers are much more closer these days, but
as you can see, the generic top level domains are still
the majority and maybe with the creation of more top
level generic domain, this number may go up much quicker
than now.
As you can see, this slide is just to show you the
distribution among the major gTLDs. As you can see,
.com is still the majority, followed by .org.
The very first .com domain name registered is was
symbolic.com. Probably registered by an academic
institution.
Just going back to Hong Kong, this is to give you an
understanding, an idea of how many names are there with
the .hk suffix, HK being Hong Kong. At the moment, we
have 188,000 registered names in Hong Kong. As you can
see, under .hk, we also allow different categories, like
.com.hk for companies, .edu.hk for educational
institutions. As you can see here, we also have Chinese
counterpart of the English categories as well.
As you can see, you can imagine, domain names also
have, it’s a good business for some entrepreneurs. Here
you can see some are already being traded or sold with
quite big monetary amount.
We just list out five of the most popular .com names
we have ever seen, have been sold at a pretty high
price.
I think this is just a quick introduction. I will
let our panel speakers talk about the individual topics
in more detail.
The first topic that we will go into is cyber
spotting and domain name scam.
I pass the floor to Stephen Lai.
>> Stephen Lai: Thanks very much. Again, like Jonathan
said, thanks very much for staying in the last session
today, over the next 10 minutes or so, I’m going to talk
to you about cyber scatters and domain scams.
Before I go on, I want to ask you guys, how many of
you guys have seen on the newspapers or on the telly
that some company or some organisation has been
hijacked, their domain names have been hijacked by some
company and they had to pay lots of money back for it?
Anyone?
So quite a lot. The rest of you are quite shy.
You have an idea what cyber squatters do. The thing
I was making there, it applies to everybody. It’s not
just for corporations. It could be any organisation.
It could be a school, it could be an NGO, it could be
government and certainly obviously it could be
corporations,.
I’m going to go through three things, talk to you
about what cyber squatters are, how do they actually
make money, why do they do it. I’m going to give you
a quick case study of a case that we did and how we got
a domain name back and it’s a classic example of cyber
squatting. Take you through domain scams and if any of
you are in charge of your domain name, I’m going to take
you through some best practices that you should take to
safeguard against this.
What is cyber squatting?
I have written here it’s the registration of domain
names containing another person or company’s brand or
trade mark in bad faith.
There’s some examples below here. Quite common one
is missing the dot, so you get melbourneit.com. You get
a lot of people who do that, because of typing errors,
it’s fairly typical.
Misspelling of an intended site, also known as typo
squatting. You have nationolexpress.com. There is
a bus company in the UK called National Express. They
run buses and these guys have — in fact, this is a case
we also did. We got the domain name back for them.
Someone registered that and they were doing all sorts of
things with that domain.
Differently phrased name, so you have
legogiraffe.com. That’s another example of cyber
squatting.
Because as Jonathan said, it’s loads of domain
extensions out there, you don’t just buy .com. If you
buy .com, somebody else could buy your name for .org,
for example.
Usually what it means is usually the guys, the cyber
squatters are usually asking for prices far greater than
they purchase it. So they would buy these names on any
registrar for anything between 10 to US$20 and they
would literally ask the brand owners to buy it back for
thousands of dollars.
That’s one way of how they make their money.
Some brands go for it, because it saves them a lot
of time. They think I will pay this guy off now, get
the name back and it saves them hassle. That’s not best
practice.
Some people have personal vendetta against certain
brands and they would literally buy domain names cyber
squat their domain names and use it to smear that brand
with inappropriate material.
When you have spare time, you could type in I hat
and then choose some top brand. Not all of them would
happen, but you will find one or two, where some people
have something really personal against these guys and
they will write all sorts of stuff about them. Of
course, that is that is no good.
That might be for personal reason.
Other cyber squatters, what they simply do is they
simply have, they buy a domain name and use it as a pay
per click site. For those of you who don’t know what
that is, it’s a page where you get paid if they click on
an adverse on your page.
They could target a clothing store a high-end brand
clothing shop and when the person goes in, you they see
all sorts of links about clothing, they click on those,
whoever has that domain gets money as it happens.
The other one is feeding off the brand recognition.
They make the domain look quite similar to the actual
brand itself and their business sells something quite
similar.
As you can see, most cyber squatters do it for one
reason. It’s to make money.
In fact, according to the coalition against domain
name abuse, this practice costs the industry a billion
dollars US a year. That’s a big industry.
It’s very harmful, not just from the brand abuse
side, but people lose traffic. If you are an NGO,
people cyber squatting your name, they could be coming
up all sorts of stuff, your reputation could go, people
getting diverted away from your own site, so all these
things add up and roughly about a billion dollars.
It’s a billion dollar industry, so obviously these
cyber squatters are very keen to be very proactive. But
they also very patient. They also pray on brand owners.
Some of you may not know this, but when you buy
a domain name on-line or with a registrar from the
corporate side, you only ever leasing your name. Most
of you buy it for one year, I think some you could buy
up to five or eight years. But at the end of the day,
at some point, your lease runs out and you have to
reregister.
Lots of trade mark owners forget to renew or
reregister their names, for whatever reason. They have
too many domain names. I know companies who have over
5,000 domain names in their portfolio and some poor guy
is trying to manage all this.
It’s very hard to renew everything. So cyber
squatters know that and as soon as the name has lapsed,
they would literally go in and buy that domain name and
use all the practices I mentioned before in order to try
and get some, start some money from the brand owner.
This is a case study, which I I have chosen this
because I think it’s quite fun and it’s relevant to all
the cyber squatting tactics I have just shown you inch
it’s a case that we did at the world intellectual
property organisation, at the arbitration and media
centre. It is lego and world internet authority. The
world internet authority is not in this particular case
is not — it sounds very impressive, but it’s a company
run in Australia and there’s no such thing as world
internet authority. The guys who run the internet are
ICANN, which I think other speakers will talk about
later.
The domain names in reason are variations of lego,
germanlego, legogiraffe.
Basically, what happened in this particular case was
those of you guys who are familiar with Lego, the toy,
is they do all these wonderful things where they build
giant Lego statues outside their offices or they have
Lego parks and it is quite a spectacle. What Lego did
one year was build this hugegiraffe over their Berlin
office and the tail alone used up 15,000 Lego bricks to
build.
So what was quite funny was a lot of tourists kept
on Nicking it, taking the tail off and taking it home,
so Thomson Reuters picked this up, thought it was quite
funny, reported it, but it got confused. They made
a mistake. Instead of saying it was agiraffe’s tail,
reported that it was thegiraffe’s pea nis.
So obviously, that created a lot of media attention
and this was reported in August 25 and on the same day,
world internet authority bought those four domain names,
germanlego, et cetera.
Who happens when people went on to that website,
instead of going to a Lego site, it went straight to
this site where it just says world internet authority
and it has a donate button and a number of credit card
signs in there.
By doing that, obviously they were hoping to get
some commercial gain out of this at the expense of Lego.
Lego obviously contacted these guys and said, look,
what are you doing? Do you mind giving the domain names
back and as you could imagine, they said no, so they
went to the Arbitration Centre.
Lego’s position is that as I mentioned before, right
at the I beginning, cyber squatting is when you take
somebody else’s name, so Lego’s position was that the
world internet authority holds no registered or other
trade marks or trade names that incorporate the word
lego, so the registration of the domain containing
another person’s company brand or trade mark, so that’s
clearly a reason for, theory for cyber squatting, and
also by having the inclusion of a donate button, WIA
were clearly looking for commercial gain.
Again, you could argue that Lego argued that that
was done in bad faith, using their name.
No surprises there. The panel of arbitrators
decided that these domain names had to go back to Lego.
Moving on, still in the same area, but it’s more
domain scams. Again, how many of you guys have had
emails from people saying we have so and so domain name.
