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Identity Theft: Giving Away Your Personal Information

Identity theft is apparently the "in thing" these days. By media accounts, hackers and evildoers lurk everywhere trying to steal your personal information. In the past few months, one company after another is being forced to admit customer data has been lost or stolen. In many cases, they have them come forth repeatedly over the next few weeks, or even months revising the estimated number of impacted customers. To date, I don't think any have ever lowered those numbers. ...Let's consider two events that didn't make the front page of C|Net or CNN.  more

WIPO Panel Splits on Descriptiveness of bocaresorts.com

An arbitration panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization has decided 2-1 in favor of Complainant Boca Raton Resort & Club in an action under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy over the domain name bocaresorts.com. ...The Presiding Panelist, Dennis Foster, disagreed with the majority's conclusion, and issued a dissent that addressed the issue of bad faith. Foster asserted that the Respondent was "entitled to believe that the phrase 'Boca Resorts' is geographically descriptive and means resorts in the city of Boca Raton, Florida... more

ICANN at the Inflection Point: Implications and Effects Of the GAC Beijing Communique

Although this article was first published just a few days ago, on May 8th, there have been several important intervening developments. First, on May 10th ICANN released a News Alert on "NGPC Progress on GAC Advice" that provides a timetable for how the New gTLD program Committee will deal with the GAC Communique. Of particular note is that, as the last action in an initial phase consisting of "actions for soliciting input from Applicants and from the Community', the NGPC will begin to "Review and consider Applicant responses to GAC Advice and Public Comments on how Board should respond to GAC Advice... 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

IP Address Reputation Primer

There has been a lot of recent discussions and questions about reputation, content and delivery of email. I started to answer some of them, and then realized there weren't any basic reference documents I could refer to when explaining the interaction. So I decided to write some. This post is about IP address reputation with some background on why IPs are so important and why ISPs focus so heavily on the sending IP. more

Internet Governance and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Part 8: Articles 22-25

This article is Part 8 of the series of articles discussing human rights in the digital age and published here on CircleID.2 When we commenced this analysis of the UDHR, and the relevance of its principles to our rights and duties within the Internet ecosystem, we committed ourselves to work through the UDHR one Article at a time. With this Part 8 we are four-fifths through that task. more

African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) Streaming Live This Week From Dakar, Senegal

The 5th African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) gets underway today, August 26, 2014, in Dakar, Senegal, with a packed agenda full of sessions focused on the future of peering and interconnection in Africa. There are sessions targeted at Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), infrastructure providers, content creators and policy makers and regulators. The event goes through Thursday, August 28, 2014. more

IPv6: Do as I Say or Do as I Do?

How important is it for a vendor, service provider or integrator to be using a service or technology that it is pushing on its clients? When Voice over IP (VoIP) came out Cisco began a gigantic push, having its salespersons pitch it to anyone and everyone on their client list. But Cisco had not yet deployed VoIP within its own corporate network. It was still making use of traditional voice systems from vendors that today it probably considers competitors. Many people on the receiving end of a sales pitch recognized this... more

The WSIS Deal

There is considerable coverage this morning (or this evening in Tunis) on the last minute WSIS deal struck yesterday. The gist of the coverage rightly reports that the U.S. emerged with the compromise they were looking for as the delegates agreed to retain ICANN and the ultimate U.S. control that comes with it (note that there is a lot in the WSIS statement that may ultimately prove important but that is outside the Internet governance issue including the attention paid to cybercrime, spam, data protection, and e-commerce). This outcome begs the questions -- what happened? And, given the obvious global split leading up to Tunis, what changed to facilitate this deal? more

New TLD Application Tip: Launch Strategies

Almost exactly nine years ago, the .INFO domain first started accepting registrations. This was an historic event as it was the first time a new generic top-level domain (TLD) was launched to an existing domain marketplace and, in fact, was the first new TLD to be added since .com. We've seen (and provided technology to power) many other TLD launches since then, with many business models. As you seek to introduce your own new TLD however, you should carefully evaluate the different launch models that have been tried before and determine which one will work best for your specific TLD. more

Geographic Implications of DNS Infrastructure Distribution

The past several years have seen significant efforts to keep local Internet communications local in places far from the well-connected core of the Internet. Although considerable work remains to be done, Internet traffic now stays local in many places where it once would have traveled to other continents, lowering costs while improving performance and reliability. Data sent directly between users in those areas no longer leaves the region. Applications and services have become more localized as well, not only lowering costs but keeping those services available at times when the region's connectivity to the outside world has been disrupted... The recently published paper, "Geographic Implications of DNS Infrastructure Distribution" focuses on the distribution of DNS infrastructure. more

MarkMonitor Supports Brand Registry Group (BRG) Call for Preliminary Applicant Guidebook

During last week's ICANN71 Virtual Policy Forum, the Brand Registry Group (BRG) held a very informative session about how ICANN can help potential applicants prepare for the next new gTLD round. Speakers during the session provided historical perspective that applicant guidebooks have regularly evolved over time as a result of community review and feedback provided to ICANN, providing concrete examples of how the current applicant guidebook was developed. more

Examininng Value in New ICANN TLDs on Search and Navigation, Companies, Domain Registries

I outline the implications for value presented by ICANN's proposed introduction of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) on user search and navigation, companies, and registries... For the new tools to be value adding they should facilitate navigation, reduce search cost, or provide actionable branding information through marketing. Unfortunately, the new TLDs bring in a mixed bag of value-adding and -destroying tools. more

Top 10 Spam Stories of 2008

Well, it's a yearly tradition in the western hemisphere that at the end of the year, we compose a top 10 list of the 10 most . Since it is now 2009, I thought that I would create my own list of the top 10 spam stories of 2008. Now, not all of these will be universally applicable to everyone, they are the top 10 stories as seen by me. more

Policies to Promote Broadband Access in Developing Countries

In the 2014 Istanbul-Turkey IGF workshop on policies to promote broadband access in developing countries organised by Rui ZHONG of ISOC China, we realized that while technological solutions are advancing rapidly, policy and regulations remain a significant barrier to affordable internet especially in the developing world. According to a report by Alliance for Affordable Internet ( A4AI), the key to affordability is the policy and regulatory environment that shapes the different actors in the market. more

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