Featured Blogs

IP Addressing in the New Age of Scarcity

This is the prepared opening statement given on behalf of Depository, Inc. at the panel discussion "IP addressing in the new age of scarcity" in the context of Internet governance and public policy at the Global Internet Governance: Research and Public Policy Challenges for the Next Decade Regional Conference held at the American University School of International Service on Thursday, May 5th, 2011 between 11:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. with Prof. Milton Mueller moderating and on the panel as well was John Curran, President and CEO of ARIN and Michael Froomkin, Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law. more

Are Domain Name Portfolios Actually Worth What They Are Touted to Be?

According to a recent article in Domain Name Wire, "shares of domain name company Tucows are down over 15% in early trading after announcing earnings." Elliot Noss, President and CEO of Tucows, says: "We delivered solid financial performance in the second quarter, which benefited from the sale of a block of 2,500 domain names from our portfolio." more

Why New TLDs Don’t Matter

Lost amid the furor about ICANN's rule change that may (or may not) lead to a flood of TLDs is the uncomfortable fact that almost without exception, the new TLDs created since 2000 have been utter failures. Other than perhaps .cat and .mobi, they've missed their estimates of the number of registrations by orders of magnitude, and they haven't gotten mindshare in the target community. So what went wrong? more

Minding Your IP Address Reputation

Network operators rely on guidance from IP address experts because not all IP addresses used on the Internet are the same. The "reputation" of email senders is especially important because some are malicious users of the system. But identifying "senders" based on their email addresses or the individual IP address of a user presents issues that are unnecessarily complex. more

Nominations Open for 2025 Public Interest Registry (PIR) Board of Directors

Are you interested in helping guide the future of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of a number of domains that serve the public interest, including .ORG, .NGO and .ONG? Or do you know of someone who would be a good candidate? If so, the Internet Society is seeking nominations for three positions on the PIR Board of Directors. The nomination deadline is 14 February 2025. more

Why DomainKeys is Broken

The recent testing by Gmail of DomainKeys affords an opportunity to look again at what the impact of it may be in any attempt to introduce a Domino addin to verify DomainKeys signatures. I have here a sample of an email sent from Gmail and that same email after being delivered to the in-box of a Notes/Domino user who prefers MIME. There are differences which make DomainKeys a real problem at Domino shops (and, I suspect, others). more

President of BuyDomains.com Responds to WLS Issue

Right now a person invents and registers a domain and must pay a yearly fee to a registrar (that registrar is supposed to have the right to compete). The registrar then has to pay their competitor (the registry Verisign monopoly) $6 as agreed to by ICANN and the Dept of Commerce. This would be fair so far if there was not a monopoly on the back end Registry. Each registrar does in fact get to play in this scenario. Now if the registrant chooses not to renew their domain after it expires the name ceases to exist by default, since it's not legal if unpaid. THERE IS NO SCENARIO WHEREIN THE GOVERNMENT EVER CONTEMPLATED VERISIGN OWNING OR CONTROLLING THIS DOMAIN INVENTED BY A COMMON CONSUMER, ONCE EXPIRED, AS THE WLS ATTEMPTS. more

IPv6 and LTE, the Not So Long Term Evolution?

The Wall Street Journal reported that AT&T saw wireless networks about to drown under a deluge of data. To see YouTube content uploaded form an iPhone or Slingbox rerouting a favourite television program to your smart phone gives mobile network operators the shivers. Skype over 3G in the meantime gives sleepless nights, not because of surging megabyte floods but due to nightmares of considerable voice and roaming revenues washing away. Not easy to plan and engineer "managed transitions" under those circumstances. more

Thoughts on IPv6 Day

Jeff Pulver proposed an interesting idea called IPv6 Day... In geeks term, we call this a 'flag day'. The last time we have a flag day was 1st Jan 1983 when Internet moved from NCP (Network Control Protocol) to IPv4. So why not do it for IPv6? more

An Overview of the Concept and Use of Domain-Name Entropy

In this article, I present an overview of a series of 'proof-of-concept' studies looking at the application of domain-name entropy as a means of clustering together related domain registrations, and serving as an input into potential metrics to determine the likely level of threat which may be posed by a domain. more

Could IP Addressing Benefit from the Introduction of Competitive Suppliers?

An article written by Paul Wilson, Director General of Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), and Geoff Huston, Senior Internet Research Scientist at APNIC. "In recent months proposals have been made for the introduction of competition into the system of allocation of IP addresses. In particular, calls have been made for new IP address registries to be established which would compete with the existing Regional Internet address Registries (RIRs). Specific proposals have been made by Houlin Zhao of the ITU-T and by Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project, both of which propose that the ITU itself could establish such a registry group, operating as a collection of national registries." ...It would appear that part of the rationale for these proposals lies in the expectation that the introduction of competition would naturally lead to outcomes of "better" or "more efficient" services the address distribution function. This article is a commentary on this expectation, looking at the relationship between a competitive supply framework and the role of address distribution, and offering some perspective on the potential outcomes that may be associated with such a scenario for IP addresses, or indeed for network addresses in general. more

High-Speed Fiber Overtakes DSL as OECD Countries Add 21 Million Fixed Broadband Connections in the Pandemic Year

High-speed fiber Internet subscriptions surpassed copper-wire DSL connections across OECD countries for the first time in 2020 as the need to move work and home life activities online during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a record 21.15 million new fixed broadband connections (including fiber, DSL, cable, and others) in the year to end-December 2020. more

The Directory Dilemma - Why Facebook, Google and Skype May Win the Mobile App War

As much as I am enjoying the new Wire app, there is a fundamental dilemma that Wire faces... as well as Talko, Firefox Hello, Subrosa and every other Over-The-Top (OTT) or WebRTC application that is seeking to become THE way that we communicate via voice, chat and/or video from our mobile phones and desktops. That is: How do they gather the "directory" of people that others want to talk to? more

AFNIC and DNS Server Redelegation

As an American, I could go for the ignorant stereotyping of the French. But being the good global citizen I try to be, I'll just see if someone can tell me if I'm missing something here, or if indeed AFNIC has lost its mind. I recently requested for one of my .FR domains to be delegated to new DNS servers. I got everything set up at my new DNS provider. But, AFNIC won't perform the transfer because of the following "fatal" reason... more

Malware Detection Provider Gets Important Victory Allowing It to Flag Unwanted Driver Installer

Despite a recent Ninth Circuit decision denying immunity to malware detection software for targeting competitor's software, court holds that Section 230 protected Malwarebytes from liability for designating software driver program as potentially unwanted program. Plaintiff provided software that works in real-time in the background of the operating system to optimize processing and locate and install missing and outdated software drivers. more