Featured Blogs

Broadband Access: What Should We Regulate?

Network Neutrality is a hot topic in the US. The FCC held hearings in my neighborhood recently (while I was in Asia). Now I see Professor Susan Crawford will be testifying next Tuesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on "Net Neutrality and the First Amendment." I look forward to her remarks, but I worry that the whole discussion will be focused on "IP Pipes," that is connectivity at network layer 3. This distracts us from the fundamental problem... more

Comcast Fires Back at E360

Back in January, bulk mailer E360 filed a suit against giant cable ISP Comcast. This week Comcast responded with a withering response... Their memorandum of law wastes no time getting down to business: "Plaintiff is a spammer who refers to itself as a "internet marketing company," and is in the business of sending email solicitations and advertisements to millions of Internet users, including many of Comcast's subscribers." Comcast's analysis is similar to but even stronger than the one I made in January... more

It’s March Madness Time and I Want My IPTV!

IPTV is on the horizon. Maybe I watch too much basketball, but the first thing I pictured was turning my flat screen into a big PC-like monitor with multiple windows showing several games, and perhaps even checking email and trying to do a bit work in another (admittedly much smaller) window. You could drag and drop, expand or shrink the games to whatever size you wanted just like you do on a PC with applications. Since the source video could come from different geographical regions in the country, you could catch the NCAA game they are showing in your local region while also watching another game from another region... For some, IPTV is a reality. But for the most part deployments are limited. more

Why Telcos Don’t Get Networks

I've posted to SSRN my paper on why most telecom companies, even though they operate networks, don't appreciate the fundamental business dynamics of network structures. This will be a chapter in a book Wharton is publishing on network-based strategies and competencies. In the paper, I describe two views on telecom and Internet infrastructure... more

Don’t Register Your Domain in the U.S. if it’s Controversial

In the news lately have been a number of incidents where U.S. courts, or the U.S. government itself has ordered domain registrars to shut down free speech. First was the E360 vs Spamhaus case, in which accused spammer E360 Insight sued anti-spam organization Spamhaus for labeling them as spammers and won by default when Spamhaus insisted that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction over them in England and didn't appear. Unfortunately, U.S. courts did have jurisdiction over Spamhaus' domain registrar, who was nearly ordered to shut Spamhaus down (a court order was under consideration). Fortunately, Spamhaus was able to move their registration overseas before any shutdown order could be issued... more

The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008

Last week Sen. Snowe filed bill S.2661, the Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008, or APCPA. While its goals are laudable, I have my doubts about some of the details. The first substantive section of the bill, Section 3, makes various phishy activities more illegal than they are now in its first two subsections. It makes it specifically illegal to solicit identifying information from a computer under false pretenses, and to use a domain name that is deceptively similar to someone else's brand or name on the web in e-mail or IM to mislead people... more

ICA Posts Position Paper and Analysis of Snowe “Anti-Phishing” Legislation

The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) has posted a position paper and analysis of S. 2661, introduced on 2/25/08 in the US Senate. While we are firmly opposed to phishing and other criminal activities that may utilize domain names we are very concerned about the provisions of the proposal that appear to provide trademark owners with a means to avoid both UDRP and ACPA actions and alternatively bring private claims against domain names with a lower burden of proof and the potential for far higher monetary damages, without even requiring an allegation that the DN was in any way being utilized in a phishing scheme... more

Virginia Supreme Court Rejects First Amendment Challenge to Spam Statute

Thanks to Prof. Goldman I see that the Virginia Supreme Court issued its opinion in Jaynes, the state-law criminal spam case that has wound its way through the courts there. It affirms the conviction and rejects the various challenges to Virginia's spam statute... As a side note I should say that it's not often one is actually excited to read an order in a case you're not involved with. This is definitely one of those instances where the excitement is palpable... The news reports billed the case as the first felony conviction for sending spam. more

IPv6 in Slovak Academic Network

The main reason for developing a new internet protocol was based on lack of address; however this was not the only reason. Unfortunately, many people think of IPv6 only as enormous address space, but there are a lot of other advantages, for example... authorizations and authentication function are implemented directly in the protocol and are mandatory... automatic configuration of network interfaces based on their physical address... protocol itself recognizes data streams which must be transmitted in real time, and the data must be processed with highest priority... more

The Perfect Phone

Lee Dryburgh initiated a great thread in the Emerging Communications public group entitled What would your perfect phone be? There are 14 messages there at this moment with a lot of good ideas, but my first thought was the term "phone" is too limiting. Indeed, some of the correspondents' ideas also go far beyond the idea of a telephone. Here's what I want and fully expect to see, eventually. more

IPv6 Hour… One, Two, Three, IPv4 Switched Off!

It happened in San Jose, it happened in Taiwan and soon it will happen in Philadelphia! A nightmare? A conspiracy? No, no, it was just the IPv6 hour. One hour of pure IPv6 LAN for NANOG attendees with a NAT-PT as valve to the crowded teeming world of the IPv4 internet... At 12 noon, Tuesday February 19th it happened! While Mac, Vista, Linux and Unix can breathe AAAA, Windows XP however cannot do DNS over IPv6 transport. What to do to avoid all these Windows XP users... more

RIPE NCC Publishes Case Study of youtube.com Hijack

As you may be aware from recent news reports, traffic to the youtube.com website was 'hijacked' on a global scale on Sunday, 24 February 2008. The incident was a result of the unauthorised announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24 and caused the popular video sharing website to become unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. The RIPE NCC conducted an analysis into how this incident was seen and tracked by the RIPE NCC's Routing Information Service (RIS) and has published a case study... more

On Comcast and Net Neutrality: Shouting Fire in a Theater

The Comcast traffic shaping case has stirred up passionate debate. Net neutrality proponents are calling for Comcast's head on a platter. The common argument is that Comcast's policy may stifle innovation and competition. If a service provider is allowed to exercise unregulated discretion in how it treats subscriber traffic, it is a slippery slope toward anti-competitive practices. Net neutrality says keep your hands off. Some are preaching net neutrality as if it were an inalienable human right like freedom of speech... more

More on the Front Running Class Action Suit

Several people pointed out that although the suit still hasn't appeared in PACER, copies of the complaint are available online, including this one [PDF] at Lextext. Having read it, I'm rather underwhelmed... I do not purport to be a lawyer (nor do I usually play one on the net), but it's hard to see how the facts, which are not in serious dispute, would support any of these charges. more

UDRP: The Liabilities for the Corporations and/or their Lawyers

This post is based on the scenario that a trademark.tld domain name is registered with a UK ICANN accredited registrar, (they have an exclusive UK jurisdiction clause in their contracts), the trademark.tld criticism website located at that domain name is strictly non-commercial, the servers are located in the UK, and the registrant is a British citizen. In the above circumstances, the corporations and/or their lawyers are taking a big risk when they use the Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policies (UDRP) in order to silence criticism at trademark.tld. more