Featured Blogs

What If .COM Had Been Born With Site Finder?

ICANN's new Registry Service Technical Evaluation Service (RSTEP) process is definitely a positive step forward for ICANN. The comment period for the Tralliance proposed new service using the DNS wildcard feature closed Wednesday night. ...Ken Fockler commented "there are no right answers and no wrong answers, just judgments and decisions made on those judgments." In this light, I would be interested in hearing different perspectives on the following questions... more

Overture to Take Over Internet Governance: ITU at ICANN Meeting, Cairo

ITU is 143 years old and it has done a lot of good work. But it is so huge and powerful that it has been monopolizing (or mono-unionizing) Telecommunications for the last 143 years. ITU's hold over communications has been sweeping. But during the last ten years, ITU's member Telcos have seen several challenges from the open Internet architecture... ITU and the Internet organizations did not quite get along for this and several other reasons Especially the ITU has had its share of differences with the ICANN. Dr. Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the ITU addressed the ICANN Annual Meeting at Cairo on 6 November 2008. Here are some excerpts from the Secretary General's speech with my comments. more

Overloading the Internet? Recent Media Reports Based on Dangerous Misinformation

The London Times article (and a similar one in the Guardian) are based on dangerous misinformation. The net isn't slowing down, and nearly no technical experts believe major "overload" problems likely on the backhaul, core, or decent local loop... Net traffic per user, as documented by Odlyzko and Cisco, has been growing at about 35-40% the last five years, and that growth rate is flat and possibly down the last two years. The net has been able to handle the increase without price increases, much less overload, because the primary and rate limiting equipment (switches, routers, WDM, etc.) have simultaneously been going down at a similar 35-40%. Moore's Law is bringing costs down and capacity up at a remarkable rate. more

Why WIPO Does Not Like the UDRP

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) -- the same organization whose head recently equated intellectual property infringement with terrorism -- has been pressing ICANN to add domain name monopolies on the names of countries, and the names and acronyms of inter-governmental organizations, into the Uniform Domain Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP). Despite the fact that no-one but WIPO seems to want these new exclusions, a working group has nonetheless been convened to study their recommendations. more

Typosquatting Continues to Pose Dangers to Enterprises, Consumers

While typosquatting is not a new phenomenon, recent research highlights that it is being used to collect sensitive corporate information from employees and lure consumers to interact with dubious websites. ... Security consultancy Godai Group recently uncovered the use of a specific type of typosquat - a "doppelganger domain" - to collect sensitive enterprise information via email-based attacks. more

The Cyber-Sociology of Domain Names

Erica Wass is the editor and contributing author of the recently published book, "Addressing the World: National Identity and Internet Country Code Domains", (Rowman & Littlefield, October 2003). This book is an edited collection of original essays by domain name administrators, academics, journalists and lawyers that examine the connections between various cultures and the use and regulation of their country code domain names. CircleID recently caught up with Erica Wass to gain a better insight into the work behind this book. What follows is the first article of a three-part series where Erica shares her insight and discoveries that lead her to a sophisticated global perspective on "Addressing the world". She begins by examining cyber-sociology of ccTLDs -- the underlying theme of the book. more

As IPv6 Deploys, Will We Look Back on NAT as the Ugly Step Sister or Unsung Hero?

The debates are raging over whether or not we should migrate to IPv6. The strongest argument is the enormous address space that will allow for everyone and everything to have a unique public address, many addresses actually. It is often said that the shortage of public IPv4 addresses has limited our capabilities because it led to the pervasive use of private addressing, Network Address Translation (NAT) and Port Address Translation (PAT). Though these technologies remain critical, they are often regarded as stop-gap measures, and they sometimes create problems. In some circles, NAT has acquired a very bad name. But is that a fair perspective of the technology? Let's review the positives and negatives. more

IPv6 Security Myth #1: I’m Not Running IPv6 so I Don’t Have to Worry

Now that IPv6 is being actively deployed around the world, security is more and more a growing concern. Unfortunately, there are still a large number of myths that plague the IPv6 security world. These are things that people state as fact but simply aren't true. While traveling the world, talking to the people who've already deployed IPv6, I've identified what I believe are the ten most common IPv6 security myths. more

Banning 5G Equipment is a Foolish Strategy

It has become popular today around Washington and the venues of its coerced allies to issue threats to ban telecommunications equipment from certain countries - especially equipment intended for 5G use. The guise is vague assertions of "national security." It is an old tactic dating back to the turn of the last century and recurrent for decades. A combination of treaty instruments and collaborative industry standards activity several decades ago largely put an end to the banning tactic - significantly benefitting the entire world. more

New gTLD Registration Strategies: Preparing for the Inevitable

As we draw closer to the first new gTLD registry launch, many companies are beginning the arduous task of developing their new gTLD registration and blocking strategies. And after speaking with dozens of clients, I can tell you that the planned approaches are ranging from very minimal registration and blocking strategies for one or two core brands, all the way through to registrations of multiple brands in every single new gTLD registry. more

NCUC Group Releases Nominations

The Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) is the constituency group representing civil society organizations in the formation of domain name policy. In August 2004 it initiated a process to nominate people to serve on the UN Secretary-General's Working Group on Internet Governance, as representatives of civil society. Our purpose was to assist the Secretary-General to identify qualified and widely-supported individuals capable of serving on the WGIG on behalf of civil society. more

IPv6 Deployment: A Very Complex Time Bomb with an Uncertain Trigger Date

I did a 2 hour interview on October 23rd with John Curran, Board Chair of ARIN the North American Regional Internet Routing Registry for the last decade. I now understand what is at stake with IPv6. Outside of a key core group of network engineers I think darn few people do understand. And not all of them agree on how the scenario plays out though virtually all say the situation is very serious. John believes that it is huge. It is as big as Y2K except no one knows a precise date by which everything has to be done... more

It’s “Verisign vs. Users”

But even if the collateral damage is left out of the picture, the very idea behind SiteFinder is user-unfriendly, and that's the second half of the ALAC's note: SiteFinder is, ultimately, about short-cutting other error handling methods, and redirecting any users that enter non-existing domain names into a web browser to Verisign's own service, for commercial purposes. SiteFinder is designed so it becomes difficult to deploy superior error handling services that would compete with it -- because errors aren't flagged. more

Gmail Now Supports Internationalized Domain Names

If your first language isn't English and you don't use the Latin character set you can and will run into barriers. While Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) i.e. domain names where either the left of the dot, the right of the dot or the entire string is in characters other than Latin ones, do exist and have existed for a number of years not all services work well with them. more

Do Agencies Already Have the Authority to Issue Critical Infrastructure Protection Regulations?

The President and Congress are deliberating how best to ensure appropriate cybersecurity protection for private sector critical infrastructure. Legislative action and Executive Order are both under consideration. It is possible, however, that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) already has sufficient statutory authority to enact new cybersecurity regulations through the normal notice-and-comment rulemaking process. more