Featured Blogs

ICANN and the Almost Invisible New TLD Evaluation Process

There is a worldwide interest in the extension of the namespace to include new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) and select new registries to run them. If these New TLDs are to be selected objectively, and without partisan favours to insiders, then there is a clear need for criteria and careful evaluation of lessons gained from previous TLD launches. This was the principle behind the "Proof of Concept" approach, promised by ICANN, and yet ICANN appears to have retreated to a lightweight in-house evaluation, carried out obscurely, in the hands of selected individual under a 6-month contract 4 months ago. What have we learned about Sunrise, about Landrush, about abuse of process, about implementation and enforcement of agreements, about registrars who game the system to warehouse names for themselves, about proposed marketing budgets which evaporate into thin air? more

Online Registries: The DNS and Beyond

As the world grows more connected and more complicated, we all need ways of defining, identifying and keeping track of things and cross-referencing them with their owners. The simplest way to do that is with registries -- everything from the Domesday Book, a medieval registry of land, property and people; to current-day auto registries on the one hand and the worldwide Domain Name System on the other...But now, companies and organizations have to keep track of ever more things and people, not just inside their walls but across extended organizational boundaries. Call this new wrinkle an "external registry". Finally, they may want to interact with things and people, rather than just look them up, via an "active registry".  more

Fadi’s Resignation, Sepp Blatter’s Resignation - Others Should Consider Resigning as Well…

Fadi Chehade, the incumbent President and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), on 21 May 2015 announced his intention to leave ICANN by March 2016. No actual reasons were given for his summary and unexpected decision to stop being the head of an organization that he has led since 2012 -- against the background that Fadi Chehade had recently received an ICANN Board-approved contract extension up till 30 June 2017; together with a slate that has a long list of things to do with many uncompleted assignments. more

Wi-Fi Offload, Not Femtocells

Mobile operators face soaring data demand. The natural evolution of 2G/3G/4G infrastructure delivers about 2X additional capacity every 24 months. That's a major disconnect! (At least) two solutions are on the table, Femtocells and Wi-Fi offload. Both approaches solve the backhaul issue by using customer or 3rd party links (DSL, DOCSIS, T1/E1, WISP or otherwise)... As a solution for mobile data capacity, Wi-Fi wins, for many reasons. more

April 22, 1993 - A Day The Internet Fundamentally Changed

25 years ago, on April 22, 1993, a software release happened that fundamentally changed the user experience of the Internet. On that day, version 1.0 of "NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System" was released. You could now have (gasp!) text MIXED WITH IMAGES on the same page! Reading the Mosaic 1.0 release notes from Marc Andreessen is a bit of fun, as it includes gems like "Fixed mysterious stupid coredump that only hits Suns." more

The Internet of Things: Solving Security Challenges from the Fringe to the Core

News flash: to help fight California's drought, Samsung is offering a $100,000 prize to the innovator who creates "the most effective use of IoT and ARTIK [Samsung's IoT platform] technology for reducing water consumption by individuals or municipalities." When the average reader of this news headline needs no explanation of what "IoT" means or what this contest is about, we know IoT, or the Internet of Things, is for real. There are already an estimated 25 billion connected devices around the world, according to expert estimates. more

Domain Name Price Jump: Moore’s Law or Parkinson’s Laws?

As expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.) ...So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign's registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage... yet the cost is going up. How is this justified? more

My Experience With Starlink Broadband, It Passes “Better Than Nothing” Beta Test

May become the access answer for many at the end of the road. The icicle dripping dish in the picture is the antenna for Starlink, a satellite-based broadband service from SpaceX -- one of Elon Musk's other companies. It came Saturday, just before the snow arrived here in Stowe, VT. It's heated, so I didn't have to shovel it out, and it's working despite its frozen beard. The pandemic has shown us that it is socially irresponsible to leave any family without broadband access. more

Internet Governance and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Part 6: Articles 18-19

Internet Governance, like all governance, needs guiding principles from which policy making, and acceptable behavior, are derived. Identifying the fundamental principles to guide Internet ecosystem policy making around digital citizenship, and around the integrity of digital practices and behavior, can and should start with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (UDHR). more

Sailing Backwards: WSIS 10+ Avoids Entering Uncharted Territory

Early August 2014 the UN General Assembly agreed on the procedures how to review the results of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) from 2005. According to the draft resolution, the WSIS 10+ event will be a high level intergovernmental meeting in New York in December 2015. This meeting will adopt an "intergovernmental agreed outcome document"... The outcome document will be negotiated by governments in an "intergovernmental negotiation process". Non-governmental stakeholders from the private sector, civil society and technical community will be invited for "informal interactive consultation" in a parallel process. Wait a minute? What are "informal interactive consultations" in a parallel process? more

New gTLD Discussion Draft - Top 10

Okay, so spending my Monday morning printing out and reviewing 348 pages of the "New gTLD Discussion Draft" is not exactly what I had mind when I woke up today, but kudos to ICANN for keeping to the timeline that they had released last month. Since, most of you do not have the time or the patience (and probably have real work to do), I've taken it upon myself to highlight the most important changes in this version. more

WHOIS Review and Beyond 3.7.8

We have posted our support of the WHOIS Policy Review Team Report with two important comments. First, on page 79 of the report it is confirmed that the RAA is unenforceable on WHOIS inaccuracy (we wrote about this while at the last ICANN meeting) because the language of RAA 3.7.8 has no enforcement provision. It is now time for ICANN to confirm this problem officially.  more

More on Broadband Router Insecurity and Being Proactive

Fergie replied on NANOG to my recent post on the subject of broadband routers insecurity: "I'll even go a step further, and say that if ISPs keep punting on the whole botnet issue, and continue to think of themselves as 'common carriers' in some sense -- and continue to disengage on the issue -- then you may eventually forced to address those issues at some point in the not-so-distant future..." He is right, but I have a comment I felt it was important - to me - to make. Not just on this particular vulnerability, but on the "war"... more

Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance - Part I

This is the first part of a three-part series interview by Geert Lovink with Jeanette Hofmann, policy expert from Germany, where she talks about her experiences as a member of the ICANN's Nominating Committee and her current involvement as a civil society member of the German delegation for the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). "You recently published a paper (in German) called 'The Short Dream of Democracy on the Net.' Your conclusion is a rather sombering one. How would you describe the current situation related to ICANN? You state that nothing has been learned from the failed At-Large Membership experiment. Would you even go that far and see a backlash happening right now?..." more

Three Reasons Why It Makes Sense to Deploy DNSSEC Now

As many of you may know, today .ORG announced that all of its 8.5 million domains are now able to be fully DNSSEC signed - the largest set of domain names in the world so far that has access to this key security upgrade. .. The widespread publicity that the Kaminsky bug got around the world vindicated a decision made in several companies to invest time, effort and money into deploying DNSSEC. The community was split on the value of the DNSSEC effort -- many thought the deployment was quixotic, while a few others thought it was appropriate. more