Featured Blogs

Facing the Facts on Internet Governance

Having just arrived in Tunis for the WSIS, my weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, freely available version) focuses on the Internet governance issues that are likely to dominate discussions all week. I argue that claims about a "digital Munich" and a U.N. takeover are not helpful to arriving at an appropriate solution (though based on discussions this morning it does not appear that things are moving very far away from such claims). more

Development Matters More than Domains

The advance teams are already gathered in Tunisia ahead of next week's second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society, and those of us on the press list are being deluged with announcements, releases, notices and invitations to meetings. The meeting, which runs from 15-18 November, is an opportunity to look at the progress that has been made since December 2003, when representatives and heads of state gathered in Geneva. more

Vint Cerf Speaking Out on Internet Neutrality

In a U.S. congress hearing held yesterday November 9th, significant focus was projected on "network neutrality" and a new telecommunications bill affecting the Internet. "This bill could fundamentally alter the fabulously successful end-to-end Internet," says Alan Davidson in the post on Google blog. Vint Cerf was not able to testify because of the Presidential Medal of Freedom award ceremony at the White House, but submitted the following letter to the hearing... more

What Legal Framework for Online Identity?

Have you ever thought of how reputation is created in cyberspace? Beth Noveck wrote an article, 'Trademark Law and the Social Construction of Trust: Creating the Legal Framework for On-Line Identity' in which she argues that, to determine what rules should govern on-line identity, we should look to trademark law, which has the best set of rules to deal with the way reputation is created in cyberspace. more

Questioning the Illusion of Internet Governance

I confess, I don't get it. Much has been written about the apparent desire by the United Nations, spurred by China, Cuba, and other informationally repressive regimes, to "take control of the Internet." Oddly, the concrete focus of this battle -- now the topic of a Senate resolution! -- is a comparatively trivial if basic part of Net architecture: the domain name system. The spotlight on domain name management is largely a combination of historical accident and the unfortunate assignment of country code domains like .uk and .eu, geographically-grounded codes that give the illusion of government outposts and control in cyberspace. more

ICANN Does Something Technical!

I've often said that ICANN regulates the business of buying and selling of domain names and that ICANN's claim that it coordinates technical matters to preserve the stability of DNS is a fantasy. Well I am proven wrong. ICANN has done something technical. ICANN has issued Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names, Draft Version 2 [PDF] (pending approval by the ICANN board.) It's only four pages long, but those few pages contain a lot of significant material. more

The U.N.‘s Threat to the Net

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, writing in The Washington Post, declared that it is a "mistaken notion" that the U.N. "wants to 'take over,' police or otherwise control the Internet." Unfortunately, neither the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the WSIS' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) or the Secretary General's column give comfort to those committed to cyber-freedom. more

Internet Governance: Countdown to Tunis

In a paper entitled "DNS Détente", written in the authors' personal capacities, Tricia Drakes (a former member of the ICANN Board) and Michael D. Palage (a current member of the ICANN board) have attempted to address some of the unresolved issues of the recent Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) 3 session in Geneva as discussions head to the final phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis (Nov 16 to 18, 2005). More specifically, the paper focuses on one of the "fundamental stumbling blocks to the continued evolution of Internet Governance"; The insistence of the United States Government (USG) that it retain its historically exclusive role in connection with authorizing changes to the Root A server, particularly with respect to country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Shared further is the content of this paper. more

Nom-Com Appoints Independent and Diverse Candidates to ICANN Leadership Positions

When 72 candidates vie for 8 positions, making tough choices are inevitable. ICANN's 2005 Nominating Committee (Nom-Com) on Friday announced the selection of a diverse and independent set of nominees for important roles in ICANN, including the Board of Directors, the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the At-Large Advisory Council (ALAC) and the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO). more

DMA Requires Email Authentication, Do We Care?

Last week the DMA announced with considerable fanfare that their members should all use e-mail authentication. DMA members send a lot of bulk e-mail, but not much that would be considered spam by any normal metric. (Altria's Gevalia Kaffee is one of the few exceptions.) Their main problem is their legitimate bulk mail, sent in large quantities from fixed sources, getting caught by ISPs spam filters. That happens to be one problem for which path authentication schemes like SPF and Sender ID are useful, since they make it easier to add known fixed source mailers to a recipient ISP's whitelist, and that's just what AOL and probably other big ISPs use it for. While the DMA may be implying that this is a virtuous move, in reality it's something that their members are doing anyway for straightforward business purposes. more

You Paid to Join; You Can Leave Anytime

Once upon a time, around 1998-1999, three of us were hired by APEC-Tel to study "International Charging Arrangements for Internet Services". APEC-Tel is a regular meeting of Pacific-nation telecommunications ministers. The impetus of the study was their consternation that connection to the Internet was being charged (paid for) in an entirely new way. The template of the old telephone settlement scheme had been overthrown. Those wishing to connect to the Internet, which was centred in the United States, were being forced to lay lines across the Pacific, pay landing rights in the United States or Canada, and pay further to connect to the Internet at the nearest negotiated peering or transit point. more

Welcome to the Root, .MOBI

mTLD's .mobi entered the root zone on Tuesday, quietly contrasted amidst all of the recent ICANN/VeriSign announcements. The .mobi mTLD is a Dublin, Ireland based joint venture between the Nokia Corporation, Vodafone Group Services Limited, and Microsoft. The .mobi domain was granted to service a sponsored community, consisting of: Individual and business consumers of mobile devices, services and applications; Content and service providers; Mobile operators; Mobile device manufacturers and vendors; IT technology and software vendors who serve the mobile community, and there are numerous benefits of .mobi to this community. more

Request to Extend the 24-Day Comment Period on the Proposed VeriSign Agreement

Bruce Tonkin (MIT) wrote in the Registrars mailing list yesterday with this: "We the undersigned registrars, request that the public comment period on the proposed agreement with Verisign be extended until Sunday 4 Dec 2005 so as to allow opportunities for in-person public discussions during the upcoming ICANN meeting in Vancouver..." In terms of process, the Registrar Constituency (RC) by-laws prevent the RC from balloting on anything in less than 24 days, and ICANN could require the interest groups it recognizes to have decision making processes that are capable of responding to the Board of Director's decision making process, in a better administrative law world. more

ICANN’s Proposed Changes to IDN Registration

A month ago, ICANN announced that it had a large set of proposed changes to its "Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names". The original guidelines are fairly confusing and not widely deployed by the ccTLDs, so one would think that the proposed revisions would be clearer and more useful. No such luck. Instead of describing what the problems with the old guidelines were, the committee that put together the new proposal simply added a whole bunch more rules. more

ICANN Gets the Root Zone, Too

A small but intriguing paragraph in the VeriSign settlement says that ICANN gets to maintain the root zone. I thought they did now, but I guess VRSN does, following advice from ICANN. This has two and a half effects. The most obvious is political -- if ICANN rather than VRSN is distributing the root zone, it removes the symbolic significance of VeriSign's A root server. The second is DNSSEC key management. Until now, the contents of the root zone have been pretty boring, a list of names and IP addresses of name servers. If DNSSEC is deployed in the root, which is not unlikely in the next few months, ICANN rather than VeriSign will hold the crypto keys used to sign the root zone. If a tug of war develops, whoever holds the keys wins, since without the keys, you can't publish a new version of the root with changed or added records unless you publish your own competing set of keys and can persuade people to use them. more