Featured Blogs

DNSAI Compass: Six Months of Measuring Phishing and Malware

The DNS Abuse Institute recently published our sixth monthly report for our project to measure DNS Abuse: DNSAI Compass ('Compass'). Compass is an initiative of the DNS Abuse Institute to measure the use of the DNS for phishing and malware. The intention is to establish a credible source of metrics for addressing DNS Abuse. We hope this will enable focused conversations, and identify opportunities for improvement. more

The Single-Letter Domain Trademark Game

Patent practitioners are familiar with the long-honored practice of engaging in standards-setting activities with the aim of having the standard ultimately require the use of one's proprietary technology. This practice is no longer limited to patents, but has become the game the whole family can play. While most standards-setting organizations have caught on, and have implemented IP disclosure policies, ICANN has not done so... As some are aware, the question of making single-character domain names available has been a perennial topic of discussion within ICANN, championed by a few who have quietly been engaged in some interesting advocacy within the USPTO along a parallel track. more

New Book on Domain Name Regulation

My book, "The Current State of Domain Name Regulation: Domain Names as Second Class Citizens in a Mark-dominated World" is now available by Routledge. The following is an overview of the book. 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

Berlin the Latest New TLD Battleground?

If you've been following the new Top-Level Domain (TLD) process within ICANN over the last year or so you will have probably been aware of how slow and tortuous development has been. To recap, ICANN, which oversees domain names globally, announced that it was "opening up" the internet so that "anyone" could get the domain extension they wanted. Of course it's not really "everyone" and the process to date has been far from smooth. more

Letter from EU to UN Secretary General

Today the Swedish IT Minister Åsa Torstensson together with the Commissioner Viviane Reding sent a letter to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I think the letter is extremely well written, but when I twittered about it, some people contacted me and asked what was so special with it? Let me try to explain... more

I Got Fired

It's a story told a thousand times: founder of a company ousted by investors. It's a story so common you can find it any day of the week as a minor headline in a tech blog. Not much of a story at all really, until it happened to me. Minds + Machines, the company I founded in 2009, informed me last week that I was no longer wanted as CEO. Without going into details, which I can't, there were differences and disagreements. Still, it was a surprise. All the plans, the hopes -- pfhhht! into thin air. It sucked. Now what? more

My Comment on Forbes - Why Is the UN Trying to Take over the Internet

Forbes just published this article that's being shared all over my facebook friends feed. I left a comment on the article that I've copied and pasted here, as it is just about long enough to qualify as a CircleID post by itself... The problem is that peering isn't always settlement free -- and even if it is, if and only if there's an equitable amount of traffic exchanged between two ISPs. And then there's transit, where you pay another network to carry your packets for you. more

The Future of Domain Name Dispute Policies: The Journey Begins

A just-launched ICANN "working group" (of which I am a member) will - eventually - help to determine the future of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), the 17-year-old domain name arbitration system that has been embraced by trademark owners and criticized by some domainers; as well as the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS), the new (and limited) arbitration process that applies to the new gTLDs. more

Where Do Old Protocols Go To Die?

In Ripley Scott's classic 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, replicant Roy Batty (portrayed by Rutger Hauer) delivers this soliloquy... "I've...seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those... moments... will be lost in time, like (cough) tears... in... rain. Time... to die." more

Rediscovering the Internet

I wrote a guest column for ZDNet last month on the importance of IPV6. I fear that the Internet has been devolving into a recreation of the old smart networks with a lot of perverse complexity in the infrastructure. The latest calls for protection from all that bad stuff only adds to my concern since the problems attributed to the "Internet" will encourage people to seek more meddling. Unfettered connectivity has been a necessary precondition for allowing innovation to thrive on the Internet. It worked because the same openness allowed those at the edges to protect themselves against the errors whether malicious or just problematic. In fact, the so-called Internet revolution was triggered by the key concept of the browser -- treating other systems with suspicion but leaving it to the end points to decide how much to trust each other. more

How to Keep Track of the New Generic Top-Level Domains (newgTLDs) Now Appearing Weekly

How do you keep track of what new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs) are now available? Particularly when there seem to be new ones being announced weekly? Because I've written about newgTLDs here previously, someone recently asked me those questions... Now, these are the newgTLDs that have been delegated by ICANN, meaning that they now appear in the "root zone" of DNS. This does NOT mean that you can go right now and register a domain underneath one of these new TLDs. more

The 30th Birthday of DNS!

As Ond?ej Surý of CZ.NIC recently pointed out on the dns-operations list, it was 30 years ago this month, in November 1983, that two RFCs that defined what we now call the Domain Name System (DNS), RFC 882 and RFC 883, were published. They make for an interesting read today when you think about how far we've come in those 30 years -- and now how absolutely critical DNS is as part of the Internet's infrastructure. more

OARC-40: Notes on the Recent DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Centre Workshop

OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with presentations on various DNS topics. Here are some observations I picked up from the presentations in that meeting... In a world where every DNS name is DNSSEC-signed, and every DNS client validates all received DNS responses, we wouldn't necessarily have the problem of DNS spoofing. Even if we concede that universal use of DNSSEC is a long time off ... more