Antony Van Couvering
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| Affiliation: | Minds + Machines | ||
| Country: | USA | ||
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| Facebook: |  Antony Van Couvering
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| Twitter: |  @antonyvc
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Antony Van Couvering is the CEO of Minds + Machines.[1] He is also the CEO of Top Level Domain Holdings, which is the parent company of Minds + Machines,[2] and an applicant for 92 gTLDs in ICANN's New gTLD Program.[3]
Van Couvering played a significant part in the early days of the creation of ccTLDs and subsequent ccTLD governance issues under the ICANN structure. He also chaired the meeting in Singapore which gave birth to the DNSO (later the GNSO) of ICANN.[4]
In a letter dated December 8th, 2011, Antony Van Couvering, along with twenty-seven other domain name industry representatives, wrote to Sen. John Rockefeller and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to support ICANN's new gTLD program, in response to the Senate Hearings taking place on the same day. They supported ICANN's argument that the program would be innovative and economically beneficial and noted that the program took a diverse group of international stakeholders years to develop.[5] The letter can be found here.
Career History
- He has been working in the domain name industry since 1996[6]
- He founded the company NetNames in 1997 and then sold it to NetBenefit.[7]
- He founded the company NameEngine in 1999, working with clients such as American Express, Bridgestone-Firestone, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Goodyear, Intel, Kodak, and Viacom, and with IP law firms including Fross Zelnick, Ladas & Parry, and Brown Raysman.[8]
- He sold NameEngine to Verisign in 2001 and then worked at Verisign till 2004.[9]
- Antony has started and managed several ccTLDs, including .tm, .as, .bt, and .pw
- Working under the direction of Jon Postel, he played a role in the reformation of the .us domain.
- He was head of the Policy Advisory Body under the old gTLD-MoU.
- He was the Chairman of the board of directors of DomainsBot.com.[10]
Education
Antony received a Bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia College in New York City.
Publications
- This is the document he wrote as a proposal to modify the .us domain. Read Online
- While working at NameEngine, he did research about Value Protection Index. Read Online
Videos
Van Couvering is interviewed by Gray Chynoweth at ICANN 42 in Dakar, Senegal, on the topic of what's next in the New gTLD Process.