Featured Blogs

Digital Sovereignty in a Fragmenting Internet: What Role Should WSIS+20 Play?

As the global digital order enters an era of intensifying geopolitical tension, debates over digital sovereignty have re-emerged as a defining fault line in Internet governance. At stake is not merely who controls data or infrastructure within national borders but whether the vision of a globally interoperable, open Internet, one of WSIS's founding principles, can be meaningfully sustained. more

Internet Governance: The Proof Is In The Pudding

"ICANN remains the frontier institution and the test case for global governance in the IT sector," writes Zoe Baird in an article in the November-December 2002 issue of "Foreign Affairs". Baird is the President of the Markle Foundation. Her article "Governing the Internet: Engaging Government, Business and Nonprofits" appears in "Foreign Affairs", a magazine usually devoted to the discussion of American foreign policy interests.

The opening line of the article is striking. "The rapid growth of the Internet," Baird writes, "has led to a worldwide crisis of governance." On the surface, a serious problem has been identified. There is the promise of a fruitful discussion to follow. more

Think Beyond .com: From Country Codes to Internationalized Domain Names

One of the major takeaways from the Web Globalization Report Card is the importance of providing "front doors" to your localized websites. These doors begin with the addresses themselves, which may not include the .com domain. In fact, I'd recommend that most localized websites not use the .com domain, as this is an overloaded domain. This article looks at the many ways brands are creating more localized addresses, beginning with country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). more

ARF is Now an IETF Standard

When a user of a large mail system such as AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail reports a message as junk or spam, one of the things the system does is to look at the source of the message and see if the source is one that has a feedback loop (FBL) agreement with the mail system. If so, it sends a copy of the message back to the source, so they can take appropriate action, for some version of appropriate. For several years, ARF, Abuse Reporting Format, has been the de-facto standard form that large mail systems use to exchange FBL reports about user mail complaints. more

IPv6: A Lost Decade?

A 'decade from hell', according to Times Magazine, a 'dazing decade' says Newsweek. In Copenhagen, at the Climate Change Conference, the World Meteorological Organization talked of the 'hottest decade on record'. BusinessWeek characterized the decade as one of 'innovation interrupted'. All this gloom made me wonder how to qualify our IPv6 decade? more

WannaCry: Patching Dilemma from the Other Side

WannaCry, originated firstly in state projects but spread by other actors, has touched upon myriads of infrastructure such as hospitals, telecommunication, railroads that many countries have labelled as critical. IT engineers are hastily presenting patching codes in various localized versions. The other patch needed, however, is more than technical. It is normative and legislative. The coding of that patch for a situation like this is in two layers of dilemma. more

Congress Will Oversight ICANN: And You Can Take That to the Bank

Even though the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plays a very important role in the global Internet ecosystem, its activities are not frequently mentioned in the mainstream international media; that is, until ICANN's name is mentioned alongside that of the US Congress in a US$1.1 trillion Omnibus spending bill. Since the bill was passed by the House of Representatives, the issue of ICANN has assumed a certain topicality and has attracted commentary from many pundits. more

EU to ICANN: Go Back to Drawing Board on Auctions!

The European Commission is not a big fan of the David versus Goliath ICANN new gTLD auction scenario. On December 12 last year, ICANN released a set of revised public auction rules. These auctions are presented as the avenue of last resort for resolving new gTLD contentions. As is ICANN's custom, the rules were put out for public comment. The EU submitted its statement on the very last day of the comment reply period. more

More than 85% of Top 500 Most Highly-Trafficked Websites Vulnerable

Over the last 5 years, hacktivists have continued the practice of redirecting well-known domain names to politically motivated websites utilizing tactics such as SQL injection attacks and social engineering schemes to gain access to domain management accounts -- and that, in and of itself, is not surprising. But what IS surprising is the fact that less than 15% of the 500 most highly trafficked domains in the world are utilizing Registry Locking. more

IT Risks for Cloud Computing

As the industry-wide paradigm shift to cloud computing and software-as-a-service gradually continues to make the transition from buzz to reality, security and availability continue to emerge as the main barriers to customer adoption. A recent ISACA survey of over 1,800 US IT professionals found that only 17 percent believe the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the risks. Only one in 10 respondents said they would consider using software-as-a-service (SaaS) for mission-critical applications. more

The DNS Still Isn’t a Directory

Back in the mid 1990s, before ICANN was invented, a lot of people assumed that the way you would find stuff on the Internet would be through the Domain Name System. It wasn't a ridiculous idea at the time. The most popular way to look for stuff was through manually managed directories like Yahoo's, but they couldn't keep up with the rapidly growing World Wide Web. Search engines had been around since 1994, but they were either underpowered and missed a lot of stuff, or else produced a blizzard of marginally relevant results. more

The U.N.‘s Threat to the Net

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, writing in The Washington Post, declared that it is a "mistaken notion" that the U.N. "wants to 'take over,' police or otherwise control the Internet." Unfortunately, neither the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the WSIS' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) or the Secretary General's column give comfort to those committed to cyber-freedom. more

CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners

Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the new CIRA whois policy, which took effect today and which I described as striking the right balance between access and privacy. The policy was to have provided new privacy protection to individual registrants - hundreds of thousands of Canadians - by removing the public disclosure of their personal contact information... Apparently I spoke too soon. more

.Pro Asking for Second-Level Domains (Again)

In a Message from RegistryPro Advisory Board to Tina Dam on 24 October 2003, it is noted that .Pro is, again, asking ICANN to allow for the registration of 2nd level domains. I am, again, of mixed opinion on this. On the one hand, a registry should be able to do what it wants, within reason. This clearly falls into that category. On the other hand, .Pro has been denied once already on the grounds that registering 2nd level domains is not the proposal upon which they were approved in the "testbed" procedure of November 2000. more

The gTLD Boondoggle

I've been watching at the excitement build in the domain community, where a lot of people seem to believe that at next month's Singapore meeting, by golly, this time ICANN will really truly open the floodgates and start adding lots of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). I have my doubts, because there's still significant issues with the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and the US Government and ICANN hasn't yet grasped the fact that governments do not defer to NGOs, but let's back up a little and ask is this a good idea. more