Featured Blogs

Enterprise Domain Stargazing: Understanding Your Company’s Galaxy of Domains

In CSC's recent insight paper, we address the trend that many business leaders today don't realize the extent to which their modern enterprise -- and its millions of digital assets -- rely on. It's a vast domain ecosystem that needs to be protected from online threats. Often, to better understand this need for domain security, we need to understand how critical and interconnected domains are within a business. more

Another Year of the Transition to IPv6

I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later, we'd still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4, and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry was going to outpace the capacity of the IPv4 address pool in a couple of years, we needed to do something quickly more

Call for Domain Owner Code of Rights and Responsibilities

This article discusses grassroots progress toward the development of a "Domain Registrant's Code of Rights and Responsibilities." This Code is an effort to create a balanced combination of the rights that domain name registrants should enjoy and the responsibilities that domain name registrants should fulfill. Discussion and survey results concerning this Code at domain-related forums show far greater grassroots consensus than one might think between what might be called the "domainer" and "intellectual property" communities. Informal surveys at some domain-related forums show very strong support in favor of this Code. more

Live Streaming Apps: Piracy Trends Are-A-Changing

Until recently, digital pirates have used both P2P sites and cyberlockers to upload and share pirated content. But as Internet connection speeds have increased, the piracy landscape has changed, and the appearance of streaming content has proliferated. In fact, 38% of online sporting fans are watching live streaming of their favorite events. However, the recent introduction of live streaming apps is further compounding issues surrounding online piracy... more

Framing the Internet Governance Debate: The Long Road to WSIS+20 (2025)

Since the early 2000s, the global debate about Internet Governance did have its ups and downs. We did see the establishment of ICANN, the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the making of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and the failure of the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT). We did see NetMundial and the IANA transition. more

What is Metadata, and Why Should I Care?

August 2014 is proving yet again to be an amusing month in the Australian political scene, and in this case the source of the amusement was watching a number of Australian politicians fumble around the topic of digital surveillance and proposed legislation relating to data retention measures. The politicians assured us that the proposed data retention measures were nothing untoward, and all that was being called for was the retention of "metadata" by Australian ISPs for a period of two years. more

IGF, WSIS 10+ & WIC: Three World Conferences for One Internet

In the last six weeks we could follow three world conferences on Internet issues. In November 2015 the 10th Internet Governance Forum (IGF) attracted nearly 5000 offline and online participants in the Brazilian Sea-Resort Joao Pessoa. In mid-December 2015, the governments of the 193 UN member states, together with a crowd of non-governmental stakeholders, finalized the review of the 2005 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and adopted the WSIS 10+ outcome document. And nearly 2000 people from more than 100 countries did meet on December, 16 – 18, 2015 in the Chinese Water-Town of Wuzhen at the 2nd World Internet Conference (WIC). more

ICANN’s Accountability Mechanisms – in Name Only?

On December 14, 2021, Dot Hip Hop, LLC (DHH) filed an Urgent Reconsideration Request following ICANN staff inaction (for its over four-month delay) of its Assignment Request for the .hiphop Registry Agreement. Not only did the ICANN Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) decide against considering the Reconsideration Request on an urgent basis, but on its last day of business for 2021, ICANN Org decided to retaliate against DHH for filing the Reconsideration Request in the first place ... more

Brand TLDs Become Official

It seems that pigs can, after all, fly. From the start of its new gTLD program, ICANN ignored what was obvious to pretty much everyone else: corporations might wish to apply for their brands and run them as closed ecosystem TLDs servicing only the brands in question. No longer. By releasing a proposed addendum to its registry contract, called Specification 13, ICANN has done two things it has always said it would never do: acknowledged that "brand TLDs" should be considered in the new gTLD program, and created a new category of TLD for this specific class of application. more

What the ITU WSIS Spam Meeting Accomplished

The first week in July I went to an acronym-heavy World Symposium on the Internet Society Thematic Meeting on spam in Geneva. A few people have reported this as a meeting by "the UN", which it wasn't. Although the International Telecommunications Union is now part of the UN, it dates back to an 1865 treaty to manage international telegraph communication... more

President of easyDNS Responds to WLS Issue

When I came out of the Verisign Product Round-Table at the ICANN Meeting it became clearer to me why I sometimes feel that registries were dangerous things to put in the hands of a for-profit corporation. Here in Canada the .CA namespace is regarded as a "Key Public Resource", thus the registry is administered by a non-profit corporation. The monopoly over the root (which is what it is) is treated very carefully, almost with a "necessary evil" mentality, which if done properly cultivates private enterprise and competition at the registrar level, where it should be. more

Sensitive Data Discovery: The First Step in Data Breach Protection

Users are tired of hearing about data breaches that put their sensitive information at risk. Reports show that cybercriminals stole 6.41 million records in the first quarter of 2023 alone. From medical data to passwords and even DNA information, hackers have stolen a lot of sensitive information in 2023. more

NASA Teething Troubles Teach a DNSSEC Lesson

On January 18, 2012, Comcast customers found they could not access the NASA.gov website. Some users assumed that Comcast was deliberately blocking the website or that NASA, like Wikipedia and Reddit, was participating in the "blackout" protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) going on that day. As it turned out, the truth was much less exciting, but it offers important lessons about DNSSEC. more

Will VeriSign Be Able to Engage in Tiered Pricing for .com Soon?

According to the draft of new Generic Top-level Domains (gTLD) contracts for Section 7.3, "Price controls have been removed for 2008 in favor of the transparent pricing model outlined above." Section 3.2.b) of the .com registry agreement states: "ICANN shall not apply standards, policies, procedures or practices arbitrarily, unjustifiably, or inequitably and shall not single out Registry Operator for disparate treatment unless justified by substantial and reasonable cause." In my opinion, VeriSign (and other existing gTLD operators) are almost being invited to ask for their contracts to be amended... more

Extraterritoriality

Black's Law Dictionary defines it as "the extraterritorial operation of laws; that is, their operation upon persons, rights or jural relations, existing beyond the limits of the enacting state, but still amenable to its laws. The term is used to indicate jurisdiction exercised by a nation in other countries, by treaty..." Extraterritoriality is also the most significant emerging development today in the law shaping virtual network architectures and services that includes OTT and NFV-SDN. more