Do you want to buy it? This certain domain name is
about to be bought by some company, would you like to
have what? I think we have all seen it or at least you
have heard of it.
Typically, you get a call from somebody telling you
that, about these names.
What the scammers are really trying to do is to
scare organisations into believing that certain domain
extensions are so important to them that they have to
spend X thousands of dollars to buy these names back.
The reason they get away with it is because lots of
organisations don’t have a strategy, they don’t have
a plan to deal with it, because they think domain names
are not very important. They are cheap, no one looks
after it, so there’s no plan for it.
By not having a plan and suddenly someone throws
that at you, the person begins to think and a lot of the
times, people part, a lot of companies part with the
money.
But the reality is, as you saw from Jonathan’s
slides, for each name, you could potentially have nearly
1,000 extensions for each domain name you buy, each
brand that you register.
It is completely unrealistic to buy them all anyway,
even for the bigger brands.
Never mind NGOs or SMEs, the huge brands it’s not
realistic for them to buy every single domain, because
it simply cost too much in their own budgets.
The best practice, what we always advise is check
out what domain names are important to you, have
a strategy so you know what you’re doing and so when you
come up with these, when you see these scams, you know
exactly what to do with it.
Sometimes, the sad reality is, you cannot stop
people from buying these names.
There’s no way you could stop that.
But what you can do is to know straightaway what you
have to do.
So if somebody did buy a domain name that you really
did want, you don’t have to buy it back, you could go
and speak to your registrar and see what’s going on, see
if there’s anything you could do about it, seek some
advice straightaway. If somebody has offered you a do
you main extension that you do not need, you could
simply ignore them.
Another really helpful tip that we advise as well is
to keep in touch with what’s going on, because the guys
who own the domains, the NGOs or corporations, they
often trade mark their names and being a trade mark
owner has lots of advantages, when new domain extensions
come out.
Typically, when a new domain name extension comes
out, a trade mark owner has a period of time where they
get the first right to actually buy that name.
But to be fair, I don’t think this practice is
promoted that well, because I know many trade mark
owners don’t know about this or they never get told
about this. So that’s why it’s really good for you guys
to keep in touch on what’s going on. You could look up
on the internet, it will tell you all sorts of stuff,
what’s going on. Go to ICANN website. All the
registrars will tell you what’s going on.
So it’s good to know what’s going on in the
industry, if you’re in that field.
Why should anyone care?
If you own a brand or own a trade mark or you are in
charge of your reputation, your organisation, you should
choir, because every time cyber squatter does something
against your organisation, your brand value, reputation
and trust absolutely decreases.
You will be all over the papers, the individual will
not be very happy and all those years you have built up
your reputation could be gone within a matter of weeks.
>From a commercial point of view, if you’re
a corporation, your website traffic will go down. If
you are trading on line, your revenue will go down. So
that’s why you should care.
I think this last couple of slides now. I think
it’s really important to establish and defend your brand
and one of the things that a lot of organisations can do
is they can manage their portfolio of domain names.
By doing that, you take away the risk of ever
missing out on a renewal and you should also give any
impartial — get any impartial advice from a good
service provider.
A good registrar should provide you with an account
manager who gives you good advice on what you should be
doing.
As I mentioned before, formulate a domain name
policy. Also, monitor some key brands or names that you
really want to keep.
It might not be relevant to you now, but for
whatever reason, if you decide to do something in any
particular country or change to attract a different
demographic, it might become relevant to you later.
For any potential, you probably do want to monitor
these things.
There are again service providers out there that
could help you.
You have done all the formulation of strategy, but
the other thing about the internet and domain nameses,
things happen very quickly. Things happen so quickly
you also have to react quickly.
By having done all your strategy, you have to
formulate a plan, perhaps in particular with your domain
names, it’s a good idea to put each different situation
into different categories, so here we typically advise
high risk, medium risk and low risk. Obviously low
risk, you don’t need to do anything. Medium risk is
something that perhaps I mention you might want to
monitor and high risk is something that you parole want
to action straightaway.
I think best practice at the bottom there. I think
the point of that is worth spending that extra bit of
time formulating a strategy like this and when you do
see things happen, you can react very quickly, rather
than not having a strategy at all an when things happen,
you take a lot longer to react to a situation.
This is definitely the last slide.
I just want to again leave you with some best
practices. I have mentioned some of these before, so
we’ll go through this very quickly.
The first thing is, understand your own
organisation. Because if you don’t understand your own
organisation, you have no chance of defending your name.
You need to know what key words are important to
you, what key domain names are important to you.
Once you have that, your life will be a lot easier.
Get your things trade marked. Lots of law firms
advise on this. You do get privileges if you have
a trade mark, as you said, you get the first — you
often get a first go with new domain extensions.
Understand your intellectual property rights.
Some people, I have spoken to when they — in fact,
they actually in-house lawyers. I have spoken to. They
didn’t think they could do anything about cyber
squatting. This is a lot of lack of understanding of
the intellectual property rights. If you have any
problems with this, you could speak to — there are
loads of organisations out there, professional
organisations like lots of law firms with specialised
and intellectual property, they will be more than happy
to give you some impartial advice on your IP rights on
the internet.
Renew your domain names, monitor your key words, as
I said, formulate a strategy, implement that policy of
the risks and Lastly, once you have done all that hard
work, when something happens, please act quickly. That
may, if we all did you, you really can chip away at the
cyber squatters.
I leave you with that. Thank you very much.
>> Jonathan Shea: We have a slight change in the order of
speakers here, compared with the conference programme.
We have made a small change. We’ll introduce Zhang
Jian, who will talk about Chinese domain name.
>> Zhang Jian: El hello everybody. Since I’m going to talk
about Chinese domain names, so I really should talk
about it in Chinese, but until beginning of this
session, I don’t know I have that option. So my slides
are actually written in English. I’m still going to
talk about it in English.
Chinese domain name, do we need it?
Actually, I’m going to give you some reasons why we
need it today.
First, I’m going to talk about a little bit the
status of internet in China. Then I’m going to talk
about the advantage of Chinese domain name and the value
of Chinese domain name.
The last, I’m going to introduce the current status
of Chinese domain name.
Actually, this chart shows the development of China
internet. From the chart, you can tell, by the end of
2009, the number of internet users in mainland China
reached 384 million.
Also, the penetration rate has reached
28.9 per cent.
That’s a little bit above the world average, but
lower than penetration rate in Hong Kong.
Because we have the biggest population in the world,
you could imagine we still have 900 million potential
internet users in China.
How to get the rest of that 900 million people to
get on-line. That’s quite a challenge for China.
Of course, we could build more infrastructure to
provide more service and to give more education to the
people, to help them to get on-line.
But one thing I think definitely will be helpful is
to use Chinese, to use our native language, to be able
to use the native language I think definitely is going
to be some effort we could make to lower the language
barrier to get the people on-line.
Because the rest of that 900 million people actually
is less — usually is less educated and with less
English skill. So definitely that’s going to be helpful
if we could use our native language.
This chart shows some survey result of users surfing
habit in China.
>From the chart, you can see, like 75 per cent of
internet user in China access Chinese content website
only.
For English content website only is only 2 per cent.
Access both Chinese and English content website,
that percentage is like 23 per cent.
You could tell most people, most internet users,
access only Chinese content website.
This shows the trend of China’s on-line commercial,
from 2007 to 2013.
Currently, for the year 2009, China on-line shopping
transaction reached 2.63 trillion RMB. That’s close to
$400 billion a year, I think.
That’s up 100 per cent over 2008.
Also, we are expecting to almost double it every
year for the next couple of years.
>From the chart, you can see that’s a huge business
opportunity.
In conclusion, in largest developing country with
bigger internet user population and most internet user
only access website in Chinese and China is also the
fastest growing e-commerce country. Many internet user
in China needs to use their own native language to get
on-line.
