Featured Blogs

The Risk Factors of CDNs and Centrality

On the afternoon of June 17 of this year, there was a widespread outage of online services. In Australia, it impacted three of the country's largest banks, the national postal service, the country's reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia, the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and some US airlines. The roll call of affected services appeared to reach some 500 serv more

Elon Musk Interview: SpaceX, Starlink and His Motivation and Philosophy

Elon Musk packed a lot about SpaceX and Starlink into a 32-minute interview at the 2021 Mobile World Congress and ended with a discussion of his motivation and the roles of his three companies - SpaceX, Starlink, and Neuralnk. Let's start with the SpaceX and Starlink update and conclude with the philosophy and motivation. (Scroll to the end of the post for the video of the interview). more

The Infrastructure Guessing Game

As U.S. Congress inches closer to an infrastructure bill, the industry is feverously speculating how a broadband infrastructure plan might work. There is still a lot of compromise and wheeling and dealing to be done, so nobody knows how a final broadband program might work, or even definitively if there will be one. But since this is the billion-dollar question for the industry, it's worth a review of the possibilities. more

Deadline of July 2 to Nominate People for Jonathan B. Postel Service Award

Do you know of someone who has made the Internet better in some way who deserves more recognition? Maybe someone who has helped extend Internet access to a large region? Or wrote widely-used programs that make the Internet more secure? Or served in some capacity behind the scenes in Internet services? Or maybe someone who has been actively working for open standards and open processes for the Internet? more

A Domain Or Social Media: What Builds Consumer Trust? (A Market Research Study Conducted by the DNA)

Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook have become key places for businesses to communicate with customers and even sell directly to consumers. Yet when it comes to actually making a purchase, do consumers trust a social media site over a domain? This is a relevant question for virtually every business. Earlier this year, we designed a survey to answer this question... more

Where Did “Data Shadow” Come From?

Anyone who works in privacy is familiar with the term "data shadow": the digital record created by our transactions, our travels, our online activities. But where did the phrase come from? Who used it first? A number of authors have attributed it to Alan Westin, whose seminal book Privacy and Freedom (largely a report on the work of the Committee on Science and Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York) set the stage for most modern discussions of privacy.  more

The Deeper Root Cause of the Fastly and Akamai Outages

As we finished this article, the world was hit by another global outage by content delivery network (CDN) provider, Akamai, on June 17, 2021. The cause seems to be related to the lack of capacity to a certain "routing table" of their distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation. Although the technical analysis is not yet available, the central premise of this article also applies to this incident, and it serves as a timely testimony. more

Capping Broadband Internet by Design

FIOS by Verizon, is a bundled Internet access, telephone, and television service that operates over a fiber-optic communications network with over 5 million customers in nine U.S. states -- providing Fiber to the Home (FTTH). One of the first service areas was a Northern Virginia community known as Ashburn -- which is also is the cloud data center capital of the world. It literally sits on top of the most massive mesh of high bandwidth, low latency fiber in existence. more

MarkMonitor Supports Brand Registry Group (BRG) Call for Preliminary Applicant Guidebook

During last week's ICANN71 Virtual Policy Forum, the Brand Registry Group (BRG) held a very informative session about how ICANN can help potential applicants prepare for the next new gTLD round. Speakers during the session provided historical perspective that applicant guidebooks have regularly evolved over time as a result of community review and feedback provided to ICANN, providing concrete examples of how the current applicant guidebook was developed. more

An Afnic Study of the Global Domain Name Market in 2020, COVID Impact on ccTLDs

Afnic, the French Network Information Centre and manager of the .fr TLD, has just published its Afnic's Global Domain Name Market in 2020 Report on the global domain market in 2020. The study is based on ICANN statistics, information from registries, specialized websites, and its own research. This is an overview of global trends and an analysis of the mechanisms at work during the health crisis. more

NTIA’s New Broadband Map

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration surprised the broadband industry by issuing a new broadband map for the whole U.S. The map differs in dramatic ways from the FCC's broadband map, which is derived from broadband speeds that are reported by the ISPs in the country. It's commonly understood that the FCC broadband map overstates broadband coverage significantly. The NTIA map draws upon varied sources in an attempt to create a more accurate picture of the availability of broadband. more

Euro 2020: An Illustration of the Link Between Real-World Events and Online Infringements

In the run-up to the postponed Euro 2020 football championships, we've analyzed historical registration trends in domains containing the terms "euro2020" or "euro2021." A number of previous studies -- looking at events as diverse as the COVID pandemic, the annual holiday season shopping events, and the Reddit campaign relating to the manipulation of the stock price of U.S.-based retailer GameStop -- show a link between real-world events and spikes in online activity. more

Email Recommendation Engine for ESPs – Text Length Optimization (Part II)

Popular email editors today have no way to optimize for text length. An email marketer may attempt to build her content but has no idea whether that content is optimized related to word count for a specific industry/client. As it relates only to text length, does the email have too many or too few words. Currently, there is no built-in predictive model to inform her. Well, until now. Last month we described an evolutionary real-time data-driven process for email campaign builders to have at their disposal. more

What’s the Right Definition of Upload Speed?

I read a blog on the WISPA website written by Mark Radabaugh that suggests that the best policy for broadband speeds would be met by asymmetrical architecture (meaning that upload speeds don't need to be as fast as download speeds). I can buy that argument to some extent because there is no doubt that most homes download far more data than we upload. But then the blog loses me when Mr. Radabaugh suggests that an adequate definition of speed might be 50/5 Mbps or 100/10 Mbps. more

Anticompetitive and Predatory Misconduct by ICANN and Contracted Parties Must End

On May 26, 2021, I submitted a complaint to ICANN's Complaints Officer, Krista Papac. In a nutshell, my complaint centers on ICANN's blatant violation of its Bylaws, specifically Section 2.2, named Restrictions, which expressly prohibits ICANN from acting as a registrar. However, despite the absence of any exceptions to this unambiguous prohibition, ICANN is acting improperly as a registrar for the purposes of warehousing and cybersquatting on certain domain names in the .com and .net registries. more