Nominet

In this issue of Nominet News I'm pleased to be able to give you an update on the recent 40th meeting of ICANN held in San Francisco, remind you that the closing date for submissions into the Nominet Internet Awards is April 28th, tell you about the launch event we held for the W3C UK and Ireland office, and keep you up to date with the latest on DNSSEC.

The 40th ICANN meeting, held 13-18 March 2011 in San Francisco, saw continued debate of the new gTLD process and some interesting commentary from former US President, Bill Clinton, who was warmly received when he addressed the meeting. We were delighted that Lesley was selected as the new chair of the Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO), having previously served as Vice-Chair. There were a number of other interesting developments, on topics such as the launch of gTLDs, and the go ahead for the .XXX top-level domain.

The Nominet Internet Awards 2011 are open for entries. Launched on 8 February at an event in central London, we are proud to announce that the awards will be in partnership this year with Nominet Trust, which supports UK Internet initiatives that contribute to a safe and accessible Internet, used to improve lives and communities.

On Monday 18 April we held an event at Keble College, Oxford to celebrate the launch of the W3C office for UK and Ireland. It was an excellent opportunity to hear how business, academia and government contribute and benefit from the emergence of new web technologies and the open standards that underpin them.

We were delighted with the response to the call for comments on the two current issues on expired domain tasting and dealing with domain names involved in criminal activity. As these and other .uk policy discussions progress there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone to make further input.

Nominet Trust is passionate about investing in projects that use the power of the internet to improve lives and communities. Read more about the latest initiatives that they have supported including Beatbullying's Cybermentors, Giving World Online, Battlefront, Apps for Good, Digital Democracy, Internet Buttons and Fix the Web.

DNSSEC is an important step for the security of the Domain Name System. It starts to fix a fundamental flaw in the DNS by expanding upon the DNS protocol and adding cryptographic signatures into the transactions between the servers that resolve domain names. This prevents anyone from trying to spoof or intercept DNS traffic between computers.