Heads to London next month — .Nxt conference
.Nxt moves across the pond.
The third .Nxt conference covering issues related to fresh top level domains takes place June 20-22 at Victoria Park Plaza in London.
I caught up with show founder Kieren McCarthy yesterday to discuss his latest show.
Following holding two conferences in San Francisco, McCarthy stated a number of interested attendees asked him to hold a show in Europe. With ICANN holding a meeting in Prague starting June 24, McCarthy felt that a stop of in London made sense. (It doesn’t hurt that McCarthy is from London.)
Like those applying for fresh TLDs, ICANN’s TAS snafu and subsequent timeline delay is forcing .Nxt to constantly shake up its programming. It had hoped to have a list of all fresh TLD applicants by now. But that list is at least a couple weeks away from being published. It’s possible it won’t even be out by the time .Nxt takes place.
“ICANN’s issue has made life a little bit more difficult,” explained McCarthy. “But that’s ICANN. We ought to have known better.”
The conference includes tracks regarding fresh gTLDs themselves as well as regarding internet governance.
“All of these firms that are regarding to become registries, whether they know it or not, need to become aware of the internet governance world,” stated McCarthy. He stated that decisions being made by people and groups they don’t know yet will have a huge impact on their businesses.
“People just seem to think the internet will go along as it has always gone along,” he stated.
McCarthy thinks the session “SOPA and What it Means for the Future of Internet Policy” will be particularly interesting. A session on “Why We Love (and Hate) the Multi-stakeholder Model” ought to also attract some spirited discussion.
A session regarding .brand ought to be well attended if, as many consultants predict, 60% or so of applications are from brands.
McCarthy also states he has a great keynote lined up that will hopefully be revealed in the next week.
McCarthy expects 175-200 people to attend. He was expecting more until the ICANN timeline got pushed back, but pitches five reasons people ought to attend.
3-day passes are £599.00 through June 12.
