Featured Blogs

City Identifiers on the Net: A Closer Look

Cities are among the largest regional authorities and natural human communities we know. Of course there are countries like China, India or the USA which count some hundred million or even a billion inhabitants. But there are also countries with far less than 100,000 inhabitants, like Tuvalu, Andorra or Barbados. If city communities are ranked by the number of inhabitants as independent entities among country communities, cities like Tokyo, New York, Shanghai or London head the ranking because they have more citizens than many countries. London for instance has more inhabitants than the Netherlands, and Tokyo outpaces Canada in that respect. Interestingly, there are only around 400 cities worldwide with more than 1 million inhabitants... The following post will give an overview of how cities are being identified on the Internet via Top-Level Domains and the opportunities that lay ahead. more

How Domain Name Traffic Testing/Tasting Works

Starting from an old article (dated July 21st, 2005) published at Computer Business Review, (and following a more recent entry on GoDaddy's Bob Parson's blog) I would like to touch a bit more on the topic of 'traffic testing' or 'traffic tasting' of domains. This topic has been discussed at ICANN meetings since last year and is also referred to by the name of 'add/delete' or 'add/drop' storms... more

Vint Cerf’s Keynote at Domain Roundtable

I had the pleasure of eating breakfast with Vint Cerf, chairman of ICANN's board and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, prior to his keynote address this morning. It was great to discuss some of the issues domainers are facing with regards to registrar practices, expiring domains, etc. directly with Cerf. Cerf's keynote kept the crowd engaged. I've summarized the topics he covered... Some people have misunderstood Cerf's position with regards to adding new domains. He said he is not opposed to adding new TLDs. What he advocates, however, is having a solid rationale for adding new TLDs. Cerf believes the processes and outcomes of the first two rounds of TLD adds were not satisfactory... more

Post-Disaster Communications Petition

Recently, FCC placed on public review a petition filed by Evslin Consulting and pulver.com. The petition grew out of the experiences felt during a breakdown in communications network caused by Hurricane Katrina. As you may recall, whole communities were evacuated in the Gulf coast and many families were separated because they ended in different cities. Added to the trauma, many of these evacuees found it difficult to contact and communicate with each other. But those who have VoIP service and those who subscribe to premium features on their PSTN lines were better off because their services were able to forward the calls to the new location... more

Continued Move Towards Unified Communications

A couple of new notes that underscore the continued convergence of real-time communications services (e.g. voice/video/IM) into a presence-based real-time IP communications infrastructure... I haven't seen this shift just yet, but increasingly the folks responsible for managing voice and video systems are integrating their planning with the groups in charge of instant messaging and collaboration. I expect this trend to accelerate as we move forward. more

Fighting Over the Scraps from ICANN’s Table

I've finally recovered from another ICANN meeting, frustrated as ever. 700 or so people flew halfway around the world to hear canned presentations, dueling-monologue public form sessions, and resolutions that left major issues unresolved, and to gripe in the hallways about how little was being done. more

In Historic Vote on WHOIS Purpose, Reformers Win by 2/3 Majority

It has taken almost three years -- by some counts, more than 6 years -- but ICANN's domain name policy making organization has finally taken a stand on Whois and privacy. And the results were a decisive defeat for the copyright and trademark interests and the US government, and a stunning victory for advocates of the rights of individual domain name registrants... more

Finding Good ICANN Board Candidates

In the late summer of 2006, the ICANN Nominating Committee will convene to select three members to the ICANN Board of Directors, and four members to various councils. Depending on the global visibility of the nominees, and the current political and technical currents pulling at the Internet community, these nominations will be both pilloried and lauded in different circles. This process of selecting a good ICANN board member is astonishingly complex; I should know, having served on the founding NomCom in 2003, and the succeeding NomComs in 2004 and 2005. By far the biggest challenge is finding good candidates... more

California Frets about Goodmail Email

On Monday the 3rd, California state Senator Dean Flores held a hearing of the E-Commerce, Wireless Technology, and Consumer Driven Programming committee grandly titled AOL: You Have Certified Mail, Will Paid E-mail Lead to Separate, Unequal Systems or is it the Foolproof Answer to Spam?. The senator's office said they were very eager to have me there, to the extent they offered to fly me out from New York, so since I happened to be on the way home from ICANN in New Zealand that weekend, I took a detour through Sacramento. Sen. Florez conducted the hearing, with Sens. Escutia and Torlakson sitting in briefly. Unfortunately, Sen. Bowen, who is very well informed on these topics, wasn't there. There were five panels of speakers, and I got to lead off... more

Forward-Thinking Remedies

Just a year ago, I gave a talk at David Isenberg's 2005 Freedom to Connect conference. I said, essentially, that we should be careful in asking for regulation to protect the net, because the power to protect carries with it the power to constrain. This was a very troubling message for the audience, and the chatroom projected behind me went wild with disapproval. Since then, I've become very concerned about the concentration in broadband service provision in this country, and worried that there won't be any competition for unfettered internet access. more

Powell Warns Net Neutrologists Not to Be Naive

Just got this email reporting the speech made by former FCC Chairman @ F2C organized by David Isenberg. "Former FCC chairman Michael Powell is up on the stage at the Freedom to Connect conference right now, and he warns the tech elite crowd here not to be naive about the dangers of asking Congress for legislation on Net Neutrality. As he explains..." more

Examining Two Well-Known Attacks on VoIP

VoIP is here to stay. In fact many incumbent telecommunication carriers have started offering VoIP service for sometime and several new VoIP service providers have emerged. Aside from issues such as quality of service, the aspect of security, or lack thereof, is misunderstood by some of the VoIP service providers. This purpose of this article is to discuss two of the most well known attacks that can be carried out in current VoIP deployments. more

Interesting Facts About Domain Names

During a database testing, Dennis Forbes makes use of the .com zone file as data sample but he also stumbles upon some unexpected domain name discoveries which he has reported on his site. Dennis Forbes explains: "I recently had a need for a mid-sized amount of real-world data, which I required for testing purposes on low-end hardware (testing and demonstrating some of the new functionality of SQL Server 2005). I wanted something that wasn't confidential, which excluded the easy choice of using business data, and I refrain from using artificial data..." more

ENUM: Mapping the E.164 Number Space into the DNS

Many communications networks are constructed for a single form of communication, and are ill suited to being used for any other form. Although the Internet is also a specialized network in terms of supporting digital communications, its relatively unique flexibility lies in its ability to digitally encode a very diverse set of communications formats, and then support their interaction over the Internet. In this way many communications networks can be mapped into an Internet application and in so doing become just another distributed application overlayed on the Internet. From this admittedly Internet-centric perspective, voice is just another Internet application. And for the growing population of Voice over IP (VoIP) users, this is indeed the case... more

Put Free Expression on the Internet Governance Forum Agenda

The Internet Governance Project has joined free-expression advocacy organizations Reporters Without Borders and Article 19 to push for including Internet censorship and filtering problems on the agenda of the first meeting of the new Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a multistakeholder deliberation body created by the World Summit on the Information Society... more