There is a large number of companies are targeting
the Chinese market, Chinese domain name needs urgent
need to more effective way to do brand marketing.
Next, I’m going to talk about the advantage of CDN.
First thing you could tell, it’s easy to memorise,
because that’s our own language, so definitely it’s easy
to create, to memorise, to use the domain name in
Chinese.
Then it’s easy to use, because until now, we already
resolved the simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese
equivalent problem, also we resolve the problem of the
dot, because in the keyboard, the dot, the Chinese dot
and the English dot are different, but right now they’re
equivalent, so you don’t need to switch your keyboard to
type in the domain name in different language.
Then another advantage is brand recognition, whether
for local or foreign enterprise in China, Chinese domain
name is important part of corporation brand.
Of course, it’s also the culture heritage, because
all the cultures with great history, we are proud of our
culture, we are proud of our language. Chinese people
are so proud of our Chinese. Also, the Chinese, you
know, some meaning in Chinese is hard to translate into
English, so we chance always say, we have a word like
(Chinese spoken).
So that’s culture wise.
The next one is value of Chinese domain name. The
value to use. As I said already, language barrier is
one of the bottlenecks for Chinese user to fully access
internet. Chinese domain name makes it possible for
Chinese users to use their native language to connect to
internet.
The value of the brand. When business has to give
up well-known Chinese brand and create a completely new
name in ASCII code, it will discount the brand value.
A meaningful and easy to remember CDN is helpful to
establish a good image for enterprise or organisations.
Also, for the commercial value, Chinese domain name
is eye catching brand identity. It will make local
enterprise and foreign enterprise who want to localise
their brands easily to promote and make their website
marketing more efficient and accurate.
Lastly, it is security value.
As Stephen already talk a lot about cyber squatting,
because Chinese domain name doesn’t have the letters and
the numbers confusion, so it will reduce the fake domain
names, prevent phishing effectively.
Here it shows some famous brand already registered
Chinese domain name. So you can see some local brands
like Sina, like Air China and also there is some
international brand like Pepsi, BMW, actually the most
used example I used before is like Mercedes Benz, is so
hard to remember how to spell mercedesbenz.com, but in
Chinese, we could only just use two words, two
character. It’s so easy for local people to remember
that and definitely that will promote their brand.
Last I’m going to do some introduction for our
current status on Chinese domain name. Here shows some
milestone we have reached in the past.
In 1998, China internet network information centre
start R&D on IDN. Actually, other people in other part
of world start R&D on other languages, probably around
that time too.
In May 2000, Chinese domain name consortium was
established.
Original member including CNNIC, TWNIC, HKIRC and
MONIC, registration from Macau.
Then in June 2000, CNNIC launched CDN test bed.
Later on that year, at the same same year, TWNIC started
its priority and preregistration for second level CDN.
By 2004, there is technical standard RFC3743 joint
engineering team guideline for internationalised domain
name registration and administration for Chinese,
Japanese and Korean was issued to year.
Basically, they’re resolving the technical issue at
that time.
Then HKIRC started its priority and preregistration
for second level CDN in December 2006.
Later that year, the same year, another RFC was
released, CDN registered Chinese domain name
registration guideline.
Then community advocated fast-track process for
international domain name, country code top level domain
name in October 2007.
ICANN formed IDNC working group on fast-track
process for IDN ccTLD to work on policy formulation.
We were in that working group to work on that
policy, build up the policy for IDN.
ICANN approved the difficult IDN ccTLD fast-track
implementation plan in October 2009. A month later,
ICANN opened the application for IDN ccTLD.
Then CNNIC and TWNIC submit the request of .china,
.hongkong, .taiwan to ICANN in November 2009.
Currently, all the CDN ccTLDs, already pass string
evaluation in this year. So now we are waiting for the
last step for the approval from the board, ICANN board,
to approve the delegation process.
If we do get approval from the ICANN board, probably
we will be able to launch it probably several months
later, probably this year.
This slide shows currently all the mainstream
browsers fully support our CDN already, so you can see
from the slide, IE7, Mozilla, Firefox, Chrome, Safari,
they all support CDN, so that means you don’t need any
plug in to run CDN on your browser any more.
So we are fully ready. We are waiting for
delegation. The last step is pretty much where we are
now. That’s all for today, for my presentation.
Thank you.
>> Jonathan Shea: Thank you.
Because Zhang has to catch a flight, so she may have
to leave early, but unlet’s press on and may I now
invite Christopher To explain or to talk about the
dispute resolution and arbitration.
>> Christopher To: Thank you Jonathan and thank you the
organisers for inviting me to this conference.
I know, for example, after lunch, you tend to be
a bit tired. To change the subject slightly, I’ll talk
about something in the daily news.
How many of you have heard of this. A tenant who
was living in a property for 10 years, she did not pay
any rent, the owner cannot be found, the tenant has gone
to court to ask for the rights of the property and the
property is in Kowloon.
How many of you have heard of that?
Yes.
OK. Isn’t a property a unique address? Isn’t, for
example, that address precious, because it has value,
money?
So someone can come and take it, because they have
been living there for 10 years and it’s now that new
person and if the original owner wants to come back and
get it back again, they have to go to court proceedings
again and spend more money.
The whole issue relates to protection of rights.
So domain names are the same.
We are protecting rights, in a sense.
This conference is about governance, internet
governance.
The OECD mentioned four words in terms of
governance, not internet governance, but in general
governance of a company. They mentioned the word
control. They mention the word direct, accountability
and transparency.
Now, when we take that into perspective in internet
community, we look at control.
Do you have control of the internet?
Some people say yes, some people say no.
But you do have a control if you register your
domain name, you have control over your domain name, to
a certain extent.
Do you have direct control to your emails?
You have a password, user ID, you have direct
control.
Accountability. Whatever you put on that website of
yours, if it infringes other people’s rights, the other
people will come and sue you.
So you are accountable to a certain extent to the
community.
Transparency. Are you transparent in the way you do
things? In the internet, just like Facebook, everything
goes everywhere.
Just like last night when you were all having your
annual dinner, I saw on Facebook you were having a very
nice time. So you can see that transparency that is
there on the internet.
Businesses tend to create value to their
stakeholders, whether they are shareholders, users,
whatever.
That’s why a domain name is unique. It has to be
unique, as Jonathan mentioned early on, as an address.
It’s an address that I identifies yourself to the
community.
Very important.
My colleague from China mentioned about, for
example, trade marks. Mercedes Benz. Isn’t that
unique? It’s unique in the sense that if you want to do
mass marketing if you mention, branding, it is very
important. Because you have to get it right. If you
don’t get it right, your chances are you are not going
to be very successful in terms of your return on your
investment.
That’s what we talk about in terms of businesses and
stakeholders.
Domain names is registration on a first come, first
serve basis. So you have to go there quickly, but as
Jonathan and Stephen mentioned, many people have
registered.
The key word is before you even create a company
name, how many of you register a domain name first?
I bet most of you think about a good idea, think of
a name, go to the company registrar and say to them
let’s register this company and once you have done
everything, the legal requirements, then you say, I need
a website, I need a domain name. Then you look at the
domain name search and you say someone has already
registered it.
What do you do next?
You change your name. You go back to the company
register, so the whole purpose that Stephen mentioned
about is the strategy. The strategy in e-commerce or
internet is you have to have a plan.
Some of you are doing business and you are familiar
with this word, SWOT analysis. Strength, weaknesses,
opportunities, threats.
So you have to look at it from a business point of
view. Do you need a domain name? Is your business
on-line? E-commerce? If it is, the chances are you
have to think concurrently the name and your domain name
together and you have to check to make sure that no one
has already registered this name, so that you can trade.
