Featured Blogs

Proving and Protecting Rights to Domain Names

At their best, UDRP panelists are educators. They inform us about the ways in which parties win or lose on their claims and defenses. What to do and not do. In addressing this issue, I'm referring to less than 10% of cybersquatting disputes. For 90% or more of filed complaints, respondents have no defensible answer and generally don't even bother to respond. But within the 10%, there are serious disputes of contested rights (contested even where respondent has defaulted). more

ICANN Opens GNSO Whois Study on Privacy/Proxy Abuse for Comment

ICANN has opened the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Whois study on privacy/proxy abuse for public comment. Performed by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), this study is one of many commissioned by the GNSO to examine the current, disparate, and often maligned registration directory service, and aims to measure the hypothesis that "a significant percentage of the domain names used to conduct illegal or harmful Internet activities are registered via privacy and proxy services to obscure the perpetrator's identity." more

Verizon Throws 18 States Under the Progress Train

I am a happy Verizon FIOS fiber-to-the-home customer in Connecticut, I admire the long view Verizon took to build its FIOS infrastructure, and I appreciate the substantial punishment that Verizon took from Wall Street until it became obvious that FIOS would be a huge success. But Verizon is not building FIOS in all of its territories! Verizon is unloading land lines in eighteen states because they don't want to keep building FIOS there... more

League of Nations, United Nations, Next: United Cyber Nations

Though the "Techies" have been heavily involved in many initiatives like Internet Governance, Internationalized (Multi-lingual) Domain Names, Identity Management, Information Security, Access Rights Management etc., they still have to correctly apply the technologies at hand to be able to replicate many accepted norms that have matured in the physical world such as federated identities, non-repudiation, notarizing, witnessing, co-signing etc. more

Only Bad Actors Should Worry About the URS

With DNS abuse a topic of increased concern throughout the community, any controversy over adopting the Uniform Rapid Suspension System (URS) for all generic top-level domains (gTLDs) seems misplaced. The URS was designed as a narrow supplement to the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), applicable only in certain tightly defined circumstances of clear-cut and incontrovertible trademark infringement involving the registration and use of a domain name. more

Download Speeds of GSM and 3GSM Networks

ARCchart is selling a new report entitled Mobile Broadband Performance of Carrier Networks. I can't personally justify the purchase, but I notice this wonderful graph in their sample. ARCchart gave mobile users free speed test applications... more

Psst - Interested in Some Lightly-Used IP Addresses?

The Internet Service Provider (ISP) community is carefully watching the impending depletion of the unassigned IPv4 address pool. Most estimates place the depletion of the central pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses by mid-2011. After that, each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) will continue to satisfy requests for additional IPv4 space for a limited time (depending on the rate of incoming requests and the amount of address space on hand in the RIR at the time of central pool depletion). more

Recalibrating the DoH Debate

At the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) it is time we accept the wide range of drivers behind (and implications of) standards and for stakeholders to start listening to each other. A protocol recently released by the IETF, DNS over HTTPS (DoH), is at the centre of an increasingly polarised debate. This is because DoH uses encryption in the name of security and privacy and re-locates DNS resolution to the application layer of the Internet. more

New gTLD SSR-2: Exploratory Consumer Impact Analysis (Part 5 of 5)

Throughout this series of blog posts we've discussed a number of issues related to security, stability, and resilience of the DNS ecosystem, particularly as we approach the rollout of new gTLDs. Additionally, we highlighted a number of issues that we believe are outstanding and need to be resolved before the safe introduction of new gTLDs can occur - and we tried to provide some context as to why, all the while continuously highlighting that nearly all of these unresolved recommendations came from parties in addition to Verisign over the last several years. more

The Right to Internet Access

President Sarkozy of France recently managed to get his 'Création et Internet' law passed by the National Assembly, and if all goes well in the Senate then French internet users will soon find their activities being supervised by HADOPI, the grandly named 'Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet.' The rights it is concerned with are not those of ordinary net users but of copyright owners, and especially the large entertainment companies that have lobbied so hard and so successfully for the power to force internet service providers to terminate the accounts of those accused of downloading unlicensed copies of music, films and software... more

Finishing What We Started: A Level Playing Field for New gTLDs

While the Internet governance debate devours headlines, it's almost easy to forget that ICANN is in the midst of the most audacious and important policy process it has ever undertaken. And while many new generic top-level domains are now live, the process of ensuring the best opportunity to fulfill their potential is not yet complete. We recently reached the milestone of 280,000 registrations in the Donuts gTLDs that are currently generally available. more

Islamic TLDs and the Challenge of Good Governance

As governments ask themselves whether they should not be the only ones in charge, and everyone else is more determined than ever to stay involved, Internet governance is now a front-page topic. But away from the theoretical debates about which model is best, one real-life situation may end up looking strangely like a vindication of the multi-stakeholder model by governmental organisations. The situation in question is that of Islam and Halal. Two applications that look like they are caught in a kind of new gTLD program groundhog day. more

Dead Ends: The Achievement of Consensus in UDRP Jurisprudence

Like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) is consensus-driven; from the bottom up, not the top down. The result is a jurisprudence of domain names that develops in common-law fashion through Panel decisions that over time and through "deliberative conversations" among panelists resolve into consensus. more

America Will Not Win the Global Race to 5G

Several weeks ago, the White House published a document asserting that "America Will Win the Global Race to 5G." The White House should get over it. This is not about America winning any global race to 5G, but the world working together on fundamentally different, complex, new communication networks and services. There are four important points, however. more

Software Defined Data Centre Needs DNS

During 2012, Software Defined Networking (SDN) seemed to be all the rage. The VMware acquisition of Nicira during the summer doldrums for US $1.26 billion validated the fact that the SDN paradigm is expected to have some serious legs over the coming years. I guess the same applies to virtualized network services in general, although the acquisitions in that space were not quite as high-profile as the ones in SDN. more