Akram Atallah and Fiona Alexander have been added to the NamesCon agenda.
NamesCon, taking place in Las Vegas January 11-14, has added a couple big names to its agenda for the first full day of the conference.
On Monday, January 12, I will have a fireside chat with the president of ICANN’s Global Domains Division, Akram Atallah (pictured). Atallah is in charge of generic domain operations, domain name industry engagement and web services at ICANN. This includes new top level domain names.
Fiona Alexander has also been added to the schedule for Monday, and will give opening remarks. Alexander is Associate Administrator, Office of International Affairs, NTIA, US Department of Commerce. It’s the Department of Commerce that is involved with Verisign’s contract to run .com, and it’s also the group that currently assigns the contract for IANA functions. This is the contract currently at the center of much discussion about the U.S. government “giving up control” of the internet.
These are two big additions for NamesCon, and it shows the breadth of the conference. NamesCon is shaping up to appeal to all segments of the domain name industry.
Jay says
Getting heavy-hitters from the policy side is great and I hope Lau and other big time domain investors use the opportunity to also influence their thinking to take better into account also the domain investor side when making policy decisions but I hope Namescon does not overdo the policy side and turn into ICANN-lite.
I hope to see many entrepreneurs who built successful businesses using keyword term and exact match domains.
Last years highlights were Shoemoney and Mullenweg.
Kassey says
It’ll be great if those of us who can’t attend the conference can watch it on the Internet. Google I/O etc are already doing that. Will NamesCon do it too?
Richard Lau says
No… we aren’t doing video streaming and likely won’t be doing video recording of sessions either. You’ll need to come and see it all live!