It’s usually a trade mark, like SmarTone, everyone
knows that. It’s usually a service mark like an airway,
Cathay Pacific Airways. So people use these names to
signify who they are. Very important.
Just like everyone here, everyone is different. No
one is the same in this room. Same with your service
mark and your trade marks.
Another thing is it identified you from other
people, very important, because you want to stick out.
You want to tell the world that you are here.
When you go for a job interview, there’s thousands
of people applying for a job. Why does the company pick
you and not her and not him?
There must be a reason.
So your domain name has to be easily recognised and
it has to be, for example, usable.
As you said, Mercedes Benz, not many people know how
to spell that, so how do they type it in? That’s why
when Stephen mentioned about typo squatters, they take
this, because they realise that, for example, people do
not know how to spell things, so they put an A here and
an O here, so that basically it’s passing off, that’s
what we call. You’re using someone else’s trade mark to
say that you are them, in effect, and you are actually
getting some benefit, which is not right.
But you spend a lot of money doing that.
Another one, you have to think about is your company
name.
How many people know the full name of ICANN?
Honestly, tell me.
Everyone talks about ICANN. You know. I know.
People here know. But majority of the people in the
community, they know about ICANN, but they can’t tell us
the full name. They only recognise icann.org, but
doesn’t that tell you something, that this is a mark
that people recognise.
Cyber squatter Stephen mentioned, Jonathan
mentioned, for example, just to refresh your memory, in
terms of, for example, the largest, the terms of selling
domain names, the largest amount they got was the No. 1
was US$16 million.
If you have a domain name and people want it and you
can sell it for 16 million, you are set for a few years
without working.
Yeah?
Some people say for life. OK. Depends on your
lifestyle. OK?
You have to find out, for example, these cyber
squatter, I think majority of them on the panel here
know that they come from a certain country. There’s
only a few countries around the world that these cyber
squatters, they know, for example, they know the
internet very well, they know that, for example, they
look at newspapers, they look at articles and they see
what’s the newest trend, what are things coming up and
sometimes certain providers, registration providers,
will give you a grace period of say three months, six
pos, you don’t have to pay, so they obtain advantage of
those.
So you have to find out whether the person who has
your domain name is cyber squatter.
If it’s not a cyber squatter, the chances are you
might do things off line and do a negotiation deal.
But you have to be careful.
Why raise a dispute? As I mentioned early on, this
is your right. If you think someone has infringed your
rights, you have a right to raise a dispute.
If we did not have a quick and effective way of
resolving domain name disputes, the chances are, you
have to think about this, give you the scenario.
You have a domain name in Hong Kong, you actually
got the rights for this domain name and you win in the
court in Hong Kong.
The person is a resident of United States. He does
not have assets in Hong Kong.
So you take this court judgment to United States to
file it and ask the judge to enforce its.
Guess what the judge will say.
Sir, lady, the clerk is down there, please go and
refile this case and reheard it in the United States.
This is not Hong Kong.
OK. So what do you do in those situation. You have
to spends more money. You have to think about the issue
of jurisdiction.
If the person who holds this domain name, does he
have assets in that jurisdiction? Is he, for example,
registered in New York or is he registered in Moscow?
You don’t really know.
This whole issue was debated in ICANN and ICANN came
up with a very unique way of resolving domain disputes,
because domain names are international in nature.
People are registered everywhere. You can’t really
trace them unless you go into deep sort of tracing to
find who that person is and so you basically need to
have a quick and effective way of resolving disputes.
People say disputes, I don’t really want to hear
about disputes, dispute is not my cup of tea, because
I like to create wealth.
Dispute, as Stephen mentioned, is a risk management
tool.
In life, you have disagreements. You have to be
able to manage those risks effectively.
Dispute resolution method of resolving domain name
disputes is a last resort.
You can use negotiation. It’s a last resort.
What if someone doesn’t give me back my domain name?
What do I do next? I can’t just sit there and wait,
hoping and praying that someone will give it back to me.
So you have to take action. What kind of action is
available?
One thing is, have you heard of a case whereby some
person ate some food in a hotel and he was sick? What
he did was he went and registered a domain name of that
hotel and he basically created a website and criticised
that hotel.
For two months, he did it.
Guess what. The hotel knocked on his door and said,
OK, let’s sit down and negligent.
So sometimes people use these domain names as bad
faith. They try to create something, a negative impact
on your company, so you feel that something has to be
protected.
As I mentioned, there is various waits to resolve
it. Litigation doesn’t really work in domain names.
Arbitration, yes, but that tends to be very longwinded
sometimes, just like litigation. So you have to have
a quick and effective way. That’s why the UDRP of
ICANN, called the uniform domain name dispute resolution
process, was modelled on the arbitration element.
Simply because arbitration, if you take an
arbitration award in Hong Kong, rendered in Hong Kong to
New York courts, the New York courts will enforce it
per se. You don’t have to hear it again. This ideology
in terms of, for example, mutual recognition, was a good
idea that ICANN should adopt in terms of resolving
domain name disputes.
It’s slightly different from arbitration, the UDRP,
in the sense that it’s very quick, very effective and it
has certain timelines.
Just like, for example, you have three days to
register this. If you don’t do it, basically it’s open.
Just like that, timeline, because in project management,
we are talking about timelines as well.
I’m going to talk about the Hong Kong domain name
dispute resolution process very quickly.
In your service agreement, there would be a clause
whereby, for example, if someone has taken your domain
name, there is a risk management method of resolving
this. Last resort. Domain name dispute resolution.
Unlike the UDRP, this domain name dispute resolution
rendered in Hong Kong is final and binding just like
arbitration. That means unless the panel, the people
who hear the case, is biased, impartial, the case cannot
be heard in the court again. It’s final.
We deliberately did it that way because we want
things to be effective, quick.
Most people who take cases to the Hong Kong domain
name tend to have a genuine right. So you see the
number of cases going through the domain name dispute
resolution process in Hong Kong is practically very
minimum.
This process is a last resort. It’s not there to
create money or create value for the persons who handle
these disputes, it’s just a last resort.
Hong Kong handles all these and just like we handle
.cn, as well and .hk.
There’s three different documents that you have to
be aware of. One is called the policy and one is the
rules and procedures and one is called the supplemental
rules.
The policy and the procedures are defined by the
Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation.
The supplementary rules are defined by the Hong Kong
International Arbitration Centre.
These three documents are very similar in nature
with the UDRP. Rules and procedures as well.
So you can see that it’s similar in nature. The
reason why we have adopted it this way is because I have
a belief that why make life complicated? Life is
currently complicated enough. Make life simple.
If you go and have a dispute in terms of the courts
on different jurisdictions, you have civil law, common
law, different rules, different things, people get
confused.
Make life simple. If you want people to use the
internet, make it easy, to resolve dispute, risk
management and all that.
That’s how you get things moving.
Same way of dispute resolution.
I’m not going to go through this. If you go to the
website of Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre,
you will see a flow chart.
How many of you have seen these kinds of flow charts
in court documents?
I go to the court often. You have two White Books
in the Hong Kong and the District Court. They are that
thick. You open them up, it’s all English. Some of it
in Chinese, but very few.
There’s no flow chart, so you don’t know what to do
next.
You look at it from a layman’s point of view. If
people want to file something, what do they have to do
next? How many days does it take in what next actions
have they got to do? Just like flow charts, because my
first degree is electronics engineering, so I believe
you have to make things in a diagram so that people
understand.
I’m not going to go through these, but you can see
it’s very quick, the time.
The features of it, it’s very unique. As I said
early on, it’s modelled on the UDRP of ICANN, but you
have to be very careful. You have to have rights in
Hong Kong, either a trade mark or service mark or
whatever or IP rights in Hong Kong or even showing to
the panel that you have been using this for a certain
period of time.
Very important.
Because we have to be very careful, because we
cannot have too much jurisdiction to go around the
world.
