Featured Blogs

WSJ on Wireless Network Neutrality

Today's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article (subscription required) on the current state of the wireless walled garden. It cites several recent clashes between handset vendors and cellcos over the extent to which consumers can use their phones to access non cellco content. From the article: "At stake for consumers are what services will be available on their mobile phones and whether they're free or cost a monthly fee. The wireless Web is taking off more slowly in America than overseas, and one reason is that U.S. carriers tightly control what applications are available on mobile devices..." more

More IPv6 Warnings on Why Organizations Must Plan Transition Now

The IPv6 Portal reports on a paper titled "The Choice: IPV4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6", written by Jordi Palet, warning that organizations must start planning for IPv6 now or "be aware that some already have, and you are beginning to be at a disadvantage." From the report: "This is going to affect the business of existing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and to a greater extent, at a certain point in time, the creation of new ISPs. As a consequence if may have a deeper impact in developing regions (Africa, Asia and Latin America/Caribbean) where the penetration of the Internet is not yet so widespread." more

Domain Names Can’t Be Trespassed: Utube.com v. YouTube

Boy, this case got a lot of attention when it was first filed (which isn't surprising; YouTube lawsuits usually do). You may remember the story: the plaintiff is a dealer of used tube mills, used pipe mills and used pollforming machines. The plaintiff operated a website at utube.com. As you might expect, like most other industrial B2B vendors' websites, utube.com had a small but targeted audience. With the phenomenal and quick rise in popularity of YouTube, a lot of web users mistyped youtube.com and entered utube.com instead, causing utube.com to suddenly experience disproportionate popularity. Unfortunately for the plaintiff, few of these visitors were interested in pollforming machines... The plaintiff sued YouTube for trademark infringement... more

ARIN Provides Latest Word on Need to Move to IPv6: Will Anyone Heed the Warning? (Does anyone care?)

NetworkWorld is running an article today that talks about the announcement from ARIN (the American Registry for Internet Numbers) of the ARIN Board resolution calling upon ARIN to no longer be "neutral" in the IPv4 vs IPv6 space and instead work to actively encourage migration to IPv6... Until now, ARIN and the other RIRs have generally been fairly neutral in the IPv4 versus IPv6 debate and have not shown a preference in allocation, but this announcement from ARIN shows the first signs of change. more

Boobtube.com Shenanigan: Domain Name Exchanges Open to Market Manipulation?

VentureBeat is running a story by Mark Coker, going over the recent boobtube.com auction and its eventual cancellation due to misrepresentation of ownership. Mark writes: "Sedo, the world’s largest domain name auctioneer, sold a popular URL, Boobtube.com, for $41,688 last week, but then turned around and canceled the sale because the seller didn’t really own it." The author, who was also one of the boobtube.com auction bidders, questions the maturity and trustworthiness of the domain name exchanges, which are currently handling several hundred million dollars of trades. more

Domain Ads Generating Twice the Conversion Rate of Search Ads

A case study by Efficient Frontier mentions how using the Google Adsense for Domains network doubled the conversion ratio of search ads for their clients. According to their website, "Efficient Frontier manages more than $400 million in annual PPC spend under management, counts 80 of the top 500 search advertisers as clients and manages over 30 million keywords"... "When we analyzed the results, we were shocked. We didn't expect to see that domain park sites can bring in the quality of traffic necessary..." more

Will Arrest Stem Tide of Spam?

Legitimate email marketers, anti-spam groups and beleaguered recipients got a bit of good news with the arrest last week of a man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers. Robert Alan Soloway, 27, dubbed "the Seattle Spammer" by federal officials, was indicted on 35 charges related to fraudulent Internet activities. Soloway pleaded not guilty to all charges at his May 30 arraignment. You can read more here. Although it's always great when a notorious spammer gets put out of business, such actions probably won't result in a drop in the amount of spam that gets sent... more

VoIP: Beyond Digital POTS

I've been involved with VoIP technology since 1996. I've been a public advocate for wideband audio at least since 1997. And I've admired and supported a variety of companies using VoIP to provide innovative services and new user interfaces. But reflecting on the past decade, the only globally significant impact of VoIP has been on prices (by fostering arbitrage). Most VoIP telephony services are just digital POTS... more

Personal IE Domains Available Soon?

I've mentioned the topic of personal IE domains on here more than once in the past [also discussed here on CircleID] and in my conversations with the IE Domain Registry. Just to recap; Under the current rules you cannot register johndoe.ie if your name is John Doe. You would have to add a number to the name, thus rendering it totally useless eg. johndoe7.ie or something of that style... more

IPv6 for the Rest of Us

IPv6 deployment is in a chicken and egg situation. On the one hand, there is no willingness from ISPs and commodity DNS router manufacturers to include IPv6 support in their infrastructure or equipment because "there is no demand". On the other hand, there is no demand because the average Joe Blow could not care less if he accesses a web site under IPv4 or IPv6. It should just work. The equipment and infrastructure should adapt transparently... What we users can do is to stop waiting for the industry to get its act together and work around its limitations... more

The New Hong Kong Anti-Spam Law, and a Small Fly in the Ointment

Well, it has been quite a while since first the Hong Kong OFTA (in 2004) and then CITB (in 2006) issued requests for public comment about a proposed UEM (Unsolicited Electronic Messaging) bill to be introduced in Hong Kong, for the purpose of regulating unsolicited email, telephone and fax solicitations. We're a large (worldwide) provider of email and spam filtering - but we're based in Hong Kong, and any regulation there naturally gets tracked by us rather more actively than laws elsewhere. We sent in our responses to both these agencies... The bill is becoming law now - and most of it looks good... There's one major fly in the ointment though... more

Mergers and Acquisitions in Domain Industry Increasing at an Impressive Rate

As the year progresses the number of mergers and acquisitions in the domain industry is increasing at an impressive rate. Hot on the heels of GoDaddy's acquisition (saving?) of RegisterFly another media company acquires a domain company. Is anyone beginning to see a pattern emerging? Oversee.net has acquired SnapNames... It's an interesting acquisition for Oversee.net which already owns DomainSponsor as well as a very interesting portfolio of domains. more

Treating Different Types of Communications Differently

A friend who read my Creating Sustainable Network Neutrality paper wrote to say, "Help me understand what is so bad about treating different types of communications differently." That's a really good question! If you want to offer vertically integrated services on special purpose networks, such as video entertainment or pager service or telephony, I do not have a problem with that, provided you don't use your market power to impede Internet applications that offer competing services... more

Discussion at the Internet Governance Forum in Geneva

While travelling home from Geneva, I was thinking quite a lot on the relationship between a ccTLD (registry) and a Country. This is because many countries are starting to talk louder and louder about the responsibilities Countries have on critical infrastructure, or (possibly more important) the management of the critical infrastructure. Will for example any (none?) of ccTLD operators (servers) sustain a denial of service attack of a scale similar to the attack on the root servers? What can ccTLD operators do to resist the malicious attacks? Should this be discussed? more

Security Through Obscurity as an Institution

One of my staff members pointed me to an article by Mikko Hyppönen in Foreign Policy. In this article Mikko argues that a new top level domain (TLD) like .bank for some reason would prevent on-line fraud, at least partially. Mikko seems to be arguing that with a dedicated TLD registry for financial institutions and a fee high enough to act as an entry barrier you would have a trustworthy bank domains that would be immune against today's phising attempts... more