Featured Blogs

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

Verisign Gets .COM Forever, But ICANN Gets a Lobbyist

A press release on the ICANN web site says that ICANN and Verisign have agreed to settle all pending lawsuits, and there’s a new .COM agreement, all tentative but if history is any guide, nothing short of DOC action is going to stop it. The good news is that VeriSign has agreed not to make unilateral changes like Sitefinder. They have to give prior notice to ICANN for any material change in the operation of the registry, and if ICANN has any concerns there’s a lengthy process full of expert panels and Consensus and the like to decide whether they can do it. more

VeriSign and ICANN Settle Lawsuit

ICANN has announced today that it has tentatively agreed to settle a longstanding dispute with VeriSign Inc. The dispute which began in part from SiteFinder, a controversial search service VeriSign created in late 2003 for users who mistype Web addresses. The following is an excerpt from today's press release... more

Survey Results Expose Widespread DNS Vulnerabilities

The Measurement Factory and Infoblox have announced results of a survey of more than 1.3 million Internet-connected, authoritative domain name system (DNS) servers around the globe. The results of the survey indicate that as many as 84 percent of Internet name servers could be vulnerable to pharming attacks, and that many exhibit other security and deployment-related vulnerabilities. The surveys consisted of several queries directed at each of a large set of external DNS servers to estimate the number of systems deployed today and determine specific configuration details. more

When will we run out of IPv4?

A paper by Tony Hain was recently published in the Internet Protocol Journal which sparked a debate on Slashdot. Particularly, Tony's paper suggested that IANA will run out of IP addresses in 5 years or less. However, there is another paper written by Geoff Hutson which projects that we have enough IPv4 address until 2022. The differences got most people confused. So who is right? more

Forgotten Principles of Internet Governance

Suddenly internet governance has become a hot topic. Words and phrases fly back and forth but minds rarely meet. We do not have discussion, we have chaos. We are not moving forwards towards a resolution. It's time to step back and review some basic principles. 1. Principle: The internet is here to serve the needs of people (and organizations of people); people are not here to serve the internet. Corollary: If internet technology does not meet the needs of users and organizations than it is technology that should be the first to flex and change. more

A Public Briefing on ICANN, Internet Governance and Africa

The Collaboration for International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) recently published "ICANN, Internet governance and Africa", a public briefing on the current status and key points of the debate that provides essential background for the second phase of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). During the last few years the relationship of African stakeholders with ICANN has received greater attention, largely driven by a few key individuals within African governments, the technical community, and civil society organizations. Meanwhile, the broader topic of Internet governance has been put on the public agenda in the context of the WSIS. ...Decisions taken at the upcoming second phase of the WSIS (to occur in Tunis in November 2005) are likely to have a profound impact on ICANN and the field of Internet governance more generally. more

Breaking the Internet HOWTO

A number of people, notably Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, have been asking about how to Break The Internet. Since Mme Reding seems to have absolutely no prior experience in the Information Technology, Computing or Telecommunications industries, I have prepared this brief HOWTO. "1. Declare the creation of a new Root Zone. This is the easy bit - all you have to do is spout great volumes of hot air at a conference in Geneva, and then storm out in a huff when other people refuse to take you seriously. Then you get the PFY who services your photocopier to declare the creation of a new European Root Zone! Hooray!" more

US Policy Container: Depoliticizing the Global Internet

One of fastest growing trends of electronic communications is digital identity. The simplest way of establishing digital identity is to get a domain name and create a web site and email accounts. While this might have been a fairly complex undertaking some ten years ago, today it is a trivial matter. So trivial in fact that spammers and phishers can ply their trade with very low costs of entry. These low cost of entry have made the Internet a commodity business as traffic is handled in the aggregate and competitive pricing has made being an ISP a difficult business model. It also has created aggressive growth and adoption curves. The Internet is also the lowest common denominator... more

A Further Look Into ORSN

Most commentators on Vixie's astounding message have gotten sidetracked. People don't seem to see the most important feature of his statement: Vixie's endorsement of Open Root Server Network (ORSN) is based on explicitly political criteria. As ORSN says on its web site: "The U.S.A (under the current or any future administration) are theoretically and practically able to control "our" accesses to contents of the Internet and are also able to limit them. A manipulation of the Root zone could cause that the whole name space .DE is not attainable any more for the remaining world - outside from Germany." So ORSN sees this as a "backup"... more

If It’s About to Break, Fix It!

The UN's WSIS Prepcomm in Geneva has ended on a divided note. The US Government's Ambassador Gross pre-announced war-cry "The United Nations will not be in charge of the Internet. Period." had been met by a nearly unanimous global response from nations for some sort of government control of the Internet on a multilateral basis. A raft of proposals to alter the current situation are on the table -- most of them fairly benign, but none supportive of the indefinite continuance of unilateral US control of the root zone authorisation. more