Featured Blogs

What Is the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) and What Is It Good For?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) launched the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) (2013) in anticipation of the marketing of new gTLDs that became available from November 2013. It is one of four new rights protection mechanisms (RPMs) designed to combat cybersquatting. It is not intended for legacy gTLDs, and for new TLDs, it is planned only for that class of dispute colloquially referred to as a "slam dunk." more

Why Are the EU Data Protection Authorities Taking Away Our Fundamental Right to be Safe?

What if we created a rule that gave everyone - good or bad - the right to hide their license plate, where they live, who they are, and just go incognito? What if we made it a right to walk into any building in the world, and simply say "No, thank you" when the security guards asked for one's identification? The criminals would celebrate, and we'd all be utterly alarmed. We would immediately be afraid for our personal safety. more

A Climate of Change for the Caribbean Internet

Spring storms with winter qualities clobbered North America this week, threatening Canada with slow-moving storms, and pounding the United States with near-record snowfall in the midwest, low temperatures in the south and tornadoes further east. You could say change was in the air. And although the unseasonable weather didn't reach as far south as Florida, the climate of change still dominated the atmosphere at the fifteenth regional meeting of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG). more

Call for Participation - ICANN DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN62, Panama City

Would you like to share information about how you are using DNSSEC with the wider technical community? Do you have an idea for how to make DNSSEC or DANE work better? Or work with new applications? If so - and if you will be attending ICANN 62 in Panama City, Panama from 25-28 June 2018 - then please consider sending in a proposal to participate as a speaker in the ICANN 62 DNSSEC Workshop! more

Cuba Reaches Five Million Mobile Accounts

Cubans now have 5 million mobile accounts. The five-millionth account was recently opened Guanabacoa, in the eastern part of Havana and we see here that growth slowed last year, but has resumed -- perhaps due to increased 3G availability. Most Cubans have 2G phones, which are used primarily for making calls and sending text messages that may have attached images. more

The Fight Is on to Save Access to WHOIS: A Call to Action for Brand Owners

Late last week, ICANN published the guidance from the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) that we have been waiting for. Predictably, WP29 took a privacy maximalist approach to the question of how Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to WHOIS, a tool widely used by cybersecurity professionals, businesses, intellectual property owners, consumer protection agencies and others to facilitate a safer and more secure internet.  more

ARIN Seeks Caribbean candidate for Board of Trustees

Persons from the Caribbean seeking to contribute to the governance ecosystem of the global Internet can now volunteer for an appointment to the board of trustees of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The call for volunteers will close on April 30 at 5 pm EDT. ARIN is one of five registries worldwide that coordinate Internet number resources. Its region spans the United States, Canada and many countries in the Caribbean. more

DNS Complexity Lessons

Recently, Bert Hubert wrote of a growing problem in the networking world: the complexity of DNS. We have two systems we all use in the Internet, DNS and BGP. Both of these systems appear to be able to handle anything we can throw at them and "keep on ticking." But how far can we drive the complexity of these systems before they ultimately fail? Bert posted a chart on the APNIC blog to illustrate the problem. more

Is Blockchain Causing More Cybersecurity Attacks in the Financial Industry?

There's a lot of misunderstanding about blockchain. A recent study by HSBC, for example, found that 59 percent of customers around the world had never heard of it. Yet, while that alone is quite telling, it's probably more alarming to consider the fact that very same poll revealed that 80 percent of people who had hard of blockchain did not understand what it is. This level of confusion isn't confined to the general population either. more

GDPR and WHOIS - We’ve Heard from the Article 29 Working Party, Now What?

Well, here we are on Friday the 13th and I couldn't think of a better way to spend the day than providing an update on GDPR, WHOIS and ICANN. There's lots to cover, so let's dive right in. As we have been talking about for a number of months now, the EU's new General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) will become enforceable on May 25th. The ICANN community has been struggling with how GDPR will impact the WHOIS system. more

US Congress Re-Launches Treaty Talks on Internet Economy

Final echoes of the US Senate committee's questions of Facebook this week will only fade in the UN Security Council where, in a few years, Member States will adopt a treaty on regulation of the Internet Economy. By opening wide the door to questions on privacy, revenue, security and purpose, Congress showed its well-placed concern and signaled that others can too. more

7th Registration Operations Workshop (ROW), Vancouver, Thursday May 17th 2018

The Registration Operations Workshop (ROW) was conceived as an informal industry conference that would provide a forum for discussion of the technical aspects of registration operations in the domain name system. The 7th ROW will be held in Vancouver, Canada on Thursday, May 17th 2018 in the afternoon, at the end of the GDD Industry Summit, in the same venue. more

Why Getting Awards Wrong Undermines the Integrity of the UDRP

The integrity of any legal system depends on the quality of mind of those appointed to administer it. There are expectations that the one judging the facts and applying the law knows what the facts are and what law to apply. Panels appointed to adjudicate disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) are not held to any lower standard than the judges of courts of competent jurisdiction. more

Game Over for Public Whois? Article 29 Gives ICANN the Advice It Asked For

We've talked about the conflicts between our ICANN contract and privacy law in the past. Not once, not twice, but multiple times. We refused to sign the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN until we'd received a data retention waiver. That decision probably cost us money, but if we have to choose between operating legally or illegally our path is clear. more

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today we remember that the Nazis rounded up Jews, Roma, political dissidents, and other "undesirables" using the best data and technology of the day and sent them off to concentration camps. We don't normally deal with this type of political reality in ICANN, but now is the time to do so. In 1995, the recently formed European Union passed the EU Data Protection Directive. more