Because someone from Moscow can give you, I have
a trade mark in Moscow and I bring it to Hong Kong.
But remember, this is .hk. This is not the .coms,
.orgs, that’s difference. They look at international
perspective. .hk only looks at the Hong Kong
perspective.
It’s different, it’s kinding and it’s final.
This is very important, because businesses I now
come across, they want the proceedings to be very quick
and effective.
Remember the key word I mentioned early on.
Corporations have to create value to their stakeholders.
If disputes are dragged on for years and years, it
doesn’t create value. It drains the company’s resources
and some of the CEOs could be accountable for why are we
spending so much must be on legal costs? That’s not
part of our business. Our business is creating wealth
for our stakeholders.
Very effective, one thing about it is similar to the
UDRP, if you file one, you give the other side 15 days
to respond. Majority of the cases who are cyber
squatters, they will not respond.
So the chances of getting your domain back is very
quick. But some of them tend to stick in there. The
very first UDRP dispute, lots of cyber squatters stick
in there and they realise that case after case they are
losing. Some people prefer not to go to this because
it’s very public. As I mentioned, transparency.
Can you imagine, a very important corporation, as
Stephen mentioned, forgot to register their domain name,
after renewal. Suddenly it is open in the market and
someone comes along and takes it.
You don’t want to go to the UDRP and tell the world
that I forgot to register any domain name and it’s now
being, for example, taken by someone else, so majority
of the companies tend to actually hire service providers
for them to actually manage this domain name.
Or sometimes they try to, if this is a situation,
they will try to negotiate with this cyber squatter and
say give it back to me.
I’ll give you certain amount of money.
Because, remember, branding is very important for
them.
If they can’t even manage their own brand, how are
they going to manage your branding?
That’s very important.
That’s why sometimes cyber squatters still survive
in this day and age because they pray on this, people
don’t register.
Another thing is the panel will always give you, for
example, extensions. I sat on some panels. I can tell
you, I never get extensions, just like in court, if you
have a writ served on you, you have 14 days to respond.
If you can’t respond, you have to give reasons why you
can’t respond.
The panel is not there to actually help the
respondent continue. The panel is there to ensure that
there is fairness, impartiality and that people, for
example, have their rights protected.
Very important.
There’s three steps, but it’s very important. This
is slightly different from ICANN. ICANN tend that
apply, the providers tend to appoint, but in Hong Kong,
they tend to give a list of five names and ask the
parties, both the claimant and respondent, to rank them
in order, which one do they prefer. The highest ranking
will be the one appointed. The reason why we did it
this way is because ICANN watch, they look at this stuff
and we notice this people complain about, we don’t get
the chance to choose our panel. But the scenario goes
back, do you get a chance to choose your judge in
a court?
No. But to cater for users demands, we decided, OK,
we’ll give you a choice of choosing a panel. We’ll give
you a ranking of five names, you tell us which one do
you want to choose. Those five names are not just
randomly chosen. Both parties will pits forward names
and they will not tell the other side what names they
have put forward and we’ll give them the name back and
they whether rank them in order of priority.
So far, it has been working very well.
I’m not going to go through this. The powers
basically have to be very fair.
The language of the proceedings are dictated by the
registration agreement.
Different providers will have different languages,
so you have to be careful. If you are a company that
only speaks one language, you have to make sure that the
dispute resolution has to fall within that language as
well, because you will be instructing lawyers to
represent you in these proceedings.
In-person hearings, usually anyone. I have never
seen any in-person hearings, that means attending the
hearings in person.
You basically have three business days to implement
the decision. Very effective. Especially when people
have been holding your sort of trade mark and
blackmailing you for a certain period of time. So this
is a very quick and effective way of resolving disputes.
You look at Hong Kong. Not many cases. This year,
1. If this is a going concern for a company, you will
be out of business. Because resolving these disputes,
how much do you have to pay?
>> Jonathan Shea: $8,000.
>> Christopher To: $8,000 times 12 is how much? So if this
is a company, you will go out of business.
So that’s why certain provideers do this, because
it’s a community service. Someone has to do it. It’s
a last resort. You don’t want to allow people to get
away with things.
That’s why we have the courts in Hong Kong. The
courts in different jurisdictions. Because if someone
has killed someone, or committed manslaughter, whatever,
they have to be punished. But if you don’t have that
mechanism to punish them or enforce it, the chances are
you have no rule of law.
Tips and suggestions.
This is very important. As my friend from China
said, make things simple. You don’t want to register
mercedesbenz.cn when people can’t remember how to spell
it. Make it simple so it’s eye catching for people to
remember.
For example, if you are not using a domain name, as
Stephen mentioned, make sure it gets pointed to
a certain website. Because someone will prove that you
are not using it, it is inactive, so I want the rights
back for it. So you have to be very careful for this.
I this is important. Many people forget to register
domain names, including myself. I know that I get sent
emails saying you have to register and sometimes
I forget. If you forget to do things like this, make
sure you have a service provideer, a reliable service
provideer, who charge you a fee, that’s not very
expensive, to remind you all the time that you have to
register.
Another one is, if you are not sure of thing,
creating websites and all that, I always believe in find
someone who’s an expert in it. Outsource things. My
corporation now, I don’t create positions within my
organisation whereby I recruit a lot of employees.
I outsource things. Because I know that even though if
I recruit people in our organisation, the chances are,
after a few year, he does not really have the expertise
any more, because he’s not really involved with the
industry, so I tend to go for people within the
industry.
Thank you very much.
>> Jonathan Shea: Thank you, Christopher.
>> Edmon Chung: Edmon, I apologise that you have to keep
your presentation within 10 minutes.
>> Zhang Jian: Actually, any question for me? Because
I have to catch my flight.
>> Stephen Lau: A couple of very quick ones. One is you
mentioned about Chinese domain name, IDN has been
approved, you are waiting for delegation. Please
explain, what does that mean, in terms of what is the
action coming up first? Secondly, earlier days there is
a working party has included Macau. Who happened to
that IDN?
>> Zhang Jian: I could answer your second question first,
actually, I’m not very sure, because probably they don’t
feel pressing need for their Chinese name, Macau. But
they didn’t, as far as I know, submit the request for
the name, so far.
For the first question, our whole process is like
you submit your request and then there is a string
valuation and then next step will be a delegation. So
we already passed string valuation. That means your
string is fine, really represent China.
The last step will be delegation process. But
first, we need approval from the ICANN board. We still
didn’t get that, yesterday, hopefully, it will happen,
maybe next weeks in Brussels ICANN meeting.
Then after the delegation, after approval of the
delegation, they are going to physically put the name in
the root server. That wouldn’t probably take long,
probably a month or so. A month or two.
Then we could use our name officially, globally, at
that point.
That’s pretty much it. So actually we are cross
finger to pray next week, we could finally get it.
>> Jonathan Shea: Maybe we shouldn’t hold her up for too
long, otherwise she will miss her flight and have to
stay in Hong Kong for one more day.
Thank you Zhang Jian.
>> Edmon Chung: Thank you, Jonathan.
In the spirit of sort of multi-stakeholder approach,
I heard of lot of brand protection and cyber squatting
and abusive registration. I just want to add a couple
of words before I go into my presentation.
Of course, we talked about the $16 million sales of
a particular domain name. I wonder if you’re interested
in what name it is.
>> Stephen Lau: I know.
>> Edmon Chung: Well, the name was insure.com. One thing
I just want to bring up is that there is — besides
abusive registration, there is also a side of domain
registration where you can speculate or invest. This
company invested into insure.com, they bought it for
1.6 million a few years ago and then they sold it for
16 million.
It’s not like they were just — in this particular
case, it wasn’t like they were just sitting around with
nothing to do and sat upon somebody else’s trade mark.
Another one that I think maybe you can think about,
when you think about this thing, there is also an
opportunity for you to invest into domain names.
