Earlier today ICANN held a webinar to provide an update on their data privacy activities in relation to whois and GDPR. Rather than simply talking about the various "models" they produced both a visual mapping as well as a matrix. While some attendees may not agree with how all the models are classified it is still a helpful way of showing the deviations from the current fully public whois model for gTLD domain name registrations. more
The defining of rights in the UDRP process is precisely what WIPO and ICANN contemplated, but it is unlikely they foresaw the destination of the jurisprudence. Since its inception, UDRP Panels have adjudicated over 75,000 disputes, some involving multiple domain names. (These numbers, incidentally, are a tiny fraction of the number of registered domain names in legacy and new top-level domains, which exceeded 320 million in the first quarter 2017). more
The way the Internet operates drove a wedge between strings of lexical and numeric characters used as marks and alphanumeric strings used as addresses. Domain names were described by Steve Forbes in a 2007 press release as virtual real estate. It is, he said, analogous to the market in real property: "Internet traffic and domains are the prime real estate of the 21st century." more
The Caribbean suffered six major storms in 2017, including the record-breaking Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria. In the unprecedented destruction, the islands of Dominica and Barbuda lost all communication and telecommunications service, and eight other Caribbean countries were severely disrupted. Each hurricane season wreaks greater devastation than the last, yet decreased telecommunications competition, inadequate regulation, and high national debt burdens in the region yield ever-diminishing infrastructural investment. more
Unicode's goal, which it meets quite well, is that whatever text you want to represent in whatever language, dead or alive, Unicode can represent the characters or symbols it uses. Any computer with a set of Unicode typefaces and suitable layout software can display that text. In effect, Unicode is primarily a typesetting language. Over in the domain name system, we also use Unicode to represent non-ASCII identifiers. That turns out to be a problem because an identifier needs a unique form, something that doesn't matter for typesetting. more
To put it bluntly, the proposal cited in Axios story on "Trump team considers nationalizing 5G network" doesn't make sense on a number of levels. The real danger comes if this indeed represents the NSC's failure to understand Internet style connectivity. The proposal may just be the work of an NSC staffer who accepted all the 5G hype as if it were real. I credit the Axios article for having some skepticism... more
President Obama began working on Cuban rapprochement during his 2009 presidential campaign. After over five years of thought and negotiation, the Whitehouse announced a major shift in Cuba policy, which included allowing telecommunications providers "to establish the necessary mechanisms, including infrastructure, in Cuba to provide commercial telecommunications and Internet services, which will improve telecommunications between the United States and Cuba." more
Before the Internet, the sole competition for strings of characters employable as marks was other businesses vying to use the same strings for their own products and services. National registries solved this competition by allowing businesses in different channels of commerce to register the same strings but prohibiting competitors in the same industries from using identical or confusingly similar marks on the grounds that they were likely (at best) to create confusion and (at worst) to deceive the public. more
This seemed to be the reaction this morning worldwide to the leaked alleged PowerPoint slides detailing the White House strategic options for a U.S. national 5G infrastructure. The gist of the slides has apparently been confirmed to Reuters by unnamed "Trump security team members." The options apparently range between creating a U.S. Ministry of 5G resembling the old world of government Post, Telegraph and Telecommunication (PTT) agencies of bygone years, and sawing off the U.S. ICT infrastructures and services from the rest of the world. more
On January 24, 2018, ICANN's Business Constituency (BC) and Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) co-hosted an event to discuss the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its implications on access to the WHOIS database. ICANN's CEO and General Counsel joined the discussion, as did stakeholders from across the ICANN community. The event was timely and well attended with over 200 participants attending in-person or virtually. more
I am a student of life, learning one hard lesson at a time. In fact, I actually dropped out of my last year of college to start a tech company in a new space called the internet. I was an entrepreneur running an online service prior to the advent of the world wide web in 1992, back when Pine, Usenet, and Gopher ruled the information superhighway. Over the last 25 years, I have learned a great deal about technology adoption cycles by launching six internet companies, each at the forefront of a new technology wave. more
There is no doubt that the Internet continues to grow. While the sales volumes of the more traditional forms of personal computers has peaked at some 430 million units per year and sales of handheld smart devices has also peaked at some 1.9 billion units per year, the world of the Internet of Things continues to spiral upward. The installed base of these "things" is now at an astonishing 8.4 billion at the end of 2017. more
Alain Durand, Principal Technologist at ICANN, visited Georgia Institute of Technology last week for a talk on the global adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The Internet Governance Project organized the talk in cooperation with Atlanta's Technology Development Center (ATDC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy. Durand, who was involved in the IPv6 standardization efforts at IETF back in the early to mid-1990s, offered a clear eyed assessment of the protocol's critical flaw... more
The Trademark Act of 1946 defines trademarks and service marks to include "any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof." Marks composed of lexical and numeric elements (as opposed to images) also can be described as strings of characters. Before the Internet there was no commercial use of such strings other than as marks, but the functionality of the Internet depends on strings of lexical and numeric characters in the form of domain names that serve as electronic addresses. more
The typical daily accounting of decisions filed in disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) may include an award or two dismissing complaints (three is particularly noteworthy: weddingfleamarket.com, dme.com, and scheduleflow.com from the Forum for January 20, 2018), but overwhelmingly complaints are granted not dismissed. Let us imagine a trademark or service mark that is neither a dictionary word nor composed of common combinations, would anyone be surprised when the Panel rules in Complainant's favor? more
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