Featured Blogs

CircleID’s Top 10 Posts of 2018

It is once again time for our annual review of posts that received the most attention on CircleID during the past year. Congratulations to all the 2018 participants for sharing their thoughts and making a difference in the industry. more

Political New gTLDs: One Year in Review

Once a month, at the end of the month, a snapshot of domain name registration volumes is taken according to categories of new gTLDs. Twenty categories are covered and this article covers Political new gTLDs. These snapshots allow having a global overview of which extensions increase their volume of domain names registered from a month to the other, in a period of 12 months. Below is what I noticed from January 2018 to December 2018 for domain name extensions related to politics. more

Internet Governance Outlook 2019: Innovative Multilateralism vs. Neo-Nationalistic Unilateralism

What says the "Crystal Ball" for the Internet Governance Ecosystem in 2019? In a best case scenario, we will take three steps to Cyber-Heaven. In the worst case scenario we will take three steps to Cyber-Hell. The middle way is no "digital big bang", but some small "digital goodies" and some small "digital disasters". Stumbling further forward into the digital cyberworld. However, 2019 could also go into the history books as the year of "digital wisdom". more

Who Played a Major Role in Advancing the Internet? Nominations Open for 2019 Internet Hall of Fame

Do you know someone who has played a major role in the development and advancement of the Internet? Now is the time to recognize their contribution. Nominate them for the 2019 Internet Hall of Fame. With more than 100 inductees, the Internet Hall of Fame celebrates Internet pioneers and innovators who have pushed the boundaries to bring the Internet to life and make it an essential resource for billions of people today. more

Typosquatting as Per Se Cybersquatting Unless Proved Otherwise

The quintessence of typosquatting is syntactical variation: adding, omitting, replacing, substituting, and transposing words and letters. Since these minor variations are mostly indefensible, respondents rarely respond to complaints, although as I will explain in a moment there can also be innocent and good faith syntactical variations which are not typosquatting. It follows that if there are defenses, respondents should prudently respond and explain their choices because default generally favors complainants. more

Are We Ready to Defend Our Freedom? Book Review: “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

It is not often that you read a book where afterward nothing seems the same again. Like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Shoshana Zuboff's book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,, puts what we do in these times into a context and gives a focus to ongoing issues of privacy and governance with regard to the Domain Name System. This is even more astonishing as the book does not even mention the DNS, the Internet ecosystem or even Internet Governance directly. more

ITU-T Takes Lead on Drone IoT Identification in 2019

In today's fast-paced world of IoT, perhaps one of the most significant involves the rapid identification of civilian drones -- more formally known as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The identification of civilian UAVs has become a critical public safety concern today. Establishing a flexible, trusted global means for identifying these objects through worldwide supply chains and resolving the identifier tags to a responsible party rapidly via a network-based resolver is a high priority. more

The Christmas Goat and IPv6 (Year 9)

Here we are with the ninth year of measuring IPv6 on the Christmas Goat. Last year we had almost no snow and it's almost the same this year. This year I give you 50 seconds of "action" film with the goat from the early in December. But the measurement was a big disappointment. They started high with 60% IPv6 and went down to 41% at the end. But as can be seen with the progress, next year we should easily break the 50% barrier! more

Simulation of OneWeb, SpaceX and Telesat’s Proposed Global Broadband Constellations

Inigo del Portillo and his colleagues at MIT have run a simulation comparing OneWeb, SpaceX and Telesat's proposed low-Earth orbit Internet service constellations. The models are based on the initial FCC filings by the companies and demand and data-rate estimates by the authors. I will mention subsequent amendments to the filings below later in the post. more

Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Internet Service Developments for 2018

At the end of 2017, I posted a review of important LEO-satellite Internet service developments. I've been updating those posts during the year and have also added the following new posts in 2018. ... SpaceX, OneWeb and Telesat are planning to offer Internet-service from LEO, but O3b is already providing connectivity to relatively large customers like mobile phone companies, government organizations, and cruise ship lines using a constellation of medium-Earth orbit (MEO) satellites.  more

IPv6 in China

Much has been written about the progress of the adoption of IPv6 over the years. I know I've been guilty of adding my writings into the pool, and this article is a further contribution to that pool of observations and measurements. In this case, I want to look in some detail at the deployment of IPv6 in China. Why is China so important in this story of IPv6 deployment? more

IoT in Africa: Urgent Regulation Required

Globally, people are connecting more and more "things" to the Internet. Devices that were traditionally offline or dumb like refrigerators, cars, watches, home cameras, air condition, door locks, agriculture monitoring devices, etcetera, are now being connected to the Internet. This is referred to as the "Internet of Things" (IoT). Using sensors, IoT devices collect data of some sort, which is then most likely shared over a network connection to a service provider, where some analysis is performed on the data. more

CPH TechOps Retrospective 2018

From the perspective of the domain name industry, 2018 was strongly influenced by, among other things, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Temporary Specification and especially the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP). For the Contracted Parties House (CPH) TechOps Group, one year after its foundation, it was a very exciting and intensive time. This initiative was created to tackle technical and operational needs and challenges plus ideally to create best practices. more

OneWeb’s Offer to Sell a Share of Their Satellite Internet Service to Russia

OneWeb has a contract to launch Internet-service satellites on Russian-made Soyuz rockets and has a joint venture with Gonets, a Russian satellite operator, as a marketing partner in Russia. However, the Russian government has expressed concerns about security, dragged their feet on spectrum allocation and complained about US sanctions. This led OneWeb to make two concessions. more

2018 Domain Name Year in Review

Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year when I look back at all of the biggest domain news stories from the last twelve months, and also reflect on my predictions from last year. As expected, GDPR has had a major impact on the ability to access domain ownership information. And we did indeed see a number of M&A transactions over this last year. However, there wasn't a lot of new .Brand activity. This is one prediction where I may have missed the mark... more