Featured Blogs

Think ICANN Will End Up Rolling in New gTLD Cash? Think Again!

January 2014. The first registry contracts have been signed. The first Sunrise priority registration periods have been opened. The new gTLD program is well on the way. So maybe now, at last, we can start to find out the real costs of opening up the Internet root? And how much revenue doing so has brought ICANN! Short answer: ICANN has taken in USD 344.958 million from the first round of new gTLD applications. The figure comes from the first of ICANN's quarterly financial statements, covering the three months up until September 30th. more

Cloud Marketplaces Help Cut Through Confusing IaaS Pricing

A recent study from 451 Research reveals some interesting facts about the nature and complexity of cloud pricing. In theory, one of the major benefits of using the cloud is that on-demand pricing makes it easy to know exactly how much a company will be spending and avoid large-scale capital expenditure. That's certainly true, but the cloud space has yet to develop into a fully mature market, which means that companies have to tangle with wildly different pricing models and the cost itself can vary between vendors. more

The Christmas Goat and IPv6 (Year 4)

This year, 2013, I got 24 days of IPv6 and DNSSEC measurements. All in all it created 15GB logs with more than 62 million rows. On the 21st of December, early in the morning, the goat was "traditionally" burnt down, however this year with one exception. Via the Swedish newspaper Expressen the arsonists anonymously took the blame and also filmed their own act. more

Rewiring Internet Governance: Summing up ICANN Policy Walking Backward Into the Future (Part 4)

So-called "globalization" and its corollaries which are trade policy and, thus, foreign policy intersect with telecommunications. This ought to be obvious and it is not new. For example, in December 2011, OECD adopted its "Recommendation of the Council on Principles for Internet Policy Making", the latter which apparently connects with an earlier U.S. cyberspace strategy based on something called the "Internet Freedom Agenda" dated 21 January 2010... more

It’s Time for Privacy Progress in ICANN

Privacy issues have been important to parts of the ICANN community for many years. I can attest to that fact as a long time veteran of Whois debates as far back as 1998 when I was with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. However, they have started to receive the general ICANN community visibility only relatively recently. These efforts must continue in order to protect rights, to avoid increasing potential conflicts between ICANN rules and applicable laws, and to generally maintain trust in the Internet as a place to be. more

Internet Governance Outlook 2014: Good News, Bad News, No News?

What does the crystal ball say for the Internet in 2014? Here are three scenarios for what could happen with the global Internet Governance Eco-System in the coming 12 months... In the worst case scenario the Internet gets more and more fragmented and re-nationalized. A growing number of governments start to define a "national Internet segment" and develop policies to surveil, censor and control access to and use of the Internet. National firewalls will separate the "domestic Internet" from the global Internet and an exit and entrance regime into networks is introduced where users need passwords, handed out by governmental authorities on an annual basis, to go from one domain to another... more

The Naive Arrogance of FUSSPs

Everyone who's been in the e-mail biz long enough knows the term FUSSP, Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem, as described in a checklist from Vern Schryver and a form response that's been floating around the net for a decade. FUSSPs fall into two general categories, bad ideas that won't go away, and reasonable ideas that are oversold. more

From Wikileaks of 2012 to Snowden’s NSA Leaks of 2013: Implications for Global Internet Governance

2012 will always be remembered as the Year of Wikileaks. Similarly, 2013 shall also be remembered as the year that Edward Snowden, a computer security specialist and former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor, leaked classified information regarding the NSA global surveillance programs. Whilst Wikileaks was about US diplomatic cables, the Edward Snowden disclosure of classified NSA information to private media organizations such as the UK Guardian newspaper has had graver implications for global Internet privacy. more

Panel on Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms

The Internet is at a crossroads. And while high-profile events like the introduction of new gTLDs and revelations about governments and online surveillance may be a catalyst for recent Internet governance reform initiatives, their necessity isn't exactly new. After all, the current structures and processes in place were set up a decade and a half ago, an eternity in Internet years. A key step in reviewing and renewing these structures is the Panel on the Future of Global Internet Cooperation, announced at the recent ICANN meeting in Buenos Aires. more

100 Years of Monopoly Phone Service

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Kingsbury Commitment which effectively established AT&T, a.k.a. The Bell System, as a government sanctioned monopoly. It was on December 19, 1913 that AT&T agreed to an out-of-court settlement of a US Government's anti-trust challenge. In return for the government agreeing not to pursue its case, AT&T agreed to sell its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph company... more

Contention for Three More gTLDs Resolved in Fourth Applicant Auction

The Fourth Applicant Auction has concluded, resolving contention for three more strings. Donuts Inc. came away from the auction as the winner of all three strings: .LIFE, .CHURCH, and .LOANS. Life Covenant Church, Inc. will be compensated for withdrawing their application for .CHURCH, and Radix will be compensated for their withdrawal from .LOANS, while Xiamen 35.com Technology Co.,Ltd and CompassRose will be compensated for their withdrawal from .LIFE. more

Identify DDoS Attacks with External Performance Monitoring (Part 2 of 3)

In Part One of this series, we examined internal server, network and infrastructure monitoring applications. Now let's take a look at another way to capture DDoS information: external performance monitoring... Unlike network/infrastructure tools - which are usually installed inside a customer's network - external performance monitoring solutions are typically provided by a third party and leverage monitoring locations from around the world. more

Name Collisions II - A Call for Research

This post is a heads up to all uber-geeks about a terrific research initiative to try to figure out causes and mitigation of name-collision risk. There's a $50,000 prize for the first-place paper, a $25,000 prize for the second place paper and up to five $10,000 prizes for third-place papers. That kind of money could buy a lot of toys, my peepul. And the presentation of those papers will be in London -- my favorite town for curry this side of India. Interested? Read on. more

Rewiring Internet Governance: U.S. Government Will Likely Be Forced to Jettison ICANN (Part 3)

The survival thesis mentioned in Part 2 goes like this. ICANN's imaginary mandate is global. But the mind set is provincial. The latter is defensive; focused on keeping power and therefore control over internet policy. But the evidence points to policy actions that contradict policy rhetoric. Discrepancies disclose the delusion. Here's ICANN "core value" from Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 6 (amended April, 2013): "Introducing and promoting competition in the registration of domain names where practicable and beneficial in the public interest." more

The Mosque and the Bazaar: Islam, ICANN, and the New gTLD Program

The launch of the new gTLD program in January, 2012 was undoubtedly one of the finest moments for ICANN; and rightly so. The launch was a culmination of thousands of hours of hard work by thousands of people from various countries, interests, and walks of life. In the end, a 338-page Applicant Guidebook with details about how the new gTLD program was to be implemented was produced. Thus was set the stage for the greatest cyberland rush in history. more