Suppose you wanted to know who operates a website at a given domain name. Perhaps you suspect that the domain name is pointing to a website that offers illegal content, or you may just want to send a comment to its authors. Conveniently, the Internet provides a so-called "WHOIS" system that ordinarily provides contact information for each registered domain. But in the case of many hundreds of thousands of domains, the WHOIS data just isn't accurate. more
Today's Wall Street Journal has a provocative story headlined 'China Squeezes PC Makers: Beijing Is Set to Require Web Filter That Would Block Government-Censored Sites'... According to a press release dated June 8th China time, after a period of testing and evaluation, the "Green Dam Youth Escort" software received government blessing in April to be made available for free public download. The press release says that the software has been downloaded over 3 million times since the end of March and is being used by approximately 2279 schools... more
Three years ago, the first Internet-Draft on Registry Maintenance Notifications for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) was published, which will become a Request for Comments (RFC). The IETF Registration Protocols Extensions (REGEXT) working group is the home of the coordination effort for standards track EPP extensions. They released eight RFCs over the last couple of years, and they are currently working on more than 15 Internet-Drafts. more
On September 3, 2003, United States federal law enforcement officers arrested the notorious John Zuccarini accused of allegedly creating misleading domain names to deceive children and direct them to pornographic websites. Zuccarini's arrest is the first to be made under the Truth in Domain Names Act, which took effect earlier this year prohibiting people from creating misleading domain names as a means to deceive children into viewing content that's harmful to minors, or tricking adults into clicking on obscene websites. What follows is a collection of commentaries made by experts in response to this event...
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After hearing over 350 presentations on IPv6 from IPv6-related events in the US (seven of them), China, Spain, Japan, and Australia, and having had over 3,000 discussions about IPv6 with over a thousand well-informed people in the IPv6 community, I have come to the conclusion that all parties, particularly the press, have done a terrible job of informing people about the bigger picture of IPv6, over the last decade, and that we need to achieve a new consensus that doesn't include so much common wisdom that is simply mythical. There are many others in a position to do this exercise better than I can, and I invite them to make a better list than mine, which follows. more
We seem to hear quite a bit from ICM about their .xxx TLD proposal. People who might be interested in the view from the porn community might be interested in Violet Blue's article on the proposal. As you might expect, she is against and sees no real support from the porn world. She does not consider 153K defensive domain registrations as proof of demand. more
As the WHOIS debate rages and the Top-Level Domain (TLD) space prepares to scale up the problem of rogue domain registration persists. These are set to be topics of discussion in Costa Rica. While the ICANN contract requires verification, in practice this has been dismissed as impossible. However, in reviewing nearly one million spammed domain registrations from 2011 KnujOn has found upwards of 90% of the purely abusive registrations could have been blocked. more
I've often found truth in the famous George Santayana quote, "Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." That's an apt warning for what is currently happening - again - with the hundreds of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) that are launching ... and failing to work as expected on the Internet. First, a quick refresher: As most CircleID readers know, in the early 2000s, seven new gTLDs were launched: .AERO, .BIZ, .COOP, .INFO, .MUSEUM, .NAME and .PRO. Aside from Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs), these were the first top-level changes to the DNS since the early days of the Internet. more
Something odd happened through 2021 in the market for IPv4 addresses. Across 2021 the reported market price for the transfer of IPv4 addresses has doubled, from approximately USD $27 per IPv4 individual address at the end of 2020 to around USD $55 per address in December 2021. It has taken seven years for the market price to rise from just under USD $10 to get to USD $20 per address. The next year, 2020, saw the price rise a further USD $7 per address, and then in the next 12 months, the market price doubled. more
If a UDRP panelist believes domainers are the same thing as cybersquatters, is he fit to arbitrate? I came across an editorial on CNET today by Doug Isenberg, an attorney in Atlanta and founder of GigaLaw.com, and a domain name panelist for the World Intellectual Property Organization. The guest editorial focuses on Whois privacy and why it's imperative to maintain open access to registrant data for intellectual property and legal purposes. That's a common opinion I've read a million times. Nothing groundbreaking there. But then I was shocked to read that Isenberg generalizes domainers as cybersquatters: "Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as 'domainers.' Popular blogs and news sites track their activities..." more
It has taken almost three years -- by some counts, more than 6 years -- but ICANN's domain name policy making organization has finally taken a stand on Whois and privacy. And the results were a decisive defeat for the copyright and trademark interests and the US government, and a stunning victory for advocates of the rights of individual domain name registrants... more
On 24-28 July, states convened in New York for the fifth session of the UN First Committee's Open ended Working Group on ICTs (OEWG), which aims to establish a common understanding of - and further develop the framework for - responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. This session marked a critical juncture in the process, with states negotiating the OEWG's annual progress report... more
TLD registrations in the Internet's root-zone file currently are divided into two broad classifications: generic and country-code top-level domains. With respect to the latter classification, no new "strategy" is required to add further ccTLDs as a relatively well-working process is already in place to integrate the occasional new country-code top-level domain. With one of these two classifications under reasonably sound management, it is therefore perfectly understandable to see that the ICANN organization consequently views its obligation to "Define and implement a predictable strategy for selecting new TLDs" as a mandate "to begin the process of allocating and implementing new gTLDs"... the flaw in this conclusion, however, stems from the presumption that the Internet's taxonomy must necessarily contain only the two above-so-mentioned broad classifications. I am proposing a third TLD classification -- based on languages. more
Want to read a wide range of views on how to strengthen the security and privacy of the Internet? Interested to hear how some of the leaders of the open standards world think we can make the Internet more secure? As I wrote about previously here on CircleID, the W3C and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) are jointly sponsoring a workshop on "Strengthening The Internet" (STRINT) on February 28 and March 1 in London just prior to the IETF 89 meeting happening all next week. more
In an article by Sheldon Burshtein, published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, the author examines the view on whether domain names are properties. The following is the abstract of this article: "...Domain names have become increasingly valuable assets, in some respects more valuable than trade marks. A domain name may identify not only the source of the goods, services, business or information, but also the virtual location of the source, much as an address or telephone number does. However, there is still a significant unresolved issue as to whether a domain name is a form of intangible property or merely a contractual right." more
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