Alain Durand, Principal Technologist at ICANN, visited Georgia Institute of Technology last week for a talk on the global adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The Internet Governance Project organized the talk in cooperation with Atlanta's Technology Development Center (ATDC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy. Durand, who was involved in the IPv6 standardization efforts at IETF back in the early to mid-1990s, offered a clear eyed assessment of the protocol's critical flaw... more
Over this past week both Namejet.com and Godaddy.com ran auctions of re-branded ccTLD's and I think the results are a preview of what's to come for new gTLD's that attempt the same strategy. Namejet.com ran an auction of .PW single character domain names; single letter domains and single numbered domain names. Arguably single letter and single numbered domains such as; o.co, 8.asia, and z.com, are some of the most valuable inventory any registry will ever have, especially in the new gTLD world when two letter domains are going to require ICANN approval. more
ICANN's GNSO council had WHOIS on its agenda for today. The options on the table: (1) Accepting the outcome of years of policy development processes; (2) rejecting that outcome (again?), but calling for some kind of fact-gathering to feed into future policy work, in order to keep the space occupied; (3) acknowledging that there is broad dissent in the Internet community, and calling for a sunset on the WHOIS clauses in current agreements, as these clauses are not backed by community consensus any more. Not very surprisingly, motions (1) and (3) failed; (2) was accepted; all that after lengthy discussion, with lots of procedural bells and whistles. more
What if there was a relatively simple fix that could be applied to home WiFi routers, cable modems and other gateway devices that would dramatically speed up the Internet access through those devices? Many of us may have heard of the "bufferbloat" issue where buffering of packets causes latency and slower Internet connectivity, but at IETF 86 last month in Orlando I got a chance to see the problem with an excellent demonstration by Dave Täht as part of the "Bits-And-Bytes" session. more
Yesterday Verisign sent ICANN a most interesting white paper called New gTLD Security and Stability Considerations. They also filed a copy with the SEC as an 8-K, a document that their stockholders should know about, It's worth reading the whole thing, but in short, their well-supported opinion is that the net isn't ready for all the new TLDs, and even if they were, ICANN's processes or lack thereof will cause other huge problems. more
Digital Transformation (DX) is picking up speed. According to a recent announcement by IDC, the market is expected to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.9% to reach a whopping 321 billion dollars by 2021. In 2018 alone, IDC expects that 326 billion will be spent on transforming how people and things communicate. Based on these numbers, it looks like Digital Transformation has become the real deal. more
A look into the past reveals that continuous developments in weaponry technology have been the reason for arms control conventions and bans. The banning of the crossbow by Pope Urban II in 1096, because it threatened to change warfare in favour of poorer peasants, the banning of poisoned bullets in 1675 by the Strasbourg Agreement, and the Geneva protocol banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in 1925 after world war 1, all prove that significant technological developments have caused the world to agree not to use certain weapons. more
The terms Digital Sovereignty or Souveraineté numérique have recently risen in prominence to describe the international rule of law as it applies to information and communication technologies. At a time when disinformation is proliferating and the rule of law, democracy, and human rights, together with long-standing relationships, are being cast aside, digital sovereignty is scaling in importance as a key defensive measure among many nations. more
News reports say that the Israeli government is close to passing a law that requires portable e-mail addresses, similar to portable phone numbers. Number portability has been a success, making it much easier to switch from one provider to another, and address portability might ease switching among ISPs. But e-mail is not phone calls. Is it even possible? more
Pretty much as long as there've been computers, one of the biggest challenges has been user education. How do you create software smart enough to inform a user when they're about to do something potentially disastrous - or, worse, when something disastrous has been done to them? As one of the world's largest access providers, Comcast has put a ton of thought into developing a notification system for their users. The solution Comcast developed involves, in effect, hijacking HTTP requests... more
A couple of recent articles have caught my attention because they offer scathing criticism of ICANN. The first is a long and convoluted article by Kieren McCarthy on the .JOBS debacle. Kieren has basically written a feature that only a seasoned ICANN insider can hope to understand and that's a pity, because the points he makes appear very valid. Namely that ICANN is incapable of looking at itself in the mirror and admitting when it's wrong. more
In politics, as in Internet policy, the most effective weapons are also the oldest. So when it came time for hard-line intellectual property advocates to make a desperate last stand against the new gTLD program, it came as no surprise they turned to the atomic bomb of rhetorical devices: FUD. FUD stands for "fear, uncertainty and doubt" and it is the tool of last resort when change is coming and you want to stop it. The theory is simple: the human response to fear is to cling to what's familiar and oppose what's new. So if you can scare enough people about the potential effects of a new policy or law, you stand a pretty good chance of preventing it from ever going into effect. more
The April NETmundial meeting was a seminal event in the history of Internet Governance. Fears that the meeting might fail to reach consensus were not realized. Instead, the participants achieved a high degree of harmony -- the "Spirit of NETmundial" -- that resulted in issuance of a consensus Statement that, while lacking in precise detail, was effused with positive energy. Since that meeting there has been considerable discussion within the Internet Governance (IG) community as to what lessons have been learned from NETmundial, and how its work might best be carried into the future. more
For the purpose of this article it is not necessary to concentrate too much on defining what a Premium domain name is and what it is useful for: all that we need to know is simple, a premium domain name is often a memorable generic name, short or medium in length and highly valuable due to its relevance in search. However, when it comes to finding out how to register a premium domain name then it becomes much more difficult because you won't necessarily know where to go. more
A harmful, highly unilateral and capricious action. Tons of software out there depended on the ability to tell the difference between a domain name which exists and does not. They use that to give a meaningful, locally defined error to the user, or to identify if an E-mail address will work or not before sending the mail. Many used it as a way to tag spam (which came from domains that did not exist). It is the local software that best knows how to deal with the error. more
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