Featured Blogs

Renesys Chronicles Today’s Internet Blackout in the Sudan (Now Restored)

The team over at Renesys has once again provided a great analysis of an Internet outage in a country, this time in Sudan. In the article simply titled "Internet Blackout in Sudan", Doug Madory writes: A few hours ago, we observed a total Internet blackout in Sudan and, as we publish this blog, the Internet remains largely unavailable. By count of impacted networks, it is the largest national blackout since Egypt disconnected itself in January 2011..." more

ICANN Opens GNSO Whois Study on Privacy/Proxy Abuse for Comment

ICANN has opened the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Whois study on privacy/proxy abuse for public comment. Performed by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), this study is one of many commissioned by the GNSO to examine the current, disparate, and often maligned registration directory service, and aims to measure the hypothesis that "a significant percentage of the domain names used to conduct illegal or harmful Internet activities are registered via privacy and proxy services to obscure the perpetrator's identity." more

Valuing IP Addresses

The prospect of exhaustion of the IPv4 address space is not a surprise. We've been anticipating this situation since at least 1990. But it's a "lumpy" form of exhaustion. It's not the case that the scarcity pressures for IP addresses are evidently to the same level in every part of the Internet. It's not the case that every single address is being used by an active device. A couple of decades ago we thought that an address utilisation ratio of 10% (where, for example, a block of 256 addresses would be used in a network with some 25 addressed devices) was a great achievement.  more

2% of All Traffic to Google Now Over IPv6! (Doubling in Past Year)

This weekend brought the great news that Google's IPv6 statistics have shown that connections over IPv6 to Google's web sites hit the 2% threshold for the first time. (You can see for yourself.) While 2% sounds tiny, as I wrote in a Deploy360 post today, the important fact here is that this represents a doubling of IPv6 traffic to Google over the past year! more

ICANN and Your Internet Abuse

In spite of the material we were presented with in Durban something has gone very wrong inside of ICANN Compliance. KnujOn has published a report which demonstrates that ICANN Compliance appears to completely collapse between September 2012 and December 2012. Following December 2012, ICANN seems to stop responding to or processing any complaints. It is around this time certain compliance employees start disappearing. This was not limited to the Sydney office as some would have us believe... more

Mobiles Moving Into Fixed Networks

There are often confused reports in the media about mobile and fixed broadband, with arguments that one could replace the other. Yet the reality is that they coexist and complement each other - perhaps even more so since one cannot manage without the other. Increasingly, devices such as smartphones, tablets and smart TVs are at the end of fixed lines, with a wireless (WiFi) connection between the fixed line and the device. more

ICANN - Dispenser of Internet Justice

The following is a paper presented as a keynote speech at Studienkreis 2013 in Pisa, Italy last week. ICANN is beginning to look more and more like a government. It assesses taxes, it has amassed an enormous treasury, it passes laws with international effect, and it has developed an ad hoc judiciary system to enforce its laws. This paper will take a look at that judiciary system and ICANN as dispenser of Internet justice. more

Bring Your .Brand to Life

A preview of my upcoming presentation for the Digital Marketing and gTLD Strategy Congress on why your Top-Level Domain (TLD) strategy is paramount to making or breaking your .brand... Your strategy will be the most significant weapon in your Top-Level Domain arsenal to drive the launch of your .brand, and you'll only get there with preparation and engagement. For the vast majority of .brand applicants, ICANN has recently informed you that you have passed your application. You've come this far. more

Key Steps for Operational Readiness and Successful Launch of a New gTLD

31 August 2013 marked a historic day for Internet users worldwide. It marked a very key day in the introduction of new gTLDs. On that day ICANN, who oversees the gTLD programme, six years in the making, announced the completion of gTLD Initial Evaluation (IE) results based applicant's ability to demonstrate their financial, technical and operational capability to operate and manage a TLD Registry. more

Privacy and the Future: Are We Good Trustees of the Internet?

Recently I was reminded of the words, "responsibilities and service to the community." To individuals involved in internet governance, these words should be well known. But have we lived by the code exemplified by these words? Have we lived up to the high standards that they represent? I have always been a student of history because it never fails to show me that humanity, on many occasions, tends to repeat the same mistakes. more

Spam Arrest’s Sender Agreement Fails Because Email Marketer’s Employees Lacked Authority

People hate receiving spam, but most people stopped obsessing about spam a decade ago or more. In the interim, anti-spam filters have improved dramatically. Still, some anti-spammers hate spam so passionately -- or, perhaps, hope to put a little coin in their pockets -- that we still see a steady stream of lawsuits against email marketers. For the most part, those lawsuits don't win; in the past half-decade, repeat anti-spam plaintiffs have rarely won in court. more

Wow. That’s a Lot of Reserved Names

ICANN recently updated the list of reserved second level domain names. Those are names that you won't be able to register in any of the 1500 or so new domains they're planning to add. There's rather a lot of them, currently 629. The names are in three groups, the ICRC (the Red Cross), the IOC (the Olympic games) and everyone else. Several years ago the Red Cross and later the Olympics came to ICANN and insisted that they make a special list of forbidden names, separate from the various trademark registries. more

DNS Amplification Attacks: Out of Sight, Out of Mind? (Part 3)

Previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) offer background on DNS amplification attacks being observed around the world. These attacks continue to evolve. Early attacks focused on authoritative servers using "ANY" queries for domains that were well known to offer good amplification. Response Rate Limiting (RRL) was developed to respond to these early attacks. RRL, as the name suggests, is deployed on authoritative servers to rate limit responses to target names. more

Neustar Analysis Shows ICANN Study Overstates Risk of Harmful Domain-Name Collision

As we blogged about recently, Neustar is committed to ensuring that the domain name system is secure and stable and has been operating top-level domains (TLDs) for over a decade. Tuesday, Neustar submitted comments to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in response to ICANN's proposal to delay the launch of hundreds of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN's decision to delay the launch is based on a study it commissioned that measured the potential frequency of domain-name collision. more

Who Are the True Multi-Stakeholders in ICANN?

During ICANN Durban, I attended the Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO) 10 year anniversary celebrations. ICANN Chairman, Dr Steve Crocker, was on hand to congratulate the ccNSO on their 10 years and revered them as the "true multi-stakeholders in ICANN". Post Durban, I was reviewing notes and I came across a similar statement made during a ccNSO session that country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) "represent the best functioning multi-stakeholder model" in the ICANN ecosystem. Is this entirely accurate? more