Featured Blogs

Understand the Value of Defensive Domain Registrations

The bulk of corporate domain portfolios largely consist of defensive registrations which often include common misspellings, product names, and abbreviations in countries where they may not even be doing business. More than ever, with the launch of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) expected to occur next year, companies are now taking a hard look at their defensive holdings and asking themselves whether or not they really need all of these registrations. more

It’s Time for the New gTLD Delays to End

The next few short weeks in the run-up to ICANN's Cartagena meeting could prove the most important time yet for the organization to show that it is a credible and capable overseer of the domain name system. After over two years of delays, tens of thousands of email exchanges, weeks of heated face-to-face discussions, and many millions of accumulated frequent flier miles, the time has arrived for ICANN to finally draw a line under the new top-level domain policy-development process and name the date for the opening of the first-round application window. more

Global Spam Levels Drop Following Certain Events

If you haven't noticed lately, spam levels around the world have started dropping especially in October after a couple of events occurred. The first is a Russian crackdown on alleged spam king Igor Gusev, thought to be involved in the operations of SpamIt.com. SpamIt mysteriously shut down in late September, perhaps because Gusev caught wind of law enforcement starting to take notice of him. more

Broadband Challenge Isn’t About Plumbing

It seems to me that too many people have focused government attention on intervening in the supply of broadband facilities. Let's face it, it is easier to look at a dozen or so suppliers to gather information and figure out who should receive a cheque to help direct their investment in broadband facilities. On the other side of the equation, it is hard work to stimulate demand. But this is precisely where our efforts should be focused, as was recommended by the recent report... more

IPv6 for Mobile Networks: Time to Act Now!

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) serve the largest constituent of connected devices. There are over 4.6B GSM (and its derivatives) subscriptions today. When you add the CDMA family along with technologies with smaller footprints such as WiMax, IDEN to this list, that number tops 5B mark. On the other hand there are only (yes only!) 800M Internet hosts per ISC. Considering such a small percentage of those 5B or so devices are capable of being an Internet host and out of that percentage even a much smaller percentage is connected at a given time, one can understand the sheer potential of explosion in the number of Internet hosts as mobile devices in the next 3-5 years. more

Landing Sites, Internet’s Achilles Heel of the Internet?

For a student final dissertation TV documentary short, 10 minutes, I have ended up choosing to investigate whether the landing stations for trans-atlantic cables are the achilles heel of the internet. As an outsider to the world of internet infrastructure I have been struck by how easy it has been to identify the landing stations in Cornwall and the cables that enter them. (Thank you Google for the aerial photographs) more

Recognizing ICANN’s Failures

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has failed on a number of fronts, resulting in sub-par products and services in a global monopolistic environment. Failures will continue if not recognized and immediately addressed. Leadership is about the future, a journey into uncharted territory, and it requires vision supported by technical, operational, and mind-changing competencies. ... It does not require a rocket scientist to recognize that ICANN has fallen short because it lacks... more

Why Wouldn’t Skype Want 30 Million Paying Customers?

Skype has cut Nimbuzz off. What that means is that users of Nimbuzz' popular mobile clients will no longer be able to make calls using the SkypeOut network. According to Skype themselves, it was for unspecified violations of the Skype API terms and license... more

AS Path Lengths Over Time - How Interconnected is the Internet?

One way to determine the denseness of the Internet, or its "interconnectedness", is to look at the path length between Autonomous Systems (ASes). The "shortest AS path" is a route selection rule in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that means traffic from one AS will chose the path with the least number of ASes to get to the receiving AS. With IPv6 being deployed in parts of the Internet, we looked at the AS path length to see if the IPv6 portion of the Internet is more or less interconnected than the IPv4 Internet. more

And Then There Was the Issue of Time

Anyone who has been part of the community during its soon-to-be 12-years of existence will be the first to tell you that while ICANN's intentions are good, its execution, time and again, has been lacking. Unfortunately, the global business world does not and cannot accept only good intentions. Businesses require surety, consistency and clear evidence of stability before they can establish the foundation for their enterprises. more

Broken Policies

As an email policy wonk, I think a lot about how specific policy implementations can go wrong. Sure, every policy can go wrong, or not fit a common case. A lot of people only write polices that address common cases and don't worry about the rarer cases. The problem is there are some rare cases that may cause significant harm and those cases should be addressed. Consumerist has a case up about email policy gone wrong with a clear path to harm but no policy for handling the issue. There are a couple places I see where this policy hole can be fixed. more

Google’s Spending Spree: 2.4 Million Servers, and Counting

Google just published its Q3 financial results. So, what is Google spending on IT, and how much servers would that buy? This is one of their best kept secrets. In this post I give ballpark estimates based on back-of-the-envelop calculations, similar to the 'guestimates' I made 5 years ago. more

The Militarization of the Internet

Someone needs to take a good hard look at those Internet surveillance stories being strategically placed on the front page of the New York Times. There's a trail here, I believe, that's worth following. Here are some data points... there appears to be a deep interest in the ability to declare war online, as evidenced by cybersecurity research and public speeches by Herbert Lin, a key player who has worked on several cybersecurity reports for the National Research Council.
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Is the New gTLD Program Approval Even a Chance for This Year?

As I noted in my recent comments on CircleID, the recent resolutions from the Special Meeting of the ICANN Board held in Norway in late September left a few important new gTLD issues up in the air and created a little uncertainty in the marketplace. ... However, whilst sign-off on the program is still not guaranteed to occur in December, a recent interesting post on the GNSO mailing list from ICANN's Senior Vice President... more

Apple’s PR Nightmare: Open and “Fragmented” vs. Closed and “Integrated”

Over the weekend, I opined that closed app stores - meaning app stores, like iTunes, that restrict users from loading software from other sources (known as sideloading) - would not survive in a market where comparable alternatives, such as Google's Android OS, exist in an open ecosystem. In Apple's Q3 earnings call yesterday, Steve Jobs addressed the issue square on. more