Another one was Tom.com. I wonder if anyone knew how
much back in the day, they paid for Tom.com. Because
Tom isn’t really a trade mark at that time. They paid
$2.5 million for Tom.com before they went public,
obviously.
With that, that brings me to — it’s partially
related to the topic as well. We keep talking
about.com, we know about .hk. I think the question is
what are these things? What is new gTLD? What does the
term mean? First of all, top level domain is the last
part professor a domain name. Www.something.com. “Com”
is what is called the TLD. .asia is a TLD. There is
.info as well. Just a quick look at what happened, in
terms of what gTLD means.
I think Jonathan earlier mentioned, there are two
types of top level domains. Country code, which are
each country or territory would have, .hk, .cn, those
type. Then the other type is called generic top level
domain, that’s gTLD. The most common or the legacy ones
are .com, .net and .org.
In fact, there are actually eight of them to start
with. They include .apra, .mil, .int, .edu and .gov,
some of which you might not be as familiar.
In 2001, seven new gTLDs were added: .info, .biz,
.aero, .museum, .coop, .name, .pro. That was added to
the internet in 2001.
In 2004, seven more were added, .travel, .asia,
.cat — by the way, that’s not about cats. It’s about
the Catlin community between Spain and somewhere —
I can’t quite remember.
And .travel, .tel, .mobi, .post.
These are what we call top level domains.
So why does it matter? What does it mean? Why do
we need more is perhaps the question.
We know there are certain people who hold the
opinion that all we need is .com. Everything is under
.com anyway.
Why do we need anything else?
We have so many already. We have.– why do we want,
for example, something.music. Will we want
something.movie? Will we want something that’s outside
of English? Would it be .blog in Chinese? Would that
be useful? Why is that useful or why do we not want it?
One important part is that we talked about brand
protection and stuff. A lot of the brand owners were
worried. If you create a hundred new top level domain,
does that mean I have to register my name a hundred more
times?
Will that become unmanageable?
I’m actually not going to go into that part. I’ll
focus on why perhaps we need top level domains.
This is just some of my personal view. I think
there are three main aspects why we want more top level
domains. The social aspect, the cultural aspect and the
commercial aspect.
Generally, socially, as you look at how it evolved,
I mentioned there were some legacy top level domain
created and then some new ones.
The thing is, I don’t think, do you know how name
came about? I think that’s one aspect of what I call
social aspect is is it fair? Somebody is running .com
and somebody is running .info. We are running .asia.
If you want to run a .music today, start a business and
offer the service, why can’t you do that? I think it’s
a matter of fairness, that if somebody wants to create
a new top level domain, that there is a process to do
that. The internet should support kind of an open
innovation and let people utilise the internet in the
way that they want.
Of course not abusing it or creating illegal problem
with it.
Another aspect is cultural. I think Zhang Jian who
left mentioned about Chinese domain names. That’s very
important.
Todays especially in the gTLD space, we don’t have
anything other than English characters in the top level
domain.
When, for example, .china is being launched, I think
the community would expect that, for example, .asia, we
will have also (Chinese spoken). That is also an
important important aspect of new gTLDs, why we need
more of them.
Then, of course, there is the commercial aspect. We
talked about how expensive domain names could be. They
are, in essence, a valuable asset, I would say.
But I’m not in that sense — quote, unquote —
asset.
But also it creates new opportunities.
There is only one music.com, but there could be
a music.web that you can run. You can operate
a music.web or there is only one business.com, but you
can operate business.blog, for example.
The reason there are new gTLDs, it creates
commercial value for different people.
I’ll come back to search engine optimisation point
in a later discussion, but really people think, people
ask the question, if there are many TLDs, I wouldn’t
remember it any more. If there is only.com, I know it
is always.com, but people would forget if there is a lot
and we will push to be using search engines anyway, so
domain names no longer will be valuablable.
Is that really true? I’ll come back to that
question.
Really, of all the reasons I think it comes down to
one question.
Do you believe in choice?
The question is do you only want.com as a universal
world or do you believe in choice? We can
have.whatever. This technology supports it.
That’s, I think, it really boils down to this main
question for those who are against new top level domains
and those who are for new top level domains.
I ask the question, will people choose?
If there are many top level domains, .car, .bus,
.game, .whatever, will it really confuse the hell out of
you? Will people remember it? I think that’s a very
good point.
One of the — I’m going to start using .asia
a little bit, because we just launched two years ago and
we are looking at how a new gTLD functions, how people
start using.asia domains. I’ll use that as a series of
examples.
But I’ll start with choosing TLDs, do people really
choose or do they get very confused?
Our experience, at least so far in the last two
years, is that when given the choice, people do know how
to choose. People do pick and choose.
We did one particular study, we launched a .asia
domain, we got the same .com domain. We publicised the
.asia domain and monitored in people came in the .com
site or the .asia site. The results, they came in
the.asia site, because that’s what you publicise. So
people do pay attention what the domain name is and it’s
usually whatever appears in the advertising, they take
a look at it and then they put it into the computer.
They wouldn’t suddenly decide that when they see
ABC.asia, they put in ABC.com. That does not happen in
this world.
At least it doesn’t happen as often as people think
it does.
Just a few examples. The experience a couple of
domain, when it means something to people, like
I think.asia means that you do business in Asia, people
choose it when they try to go to the Asian market.
People choose it because they are having, let’s say,
an event in Asia or a conference or a sporting event.
Just generally, and we are also seeing a lot of
artists start using.asia domain because their fan base
is Asia wide.
I think creating a meaning for people in the top
level domain is an important aspect. We are also seeing
a lot of small medium sized businesses starting to come
on line, use the.asia domain, because they want their
business to be outside of their own local community.
Another thing is whether people actually start using
the new gTLD is a good indicator is seeing them in
advertising. I think people actually putting.asia out
in their billboards or advertising.
That shows you that people actually go to
linksmoving.asia domain. Maybe a lot of people in the
audience only know about .asia today. But that’s the
kind of thing.
I think the more new top level domains that come
around, the more you would know that there’s something
outside of.com and that’s part of choice and once people
know about the choice, people do choose.
One of the most interesting parts that I always like
to show is that we actually are finding a number of
.asia domains that are not everyone registered in .com.
A lot of people think that, you know, people would
register .com first. That’s the first choice and then
they would think about other domain names, you know, if
.com is not available, then they go to .net, maybe, or
.org or something else. But that’s not true.
We are seeing more and more people just register
.asia. All of these domains here, you see, are still
available in .com. So maybe not any more. I have done
this presentation a too many times, maybe somebody has
cyber squatted on them, but the point is that people,
when given a chance to choose, they could choose and it
is possible and that’s the value of new gTLDs, I think.
Another important aspect I mentioned is about IDNs,
internationalised domain names. That is the gTLDs in
different languages, in Chinese or in Arabic or in
Russian.
I think that serves a purpose and that’s important,
why there should be new top level domains.
Beyond the social values that I mentioned, I think
economic and commercial values are important.
I now come back to the question about search engine
optimisation. Why I bring this up. There are people
who say, new gTLDs, if you put so many new gTLDs there,
there are going to be no value in it. You are going to
push everyone to use a search engine to search for the
website.
But let’s think about it the other way around.
What TLDs provide you with a capability of doing is
help with your search engine optimisation.
If you do business in Asia, for example, if you want
people, when they search for Asia, to find you, a .asia
domain helps that. If you’re selling car, something.car
could help your search engine optimisation.
That’s very simple.
That’s why new top level domains would be useful for
search engine optimisation as well.
I mentioned also in terms of IDNs, that when ccTLDs
are launched, like .china is launched, people would
expect .com or .net or .something else would be also
available in different languages. That’s an important
aspect.
I come back to the in terms of the search engine.
