Antony Van Couvering
Antony Van Couvering is head of the Names@Work consultancy. He also serves on the Board of DomainsBot and acts as an advisor to them.
Antony has been working with domain names since he founded Netnames USA in 1997. He started three domain name companies (NetNames USA, RegisterFREE, and NameEngine) and later sold them, the last one to VeriSign. He also started up several ccTLDs, including .TM, .BT, .AS and others.
Names@Work is currently focused on helping applicants in the new round of top-level domains from ICANN.
He maintains a healthy skepticism about the motives and abilities of people with their hands on the levers of power, and feels that ICANN is valuable as a limitless source for outrage and comedy. He helped contribute to some of that as co-chair of the 1999 Singapore meeting that created the ICANN constituencies, and after that as one of the elected leaders of the Country-code TLD Constituency under ICANN prior to its morph into the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization.
Prior to ICANN, Antony was head of the Policy Advisory Body under the old gTLD-MoU, where he made life difficult for the ruling junta on the Policy Oversight Committee. In the formative years of ICANN, he chaired the meeting where the DNSO (now GNSO) was formed, and later founded the International Association of Top Level Domains, which was devoted to protecting ccTLD administrators from the predations of corrupt or stupid governments.
[edit] Contact
Names@Work +1 212 254-5961
avc [at] namesatwork [dot] com
[edit] Address
- Names@Work
- 256 Fifth Ave, 4th Floor
- New York, NY 10001
External Links
ICANNwiki: An industry resource fostering global collaboration and transparency within the ICANN community
