Featured Blogs

Story Behind .ASIA

After releasing .travel and .jobs (hey, steve.jobs up for bidding!), ICANN said they will look at .xxx and .asia next. (via Chiao) "Vint Cerf: ...of those, we have had fairly extensive discussion about .asia and .xxx. We continue to evaluate those. The others will be attended to as we can get to them. But i want to say for the record that we will attempt within the next 30 days to come to a conclusion one way or the other about .asia and .xxx so these will be on a board call sometime within that period." Chiao called .ASIA "more or less like a joint venture among APxx organizations". I say nonsense! Don't let appearance fool you. more

In Pursuit of IDN Perfection?

Many of the problems of IDNs come from trying to do multiple languages at the same time or languages one can't read. The biggest difficulty is implementing them in gTLDs like .com or .org. I think that if we focus on helping the country level TLDs (ccTLDs) get going with IDNs in their own native languages, we would be solving the problem for 80% or so of the people. My concern is holding up the ability for these people to use IDNs because we can find the perfect solution for the edge cases. more

Creating a National Cybersecurity Framework: Need For New Regulation?

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently released a major new study examining cybersecurity. The report, "Creating a National Framework for Cybersecurity: An Analysis of Issues and Options" discusses a variety of significant public and private cybersecurity concerns. The CRS analysis lists several broad options for addressing cybersecurity weaknesses ranging from adopting standards and certification to promulgating best practices and guidelines and use of audits among other measures. more

The Ultimate Solution to Internet Governance: Let ITU and ICANN compete

Controversies over ICANN led to the creation of the Working Group on Internet Governance, but so far there have been few specific proposals for change. The Internet Governance Project has entered that breach with a new policy paper: "What to Do About ICANN: A Proposal for Structural Reform." The proposal, by Hans Klein and myself, proposes three clean, clear but probably controversial solutions to the criticisms that have been made of ICANN. more

JET Open Letter to Microsoft

We, members of the JET (Joint Engineering Team), send this open letter to request Microsoft Corporation to implement IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) standards[1] in the next version of Internet Explorer. ...IDN is a critical enabling technology that will make the Internet more useable and attractive to the majority of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean population who do not use English in their daily life. In fact, IDN is mentioned as one of the Declaration of Action of the World Summit of Information Society (WSIS). To date, IDN registration has been launched in .cn, .jp, .kr, .tw and many other European country code top level domain as well as other generic top level domain names. More than 1 million IDNs have been registered since 2000. Most of the web browsers, such as Safari, Firefox and Opera have implemented IDN standards. This means that users can use IDN in these web browsers without additional applications or plug-ins... more

How India’s .IN Domain Rouses from its Slumber

India is one of the world's fastest growing economies, the global leader in outsourcing and the service computing, and home to over a billion people. But when I first met officials from the Indian government to discuss their plans for .IN, India had a total of just about 7,000 .IN registrations, fewer than most small countries have. ...(Compare to 100,000 names registered last month alone) This is one of the most rapid starts of any domain worldwide. In my conversations with senior officials of the Indian Government and the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) which manages the .IN Registry, they credited three key decisions that proved critical to the success of the domain's re-launch... more

Meeting Growing Demands of Domain Name Space

This post will explain why ICANN and the domain industry should foster and encourage the use of third-level domain name spaces to benefit the domain name industry and as a way to meet the growing demand for easy-to-remember URLs. ...The Internet was originally envisioned to be hierarchical in nature. The Domain Name System came into being out of a need for easy-to-remember network addresses. ...Although benefits have come out of the creation of the new TLDs, a simple, obvious, important, existing solution is largely being overlooked by the domain name industry... more

Why Restricted TLDs Should Not Be Gatecrashed

In recent weeks, thousands of what ICANN describes as "questionable" registrations have been activated... Let me illustrate: Mr. ICANN decides to hold a party. He has decided that he only wants to ask some of his professional friends to come, so they are asked to bring their party invites with them to prove they've been invited, because poor Mr. ICANN has had trouble before with people gatecrashing his parties. At a sunrise party he'd held a few years ago, all kinds of people had gatecrashed and no-one had asked to see their invites and it was dreadful. So Mr. ICANN hires a bouncer to stand guard at the front door of his house. The bouncer, Johnny Registry, assures Mr. ICANN that no-one will get in without an invite... more

.EU TLD Comes Closer Than Ever to Becoming a Reality

With much awaited fanfare, .EU is inching ever closer to becoming real! I am a bit reluctant to say it is actually here until the gates are actually open, but I can imagine that there are many who are grateful as I am that the process has gotten as far as it has. On March 23rd, 2005, ICANN announced that they had approved an agreement earlier that week with EURid to have .eu added to the root zone... more

Spirit of .Pro, Where Art Thou?

On March 2, EnCirca launched its ProForwarding leasing service for .pro domains. When we launched the service, we were sure that the ProForwarding service would appeal to a segment of the internet community not being served well by other extensions: self-employed professionals and other small businesses. Based on the response we've received, it appears we were right. It also caught the attention of ICANN and others, who accused us of "violating the spirit of .pro". Does .pro even have a spirit? And if it does, who gets to decide what it is? more

Whois Privacy vs. Anonymity

The Internet is often a lawless place. Everyone knows that there are many tricks and traps lurking on the Internet, just waiting to prey on unsuspecting and innocent users. Some of these traps will trash your computer while others will turn your PC into a zombie that will broadcast messages at the virus writer's command. ...The list of annoyances and downright criminal activities seem endless. ...To make the Internet a safer place both legislators and law enforcement are now focusing on the Internet. In the crossfire that's taking place there are many ideas that are being offered up. Some of them are good and some are not. One bad decision that was recently forced upon the Internet community (without hearings -- more on this later) was to eliminate private domain name registrations for .US domain names. ...It's important to understand the difference between privacy and anonymity. more

Shambles at the .Pro Registry

Registration of .Pro domains has descended into shambles as the Registry responsible for their administration has allowed a flood of domain registrations which appear to be in breach of the strict rules restricting who can register a .pro domain and the certified credentials required before any such domain can work. more

Protecting Brands from Phishers No Easy Task

Just in case you've been out of the country for the last 12 months, a new scourge is hitting the Internet and the world of email and it's called phishing. The Anti-Phishing Working Group defines phishing as identity theft "attacks using 'spoofed' e-mails and fraudulent Websites designed to fool recipients into divulging personal financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames and passwords..." According to various experts, the incidents of phishing are rising at an alarming rate: there were 13,000 unique phishing attacks in January alone - that's a 42 percent surge over the previous month. The real problem is that phishing works. more

IDN Parody on verisign.com

Guilllaume Rischard setup a parody on verisign.com using the IDN spoofing trick. He managed to get one registrar to register verisign.com with a cyrillic S (U+0405) (ie xn--veriign-mog.com :-) This actually started in #joiito a couple of weeks ago after the Eric published the spoofing attack paper. A joke was made that it would be funny if someone did it to verisign.com and so he did. I suppose I could rant why VeriSign should adopt the JET Guideline (or ICANN Guidelines) but this parody would send a louder message. more

Protecting the Internet: Certified Attachments and Reverse Firewalls?

In many respects the internet is going to hell in a hand basket. Spam, phishing, DNS poisoning, DDoS attacks, viruses, worms, and the like make the net a sick place. It is bad enough that bad folks are doing this. But it is worse that just about every user computer on the net offers a nice fertile place for such ill behavior to be secretly planted and operated as a zombie under the control of a distant and unknown zombie farmer. ...Some of us are coming to the converse point of view that the net is being endangered by the masses of ill-protected machines operated by users. more