Featured Blogs

Video Interviews of IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) Members

Want to know more about what is going on with the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG)? ICANN recently published a set of video interviews with members of the ICG. Here, for instance is the interview with Alissa Cooper who represents the IETF on the ICG... While this is certainly not the complete list of ICG members, it is a good sampling of the variety of people involved with the ICG and does provide a range of different viewpoints into what is going on within the ICG process. more

Call for Nominations: M3AAWG J. D. Falk Award Seeks Stewards of a Better Online World

Anyone seeking to honor a groundbreaking contribution toward a better online world should submit a nomination for the 2014 M3AAWG J. D. Falk Award. Presented to people whose work on specific projects made the Internet a safer, more collaborative, more inclusive place, the J. D. Falk Award has recognized leaders and pioneers who saw elements of the online experience that needed improvement and took action to fix them.  more

Gmail Now Supports Internationalized Domain Names

If your first language isn't English and you don't use the Latin character set you can and will run into barriers. While Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) i.e. domain names where either the left of the dot, the right of the dot or the entire string is in characters other than Latin ones, do exist and have existed for a number of years not all services work well with them. more

Six Approaches to Creating an Enterprise Cyber Intelligence Program

As few as seven years ago, cyber-threat intelligence was the purview of a small handful of practitioners, limited mostly to only the best-resourced organizations - primarily financial institutions that faced large financial losses due to cyber crime - and defense and intelligence agencies involved in computer network operations. Fast forward to today, and just about every business, large and small, is dependent on the Internet in some way for day-to-day operations, making cyber intelligence a critical component of a successful business plan. more

Is ICANN’s .IR Response at Odds with the ACPA and ICE Domain Seizures?

An initial review of ICANN's response to litigation seeking it to turn over control of the ccTLDs of Iran, Syria and North Korea led to the conclusion that it had opened a "legal can of worms". A few more just wriggled out, and they threaten the basic assumption that underlies the U.S. statute governing cybersquatting and the practices engaged in by Federal officials seizing domain names engaged in intellectual property infringement. more

From Telegraph (1914) to Twitter (2014) - Are There Lessons to Be Learned?

Could the Great War have been avoided if leaders had gotten together and negotiated in person instead of exchanging telegrams? In the voluminous historiography of the origins of WWI, there is a very little on the role of the telegraph. Today, as Twitter takes its place conference rooms, we can learn a lot from the failure of telegraph diplomacy one century ago... The telegraph introduced the notion of 'virtual presence'; for the first time in human history, communication was detached from transportation. more

Anti-Spoofing, BCP 38, and the Tragedy of the Commons

In the seminal 1968 paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" , Garrett Hardin introduced the world to an idea which eventually grew into a household phrase. In this blog article I will explore whether Hardin's tragedy applies to anti-spoofing and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the Internet, or not... Hardin was a biologist and ecologist by trade, so he explains "The Tragedy of the Commons" using a field, cattle and herdsmen. more

“Requiescat in Pace” - the new .RIP Generic Top-Level Domain

I thought "RIP" stood for "Rest In Peace". I thought it was an acronym used in English only and a TLD that would be understood by the next generation; because no one would ever register such a domain name ending in .RIP today. When you say "RIP", it makes you think of death... I have also said that such a TLD was something... typically American and that no other culture would consider buying such domain names because promoting death online is something a bit odd. more

New Internet Domain Names Need a Backstory to Succeed

If web address registrations are any indication (and they may not be), the hundreds of new Internet domains (where .guru competes with .com and .berlin intrudes on .de) are seeing slow, but steady success. By one count, there are about 2 million new online addresses. Slow and steady may wind up being the best business model, but if the effect of the top level domains is to be felt in business, culturally and socially, there needs to be more done than create the opportunity to register a new name... more

The Mobile Messaging Wars - and Why Facebook Is Forcing Users to Use Its Messenger App

In the ongoing war for mobile messaging dominance and "what will replace SMS", Facebook has decided to annoy a serious part of their user base and force all mobile users to move to Facebook's separate Messenger app. In a short period of time, you will be forced to install the Messenger app if you want to send messages to Facebook friends while using your iOS or Android mobile phone. more

ICANN’s .IR Response Opens Legal Can of Worms

ICANN has filed its initial response to writs of attachment issued by U.S. Courts that seek to have ICANN transfer control of the country code top level domains (ccTLDs) of Iran, Syria and North Korea to plaintiffs in various legal actions. The lawsuits were brought under a U.S. law that permits victims of terrorism and their family survivors to seek the assets of governments that provided support or direction of the terrorist acts. more

Mix It Up: Key Ingredients of Successful Cloud Management Systems

The cloud cuts both ways; while the ability to spin up compute power on demand has empowered even small businesses to compete on a global scale, this same flexibility has led to a significant amount of "cloud sprawl." According to Tech Radar, 61 percent of companies surveyed said cloud sprawl - both from employees using unauthorized services and not fully utilizing approved resources - is responsible for business-wide inefficiencies. Bottom line? more

A Financial Back-Up to Win .WINE?

Still want to protect wine Geographical Indications (GIs)? A hot potato! Where the bucket ends is still to be found and the launching of both .WINE and .VIN new gTLDs is still an issue. At least some of the three applicants are following the ICANN new gTLD applicant guidebook, working with parties interested in bringing better protection mechanism to protect wine GIs. There seems to have been an attempt which has not worked... more

Some Internet Measurements

At APNIC Labs we've been working on developing a new approach to navigating through some of our data sets the describe aspects of IPv6 deployment, the use of DNSSEC and some measurements relating to the current state of BGP. The intent of this particular set of data collections is to allow the data to be placed into a relative context, displaying comparison of the individual measurements at a level of geographic regions, individual countries, and individual networks. more

NTIA’s FOIA Disclosures Shed Limited Light on IANA Transition Decision

On March 27, 2014, shortly after the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) March 14th announcement of its intent to transfer its counterparty status on ICANN's IANA functions contract to the global multistakeholder community, the conservative advocacy organization Americans for Limited Government (ALG) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with NTIA. ALG's request was for disclosure of "All records relating to legal and policy analysis developed by or provided to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) that support its decision to "transition key internet domain name functions," including any analysis showing whether the NTIA has the legal authority to perform the transition." more