Featured Blogs

Google, China, and Lawful Intercept

Like many people, I was taken by surprised by Google's announcement about its threatened withdrawal from China in the wake of continued censorship and attacks that appeared to emanate from there. My immediate reaction was quite simple: "Wow". There's been a lot of speculation about just why they pulled out. Some reports noted that Google has been losing market share to Baidu... I don't think, though, that that's the whole story. more

2% of All Traffic to Google Now Over IPv6! (Doubling in Past Year)

This weekend brought the great news that Google's IPv6 statistics have shown that connections over IPv6 to Google's web sites hit the 2% threshold for the first time. (You can see for yourself.) While 2% sounds tiny, as I wrote in a Deploy360 post today, the important fact here is that this represents a doubling of IPv6 traffic to Google over the past year! more

Google Surpasses Supercomputer Community, Unnoticed?

This week's issue of EE Times carries a story Pflops here; now what? about IBM's new 1 petaFLOPS supercomputer, the Roadrunner, and how its designers are scrambling to run benchmarks in advance of the annual International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) being held June 17th-20th. It's an article (dare I say, a puff piece?) about IBM, but it does mention competing supercomputers by Japanese vendors. However, it makes no mention of distributed computing projects like SETI@Home or, more importantly, of the Google computing cluster. more

Google’s Spending Spree: 2.4 Million Servers, and Counting

Google just published its Q3 financial results. So, what is Google spending on IT, and how much servers would that buy? This is one of their best kept secrets. In this post I give ballpark estimates based on back-of-the-envelop calculations, similar to the 'guestimates' I made 5 years ago. more

Is There Such a Thing as Technical Internet Governance?

In ICANN's "President & CEO Goals for Fiscal Year 2021", Göran Marby went out to make a curious distinction in the document's second stated goal, according to which he intends to "Implement a common strategy for Internet governance (IG) and technical Internet governance (TIG)". Proceeding to state that "we will begin by identifying the most important issues we need to address, followed by an assessment of where and how we can intervene, the venues we should use, and the resources required to be effective". more

Policy Advisory Boards - A Cornerstone PICS (Public Interest Commitment Specification)

Six months following the April 11th issuance of the Beijing Communique by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), ICANN continues to wrestle with whether to accept the bulk of the GAC's proposed safeguards for new gTLDs as set forth in Annex 1 of that document. On October 1st ICANN Board Chairman Stephen Crocket sent a letter to GAC Chair Heather Dryden summarizing the results of the September 28th meeting of the New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) that considered the remaining and still undecided advice received from the GAC. more

ICANN Can’t Take Care of Everything

Bruce Young tells a story of an Internet user who gets into trouble because "his" domain name was registered in the name of a web hosting provider that went bankrupt later on...As far as registrars are concerned, ICANN is currently doing its homework on domain name portability. As far as web hosting companies are concerned, though, these suggestions only look appealing at first sight. Upon closer inspection, they wouldn't be good policy... more

Canadians Aren’t Buying Into Net Neutrality

The Tyee, an independent on-line magazine based in BC wrote a story about net neutrality more than a year ago, noting that most Canadians are sleeping through the debate. They followed up again last week. Despite what is called a "perfect storm of events that may crystallize the issue for consumers, businesses, politicians, and regulators," there hasn't been an overwhelming outcry, despite extensive press coverage of the most recent network activities. There are a number of voices who present a conspiracy theory on traffic shaping in Canada... more

Verizon vs. iREIT et al Court Documents: What Can We Learn?

Verizon filed sued against iREIT and Domain Marketplace a couple of weeks ago in a Texas court, alleging cybersquatting. David Kesmodel's blog broke the story, and I used the PACER system to obtain the court filings, which are posted here. Exhibit 5 makes fascinating reading, especially when point #43 in the main statement of claim says "Exhibit 5 details only one famous trademark for each letter of the alphabet." more

Google Launch of DNS Service and OpenDNS Reply

Earlier today Google announced the launch of their new DNS service. They're pushing it as part of their "better experience" and "speed" drive that Matt Cutts and Co have been harping on about for the last while. OpenDNS, however, has been offering a similar service for quite some time... So it was quite interesting to read OpenDNS' response to the Google service. more

ICANN: Our Top 3 Policy Priorities for 2015

2014 was a big year for us and for our clients. The new gTLD program forced us to rethink, reprioritize and implement new and different strategies to protect our brands online. The uncertainty largely behind us, and with more information at our fingertips about just how well (or not) brands are faring in the new environment, it's time to look forward to what we can do in 2015 to fix what's broken, throw away what's useless, fight for what's important... more

ICANN Senate Hearing: The Battle Between Intellectual Property and Multistakeholderism

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Hearing on ICANN's Expansion of Top Level Domain Names on December 8, 2001 was all about strategy. The strategy was simple: while the world has its attention turned to the debate on the copyright legislative proposals of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, let's have another ICANN hearing and try to re-open trademark protection for new gTLDs. more

DNS Resolvers and DNSSEC: Roll Over and Die?

Security is great when all the green lights are shining brightly and everything validates as intended, but what happens when you encounter failure? In this work we examine the behaviour of the DNS when security, in the form of DNSSEC is added, and we look at what happens when things do not happen as intended. What triggered this examination was a sudden increase in the traffic generated by secondary servers for the in-addr.arpa reverse zones in December 2009. more

How Do We Define ‘SIP’ for Telecom In 2014?

"What is a minimum set of specifications that a vendor must implement to be able to say that it is SIP-compliant?" A friend asked me that question and my response was: "It depends." and even more unfortunately:
"I don't know." It turns out to be a challenging question to answer... and it led me to ask: "How do we define what "SIP" is for telecommunications in 2014? How do we help vendors move their products/services to be based on SIP? As we talk about "turning off the PSTN" and "moving all telecom to IP", how can we make it easier for companies to switch to using SIP? more

A Gap in the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook?

I strongly believe there is a serious "breach" in the Applicant Guidebook: I checked the scoring, I checked the possible objections, I am aware of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) early warning but I really could not find how ICANN is going to avoid Community applications to be submitted as Standard ones. The role of ICANN is to offer a solution to launching new generic Top-Level Domains, it is no party in saying whether a new gTLD is a Community or not. more