The reason why such engines are important is because the
domain name that you use or you utilise helps in terms
of search engine ranking. And why internationalised
domain names is important and new in Asia, for example,
in Japan, in Korea, in China, people search in their own
language. Today, you may be typing in domain names in
English characters, but today you still search in
Chinese.
Actually, in Hong Kong, most of the searches through
Yahoo is in Chinese. Having a Chinese domain name would
help your search engine ranking. That’s the simple
fact. That’s also part of why new gTLDs are important,
why IDN especially multilingual TDLs are important.
I think Zhang Jian mentioned this as well. A lot of
the brands are exclusively in Chinese. You though these
brands and you know their Chinese name. In Japan, you
know their Japanese name. That’s why it’s important, in
terms of the a overall domain name, to have IDNs.
I think just an example, .asia will be launching
Chinese domain registrations later and one of the
highlight, showcase domain was the latest film from
Jackie Chan and when we worked with Jackie, we said, OK,
you can do .asia and he said why can’t we do it in
Chinese? That’s really why. That’s why it’s important,
eventually, to have new — to add new gTLDs, is to
provide the ability to instead of .asia, to be in
different languages. That’s also a very important
aspect of it.
There I end. Just a thank you and just note that
.asia, besides promoting .asia, every .asia domain name
that you register contributes to internet development in
Asia.
Like this conference that you are in.
>> Jonathan Shea: Thank you, Edmon.
We have our last speaker. Sanjay, are you there?
>> Sanjay: Yes.
>> Jonathan Shea: It’s your turn now. Can you keep it to
within 10 minutes?
>> Sanjay: Sure.
I’m the last speaker here. I’m sorry I can’t be
there in person, but I’ll be speaking slightly different
from the previous speaker. This is about the number,
the internet numbers.
The presentation I present is about the running out
of IPV4 and the urgency for us to move to IPV6.
Let’s look at the world internet penetration here,
the latest figure we have in 2009. The world average
penetration is only 26.6 per cent and yet IPV4 remaining
is only 6 per cent.
Clearly, this is not enough.
When will IPV4 be completed? We have someone
keeping track of this on a daily basis. IANA will run
out of block some time in August 2011 and probably APNIC
will run out of IPV4 blocks in 2012.
Therefore, the importance for us to transition to
IPV6, because IPV4 is inevitable. The 4 billion
addresses is not enough and IPV6, with the 340 trillion
trillion trillion addresses should be big enough. It’s
the only solution to IPV4. IPV6 protocol is mature and
it has an increased use in the past years.
How far have we come?
We did a survey last year, APNIC, and surprisingly,
this is not good news. A lot of people are still
holding back on deploying IPV6, because they think they
don’t see business need.
This is kind of strange. I mean, if we asked the
question differently, if you have a website, you have an
email address and then you are travelling abroad and you
checking in at the hotel, that only has IPV6 in the
future and you can’t see send your email back to your
own company or can’t see your own website, is that
a problem?
I think there is a need for us to clearly say to the
business owner here, that it’s not — the business need
is survival, it’s not about I have got no business on
IPV6. It’s about if you are not on IPV6, you lose out.
More encouraging news is on the technical side.
When we check the ISPs, it seems like most of them are
quite ready with that deployment. At least 70 per cent
of them are already considering or already have
allocation of IPV6 assignment and it’s a matter of time
for them to really deploy it on their network.
This is consistent with study we are seeing on our
resource delegation, although IPV4 request keeps coming
up, IPV6 requests are also growing very fast.
Looking from the OECD latest report, they also
tracking how many ISPs offering IPV6 services. As you
can see, Germany, United States, Japan, United Kingdom,
France, Switzerland, there are more than five provideers
on each of those already serving IPV6 service.
Ratio of IPV6 to IPV4 numbers are steadily
increasing. It is now 6 per cent of all AS numbers are
announcing IPV6 addresses.
We also got a surprise earlier this year when Google
silently turned on their IPV6 support on their Youtube
and suddenly, there’s heaps of IPV6 traffic being
consumed going through that site.
Apparently, there is enough IPV6 addresses being
deployed out there that when Youtube turn on their IPV6,
because IPV6 is always preferred over IPV4, then these
IPV6 enabled computers will just start using IPV6, just
like that, with no one being aware of that.
The good thing is, it’s all out there. It’s
a matter of really for us to go there in greater number
of mass.
In conclusion, I guess our message is do prepare for
IPV6 now. IPV4 will run out in two years time.
You should enable IPV6 in your network. Do
something small, but do not delay.
Do it today if you can or this year. Future proof
your network with IPV6.
All people ask us, what’s the killer ap for IPV6?
The answer to that is the internet itself. The internet
needs IPV6 for it to be able to be continued being the
internet that we know and love.
I hope that you all take this message back to your
organisations and start planning for your IPV6
deployment.
Thank you.
>> Jonathan Shea: That’s all the presentations that we have
got now.
May I suggest that if we can take questions on IP
first, so that we don’t hold up Sanjay for too long.
Then we have questions on domain names.
>> : Alan Dyer: As an SME, what’s my first step in
deploying IPV6?
>> Jonathan Shea: Can we have your name?
>> : Alan Dyer: As an SME, what’s my first step in
deploying IPV6? Where do I go? Who do I ask in.
>> Sanjay: Thanks for the question. This is a very
important question. The first port of call will be your
ISP. If you’re not connected to just one ISP, then you
might want to start asking your ISP when they are going
to provide an IPV6 address. That will be for your ISP
to prepare their IPV6 deployment as well.
I can pretty much assure you that all ISP are now
looking seriously into deploying their IPV6, so there is
a big chance that if you ask that question, hopefully
you will get some sort of positive answer.
However, if you are not getting a good response from
your ISP, you can always move to another ISP, but you
can also, if you are relying on that connection, you
could ask for your own IPV6 either into Hong Kong, then
you can ask APNIC, if you are in China, ask CNNIC. You
can have a portable IPV6, meaning you have your own
block and then you can choose whoever ISP is ready with
IPV6 to route your address.
The only requirement for you to get your own IPV6
block is that you must have at least two connections to
the internet. Probably two different provideers or one
provideer or one link to the provideer or one link to an
internet exchange somewhere. That’s the only
requirement for you to get your own space.
I hope this answer your question.
>> : Yes, thank you very much.
>> : Are there any other questions on IP address?
If not, I have got one for you, Sanjay.
One reason why people or companies don’t want to
move across to IPV6 is that there are no business
specifications, as far as they are concerned, they think
this is just an expenditure thing. So spend money on
the new gear, the new software, the new network, but
there seem to be no new business coming in.
Many people, especially SME find that quite
difficult to justify the investment to their management.
But, actually, some people may not be quite aware
that there may be some innovations that can be made
possible with the introduction of IPV6.
I just want to know what’s your view in relation to
that? Maybe people are not aware that it may bring us
to the next level of the internet, even some academic
institution label the IPV6 as internet second generation
or internet 2 or whatever.
So I would appreciate if you can share with us
whether you have any view on the possible innovate
vaytive or innovation possibility with the introduction
of IPV6.
>> Sanjay: Well, what IPV6 promise, I think after
considering all the benefits of it, I think in the end,
the real benefit of IPV6 is allowing end to end
communication, back like when we started having IPV4,
you know, in the early days.
Nowadays, with IPV4 running out, people are using it
restrict how you can grow or create a new innovation in
the internet. With IPV6, we can go back to the complete
end to end transparent connection between two devices in
the internet, with no translation in between.
That allows the internet to grow again.
That’s my personal view.
Of course, there are also other research in Mostly
in Japan and China as well, in Taiwan, a lot of new way
of connecting, new devices through IPV6, like the wetter
monitoring system, traffic, car communication, those are
all beautiful, but I think for small and medium
organisations, I think the key message is: you do want
to be connected to everyone, not only to just the IPV4
network, because IPV6 is going to be bigger, so you
probably need to move to IPV6 as soon as possible.
