Featured Blogs

ICA Anti-Phishing Victory Might Be a Curse!

A triumph by the Internet Commerce Association (ICA) over tactics and legislation detrimental to domain name owners might end up being a case of winner's curse, a triumph bought at the expense of the industry. In picking this one battle to win, the association ignores a broader war, the range of issues our industry needs to address. more

What’s Going on at ICANN in Cairo

Following up on the big decision at the Paris ICANN meeting in June to make new Top-Level Domains available, there's lots of activity at the ICANN conference in Cairo, Egypt this week. A few of the hot topics of discussion that we are following are the applications process for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), Registry/Registrar Cross Ownership, and restructuring of the ICANN Board. more

TV White Spaces Just the Beginning: Secondary Use of the Spectrum

Yesterday, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to allow qualified devices to operate on a license-exempt basis in unused portions of TV channels 2-51, spectrum commonly referred to as "TV white spaces." A lot has already been written about this move... But what is missing in these discussions is the bigger picture. more

FCC Approves White Space Devices: The Dawn of the Age of Opportunistic Spectrum Reuse

Yesterday will go down in history as a bellwether moment. Few among us will soon forget the excitement of Obama's election. But there was an equally historic vote yesterday that for geeks, policy analysts, and technologists represents an entirely new trajectory in telecommunications. In essence, the FCC has begun the transition from command-and-control, single-user spectrum licensure to a more distributed system that holds the potential to eliminate the artificial scarcity that prevented widespread access to the public airwaves since 1927. more

FCC Vote Results: We the People Won

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has just voted to open up the so called TV Whitespaces for UNLICENSED use. This is incredibly good news for rural America in particular but actually for all of America. It's not as important as the election the rest of us in the US voted in today -- but this action is a very, very big deal. Just a few of the benefits... more

The Real White Spaces Debate: To Create or Abolish a Market in the Airwaves

I've been following the "white spaces" for as long as it has been happening -- four, maybe five years -- and I must admit that I am surprised by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's sudden fondness for them. Until the last days of his chairmanship, Martin never cared for this somewhat radical notion: allowing techies and community activists to spew electromagnetic frequencies in zones currently occupied (at least ostensibly) by the broadcasters. more

Who is Responsible in Our Cloudy World?

A number of large technology companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have announced that they have signed up to a voluntary code of conduct on how they do business in countries that curtail freedom of expression like China and Singapore... It's not surprising to see this sort of self-regulation being proposed as otherwise political initiatives like the Global Online Freedom Act, passed in one US Senate committee but currently floating in legislative limbo, could actually make it into law. more

CAN-Spam-a-Friend? The Case Against Reunion.com

Hoang v. Reunion.com sidesteps an eagerly anticipated legal dispute over the legality of commercial address book scraping and 'send-to-a-friend' emails, and also highlights the damage that can cascade when a federal Circuit Court woefully misreads a statute. more

Domain Slammers Go Phishing

ICANN introduced a requirement for domain name registrars to send out annual notices to all their customers (registrants) to check the Whois on their domain names to ensure the information is correct. While this seemed fairly reasonable (if cumbersome), the fact is it confuses the heck out of people -- and creates a whole lot of confusion for registrants. But that was a problem we could deal with. Fast-forward to October, 2008... more

Expansion of Top-Level Domain Names: Why Current Brand Protection Procedures Will Be Impractical

As ICANN introduces new generic top level domains (gTLDs) and separates itself from US oversight, it has the opportunity to distance itself from the taint of cybersquatting, brand abuse, and criminal activity involving domains... To underscore the scope of the issue, consider this research on just 30 top Interbrand-ranked global brands. The most recent MarkMonitor Brandjacking Index found cybersquatting incidents increased over 40% in the last year for the brands that were studied; these leading brands suffered as many as 15,000 incidents per brand... more

Phishing Registrar Accounts: eNom is First Target

Criminals are now looking to use established domain names, via phishing targeted at domain registrars. This is possibly related to ICANN finally moving to stop the black hat registrars of the world. According to the first report on the matter sent yesterday to Registrar Operations (reg-ops) mailing list, the attacks seem to be run by gang of child pornography spammers. more

ICANN Sends Termination Notice to Registrar

ICANN has sent EstDomains a termination notice: "BBe advised that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) for EstDomains, Inc. (customer No. 919, IANA No. 943) is terminated..." more

IPv6: Zeno’s Paradox and Invisible Brick Walls

As we continue our ride toward the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, Regional Internet Registries public discussion groups remain filled with endless discussions on how large swaths of allocated IPv4 addresses are unused, should be reclaimed or recycled one way or another, maybe be put on the free market and sold to the highest bidder or parsed out in more egalitarian controlled ways. Although everyone now accepts the notion of IPv4 address exhaustion, it seems to be for some an invisible glass wall and for others a gold brick wall worth the death of the internet to get a piece of it. more

The Trouble with White Spaces

Like several other engineers, I'm disturbed by the white spaces debate because it focuses on what I regard as the wrong question. The White Space Coalition argues that showing that a system can be constructed that prevents interference between White Space Devices and television broadcast signals compels the Commission to offer up the White Spaces for unlicensed use. This is far from obvious. more

The Global Network Initiative

After more than two years of work behind closed doors, the Global Network Initiative is launching this week. That's the corporate code of conduct on free speech and privacy I've been talking about in generalities for quite some time. By midnight Tuesday U.S. East Coast time, the full set of documents and list of initial signatories will be made publicly available at globalnetworkinitiative.org. more