...and Air Transport News chooses .aero

The recently launched Air Transport News - a daily e-mail and online newsletter produced in English by 11Aviation Publications, a specialist aviation publisher based in Athens, Greece - is affirming its industry credentials by using the .aero domain.

The newsletter (which can be found at www.airtransportnews.aero) provides a growing body of news and analysis, as well as a calendar of events, book reviews and industry-related jobs.

Adding real benefit to the .aero domain

An important part of the work of the .aero team is to help the industry explore and understand some of the innovative thinking that is a continuing feature of the Internet community.

For example, in October last year, .aero chaired a session at the US-based Air Transport Association's e-business forum to discuss DNSSec, the technology that adds significant security benefits to the domain name system (DNS).

Meet the registrars - Secura

Ever since the .aero domain was opened for business in March 2002, only members of the aviation community - including airlines, airports, aerospace companies, organizations, associations, government agencies and qualified individuals - have been able to register a .aero name.

Those registering for the first time must still obtain a Membership ID before signing up with one of the eleven registrars currently offering the service. The first of these, and still one of the domain's most active registrars, was Cologne-based Secura GmbH.

Spreading the word across North America...

Through June and July, the .aero domain is featuring on the home page of PartsBase.com, the world's largest on-line aviation market place. With a bias towards the massive North American market, the company nevertheless serves 23,000 end-users, representing some 4,500 member companies worldwide.

The .aero domain just keeps on growing

The .aero domain continues to offer a unique service to the industry, providing an exclusive top level domain as a development platform for innovative Internet-based services that use the well-established aviation naming and coding conventions.

Through 2006, there was a significant increase in registrants - 2,175 at 31 December 31, compared with around 1,800 a year earlier. This was undoubtedly helped by the success of the agreement with Afilias to provide registry services, signed at the very end of 2005 and implemented through 2006.

What's happening to the digital divide?

You may not have realized it, but 17 May was World Information Society Day, a moment set by the UN to remind the world of the vision set out at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005 to build "a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society".

The drivers behind the rhetoric are, of course, relevant to the global air transport community. The WSIS vision, after all, was for societies where information and communication are the main drivers of development.

Who owns and runs the Internet - the evolving role of ICANN

When the Internet Protocol was first developed, a crowd of networks evolved beginning with the US Government-funded ARPANET. Ultimately they were linked together to create what we know today as the Internet. From the outset, no-one owned the Internet.