As for people who are worried about investment, your
new equipment, if you buy new routers, you will get the
IPV6 anyway, like if you buy a new laptop on window 7,
IPV6 is there or Apple, it’s there, it comes almost free
nowadays. If you buy a Cisco router, it comes with
IPV6.
>> Jonathan Shea: Can we now have — do you have any
questions on the other presentations on the domain
names?
>> Sanjay: I really enjoyed the presentations.
>> Jonathan Shea: Sanjay, please stay with us, if you like.
Any questions from the floor on domain names?
Sounds like we have been doing pretty well
explaining everything crystal clear.
>> : I’m from Indonesia. Maybe this is not a question about
IP address or domain, but I just want to emphasise
several things about the IPV6 migration, because my
association also APNIC to manage the IP resources in
Indonesia, so maybe I can share something.
We have been go to several cities in Indonesia and
do conference training about the IPV6 and one thing that
usually face the company that will migrate to IPV6 is
usually they think that it’s complicated, but usually
after one or two training, simple training, usually they
want to try to migrate, because if you don’t have IP
from the ISP, there is several other way that you can
get the IPV6 for your company. You can use several
methods. If your ISP is not ready, you can use several
other services available for free on the internet.
So you can have your network IP version 6 ready
fairly fast.
That’s all. Thank you.
>> Jonathan Shea: Thank you for your comment. Given that
there are no other questions, may you please join me in
thanking the panel members.
May we invite Stephen Lau, our chair, to come up to
give us some closing remarks.
>> Stephen Lau: Thank you, Jonathan.
I just want to say, just a few words. It’s Friday
evening or late afternoon, but I think it’s only
relevant to say some, provide some concluding remarks.
We started off by hosting the first IGF event in
Asia and Asian Pacific throughout the last seven days in
Hong Kong.
When we first started, actually the idea was mooted,
I’m sure you know that by now, some time in December,
when injury Jeremy Godfrey, as the Government Chief
Information Officer, went to IGF in November or
early December and a group of organisations,
individuals, like Edmon, like Charles and Jonathan and
they said, OK, we should do something in Asia. Nobody
has done it in shai what and we so do it in conjunction
or at least synchronising and supporting the IGF on
a global basis.
It was decided then, I happen to be involved,
because I’m an adviser to IGF from sort of based in
Hong Kong.
But it was December. We only started working
in January.
To be honest, my major concern then was, really,
usually, a conference properly and well organised would
take at least six to nine months.
But imagine the sort of scenario. You got guys like
Edmon and Charles, always multi-tasking. If these guys
walk into any room, the first thing they do is look for
a socket and plug to make sure charge the lap on the and
then go on the net, heads down, but they are
multi-tasking, listening and all that. I will say, you
know, with I need six, eight months, to run this event.
Then Edmon thought, no problem. Let’s do two. Then
Charles said, yeah, why not, let’s do three. So we
ended up with three events and organised within a period
of four or five months, maximum.
All in all, I think we were, how would I call it,
optimistically ambitious. But I think with the OC
organising committee, with guys like Edmon, Charles,
Jonathan, John Fung and guys who are really experienced
in organising conferences, with a huge network within
the region and we ended up with three events. The
weekend youth camp on IGF, who reported here this
morning.
Very successfully run. 60 kids. Two days, two
nights, three days event.
And we have the regional round table that began
Tuesday and Wednesday.
And with the regional experts focusing on IGF
issues, main issues, regional experts, in form expert,
focusing on issues specific to Asian Pacific and now we
have these two days of Hong Kong conference, ending now.
We make a specifically, in fact, typical or emp
fewed by this session, is that it’s the first time we do
it in Hong Kong. Let’s make it educational. Let’s make
it awearness and I learned a lot from this session,
because I think we are in the business, but there are
a lot of people who might not understand about TLDs,
IPV6, but this would provide us with some education or
awareness.
I think in being, as I said, optimistically
ambitious, it turn out to be rallistically ambitious.
So I think we had good rapport, we had remarks made
to us about we did a pretty good job.
But this was our first attempt and I just want to
say that we can do better.
Like any endeavour, you can always do better. You
should aim to do better.
I just want to mention a couple of things that we
should do better, bearing in mind next time.
One is multi-stakeholder representation.
In IGF, this is paramount. This is essential.
We have the representation, but I think we would,
I would say, more balanced representation from the
business sector. We have a lot of businessmen here. We
tend to wear multiple hats, but in terms of
representation and focus on the panel, I think we can do
better on the business side.
That is on the representation of multi-stakeholders.
One issue on the another one is to do with is
sessions, the major topics as reflected in an IGF, the
emerging issues.
We did not touch much on the emerging issues based
on emerging technology. I think that’s one thing that
we can do better in the future.
But, for example, I’m really glad about this
particular session, in terms of learning about new
things.
Edmon, when you talk about the $16 million, I think
this insure.com, because it’s traded at $16 million, so
it’s the highest. But you think there could be a domain
name which actually not yet traded, but might even be
more if it is traded? The one I was told is sex.com.
So I’m not true if it was true.
>> Edmon Chung: It was sold for 12 million a few years
earlier.
>> Stephen Lau: So my statistics was — it may be
appreciating more.
OK. So I just want to say a few more words
regarding, it’s the first attempt and it’s a catalyst,
we want it to be a catalyst, we want it to be a spark to
ignite a wave of interest across Asian Pacific, in terms
of hosting more IGF events and I’m really glad that
a number of economies and countries have already
expressed that they will be doing IGF nationally or
regionally, like Indonesia, they want to do one next
year, national, they want to do a regional one the year
following, Bangladesh also expressed similar sentiments
and will also we have Malaysia as well, wanting to do
a national one next year.
So that is really good, in terms of sparking and
igniting interest and sentiments.
Being first in something and I really want to also
say that we also have been first in a number of areas or
at least among the first. Like Skyping. I’m aware that
this might be the second time in Hong Kong for local
conference. Both times it’s DotAsia responsible.
In terms of we have webcasting, we have remote
participation, we have multiple screen, we have sign
language professional as well, we have multiple
monitors.
That might not be the first among conferences in
Hong Kong, but I like to believe and I’m quite convinced
myself, the integration of all this technologies and all
these facilities must be the first in Hong Kong.
That would be my view, for a local conference.
For that, I really thank DotAsia and those
professionals over there. Give them a big hand, the
technology.
I just want to say, finally, I want to — we have
thanked enough, we have sponsored, Microsoft, APNIC, the
office of the government information officer in their
support and sponsorship, particularly the major ones.
I think looking around at all the supporting
organisations, but we have expressed that cans and we
continue to express thanks to them, but I really want to
say a big thank you to the logistics people, the
volunteers and professionals, like, Ka Ping and Bianca
and Elaine who in the background. Over the seven days,
the three events, all this transformation and realtime
issues and all that, overall, I think their enthusiasm,
their experience as well as their efforts and
dedication, it’s these ones I want you all to express
our thanks to.
Just one final word. We guy, the panellists and
moderators and also including audience here, during the
day, in any session, sometimes you can wander off in
your mind, take a rest, maybe think about something else
or do some email, whatever, while you are listening and
appreciating and being educated, being informed.
But then a number of people here whose mind has been
dedicated and continuously until as long as the session
is in session.
I’m talking about sign language professional, I’m
talking about our scribing professional.
They couldn’t stop, they can never stop when the
session is in session and it’s fully full time and full
dedication.
I been admiring you guys, just doing this and big
hands for them.
With that, I would declare that our IGF event, IGF
week, has been successfully concluded.
I wish you all a very nice weekend and I will
definitely have a nice weekend and thank you.
>> : By the end of the conference, please kindly fill in the
feedback form and return to the registration counter.