China is expected to become the first country in the world to officially classify internet addiction as a mental disorder.  Chinese government officials would be required to register the term with the World Health Organization, which has seen an increased interest in internet- and game-related addiction.

Around 253 million of China’s 1.2 billion population use the internet, with the number expected to grow as remote parts of the country build necessary infrastructure to support the internet.

Dr. Tao Ran studied at least 3,000 patients over a four-year period to help him classify internet addiction, which will be a condition similar to alcoholism or compulsive gambling.

A person who spends at least 6.13 hours online each day can be considered an addict.  InterActiveCorp research indicates 42 percent of young internet users feel they are addicted to the internet, while only 18 percent of American youth feel they are addicted.

Dr. Tao Ran: “We took symptoms that appeared at the same time in more than 50 percent of patients and then we noted how frequently these same symptoms were repeated. China finds itself at the forefront of this research because we were among the earliest to set up clinics … we had a sufficient sample of patients so that we could carry out proper scientific analysis.”

This week, in Paris, regulators from Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to radically change the way Top Level Domains are created.

A Top Level Domain (TLD) is the final segment of a domain name. For example, my blog’s URL is blog.techfun.org. That name tells us that blog is a host within the techfun domain which is within the ORG Top level domain.

Everyone knows about the earliest TLD’s including COM, NET, ORG, EDU, MIL, and GOV. Over the years that has expanded to a total of 21 TLD’s not including specific national TLD’s like US for the United States or DE for Germany. Some of those national TLDs have become popular due to the nation’s abbreviations similarity to English language words and abbreviations including Tuvalu’s “.tv”. The Federated States of Micronesia’s “.fm”, Djibouti’s “.dj” and Tonga’s “.to”.

More recently, ICANN introduced the BIZ TLD but adoption has been extremely slow. When the new BIZ TLD went live I was working for an Internet Service Provider and part of my job included maintaining our spam filters. The first thing I noticed in the weeks and months following was the sheer number of bogus and spamtastic BIZ domains flooding in to our servers.

In the early days of combating spam, a feature common on many mail servers was the ability to check to see if the domain portion of a sender’s email address was valid. Our servers used that, so if someone wanted to spam us from doctorsex@cheapbluesexpills.com they actually had to register the domain name “cheapbluesexpills.com”. Back then this was more expensive than it is now.

When the BIZ TLD was introduced, many registrars – like GoDaddy.com – offered very big discounts on the BIZ domains. This opened the door to spammers registering thousands and thousands of domain names to be used for a single mailing and then discarded. That poisoned the BIZ TLD for many folks and to this day I still let Spamassassin slightly bump up the spam score on any email I receive with a BIZ extension.

The new change that ICANN describes as the “Biggest Expansion to (the) Internet in Forty Years” takes the use of TLD’s to a whole new level. This new change will allow companies and people to apply to create their own TLD. For example, Coca-Cola can register a TLD of “COKE”. This would allow the use of mail addresses like webmaster@mail.coke or the creation of websites like http://www.coke or http://coupons.coke.

ICANN mentioned that there is already interest from various cities including New York City that want to create their own TLD – in that case, a site like http://mayor.nyc would be a possibility. Individuals, organizations, and corporations will all be able to apply for these new bits of Internet real estate.

The approval committees at ICANN will do its best to protect registered trademarks so there is no doubt who will end up owning .coke and .pepsi, but who is likely to get .cola or .soda? Company’s that wish to can submit objections to other applications but unless you have a retainer with an intellectual property law firm you may be out of luck when your small home business has a name that some bigger corporation decided it wants to own.

I wish I could articulate better why this whole idea disturbs me. I feel like the Internet has always been a kind of funky global neighborhood where a fetish shop might be ‘next door’ to an evangelical church. This kind of parceling off of the common Internet namespace feels like that neighborhood is at risk of being put in the shadow of huge custom condos that will block out the sun.

There is one bright side for non-English speaking nations:

“One of the most exciting prospect before us is that the expanding system is also being planned to support extensions in the languages of the world,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN’s Chairman. “This is going to be very important for the future of the Internet in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia.” The present system only supports 37 Roman characters.

Internet address suffix choice expanded
By Rob Minto in London
Published: June 27 2008 03:00 – Financial Times.

Businesses will be free to choose any suffix they please for their internet addresses after a decision yesterday to expand the choices beyond current staples such as “.com”, “.co” and “.org”.

The decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to liberalise the online naming system – allowing the creation of customised domain names – follows a three-year project.

“What we are now considering is a global equivalent of people moving to liberalised telecommunication markets or electricity markets,” Paul Twomey, Icann’s chief executive, said at the organisation’s meeting in Paris.

Icann, a non-profit body that co-ordinates the naming system, plans to accept the first round of applications for new domain names in April or May next year. It expects the cost of registering a new suffix to be at least $100,000 (€64,00, £50,000) – far higher than the current price of a “.com” name, which is as little as $14.

Some analysts worry that the changes could yield more costs for businesses operating online as they try to protect their presence on the web.

The last large-scale domain launch – of “.biz” in 2001 – did not reduce the popularity and dependency on the “.com” suffix. Registrations for “.biz” have lagged far behind “.com”, with fewer than 2m names in use compared with more than 77m for “.com”. A 2002 Harvard Law School study found that about 30 per cent of “.biz” registrations were made by organisations that already owned the “.com” version of their name.

The new move is unlikely to cause an immediate surge in the number of customised domain names online.

Icann hopes the high cost and a rigorous application process will deter any “domain squatters”, who purchase company-related domain names and try to sell them back to the company for a profit.

Any disputes over names would be referred to an independent arbitrator, who would consider existing trademarks and intellectual property rights.

However, Alex Burmaster, an analyst at the internet research company Nielsen Netratings, said fraudsters and “domaineers” – who buy up groups of domain names – were likely to benefit from the changes.

“We could see an exponential rise in dispute cases,” he said. “The two biggest losers will be businesses and customers. It will be a big cost for companies, and confusing with all the potential domains.”

Jonathan Robinson, chief operating officer of NetNames, a consultancy and registration company, said he feared that the move “would dilute online brands, putting them at risk. I’m not convinced this is being done in the right way”.

I remember first accessing the internet. If you wanted to know something you’d hit up a chatroom via one of the crappy browser chatrooms or IRC. Doing this you’d meet a ton of people. You’d break the ice by them helping you with your problem, or you helping them with theirs. You’d solve your problem and when you came back, you could discuss your solution. Heck, that’s all it took to meet a friend.

Read the rest…