Featured Blogs

A Made Up Fantasy and the ICANN gTLD Reality

Gary Elliot, chairman of the Association of National Advertisers and vice president of global marketing at Hewlett-Packard, wrote a column in Advertising Age titled "ICANN's Promises Aren't Simply Speculation, They're Outright Fantasy." His arguments opposing ICANN gTLDs are similar to the other heads of various advertising associations around the world. While the main powerbrokers of the global advertising sector are mum, their association heads are using the same circulated message of cyber-squatting fears without any solid proof. Here is my analysis and an open challenge to the trade. more

World IPv6 Launch: Now What?

World IPv6 Launch kicked off 6 June 2012 at 00:00 UTC. On this day, multitudes of website operators, network operators and home router vendors from all over the world have joined thousands of companies and millions of websites in permanently enabling the next generation Internet. They have done this by turning IPv6 support on by default in (at least some of) their products and services. This is a major milestone in the history of the Internet. more

Brazil: The Newest Up and Comer

The Virus Bulletin Conference last month had some good presentations, including this one by Fabio Assolini of Kaspersky. He spoke about how Brazil is the the newest up-and-comer on the cyber crime block. The tale begins with the story of Igor and Emily, two cyber criminals operating out of Brazil. Together, the two of them stole $300,000 US from a single Brazilian bank in one year. more

Internet Governance: There Are No Masterplans

Please pardon me if I start this story by telling about an incident that happened to me at the Madrid airport while flying to the ICANN meetings in Rio.

It was about midnight when, after flying in from Turin, my hometown, I had to go through the passport control to reach my gate for the flight to Rio. The war between the US/UK and Iraq had started two days before, and even if the Spanish government was among its supporters, security checks were apparently proceeding as usual. Passport controls inside the EU for EU citizens usually take a few seconds, and the line ahead of me was proceeding quickly. more

This Is Not Your Father’s Traceroute Tool

Traceroute is a network tool that helps determine the path packets take as they travel from one location to another, identifying all of the "hops" along the way. I wonder why they are called hops*? Almost all operating systems have traceroute utilities built in. The command is just that "traceroute", Windows systems abbreviate the command as "tracert" to deal with the 8.3 file naming convention of old... So, let's look at what information traceroute gives you. more

Political New gTLDs: One Year in Review

Once a month, at the end of the month, a snapshot of domain name registration volumes is taken according to categories of new gTLDs. Twenty categories are covered and this article covers Political new gTLDs. These snapshots allow having a global overview of which extensions increase their volume of domain names registered from a month to the other, in a period of 12 months. Below is what I noticed from January 2018 to December 2018 for domain name extensions related to politics. more

Skype Issues Official Statement About the End of Skype for Asterisk

Before writing my story yesterday about Skype killing off Skype For Asterisk, I had reached out to Skype's PR agency to see if there was any statement from Skype. There wasn't at the time, but today they sent over this statement from Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for Skype... more

New gTLDs: Money Maker

There are fascinating ideas about how, when and more than everything: who is going to earn money from gTLDs? I think back-end registry providers will earn money, some applicants will earn money too but my experience launching Eurid, the registry for .EU, reminded me one thing: these days, just before launching, until the (first) Sunrise period is launched. more

Will the Trademark Clearinghouse Fulfill its Potential?

ICANN created the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) as a way to streamline the repetitive process forced on trademark owners during the launch of new top-level-domains. With the expected tsunami of hundreds of new TLD's starting later this year, the TMCH should generate a clear benefit for trademark owners who elect to participate in Sunrise and Claims Periods. The side effect of introducing new TLDs is that the legacy TLDs will be making changes to make sure they are competitive against the new TLDs. more

The Trademark Clearinghouse: Secure, Reliable, Usable - Pick Any Two

Earlier this week, technical and legal experts from ICANN, Deloitte and IBM met in Brussels with their counterparts from registrars and registry service providers representing as much as 90% of prospective gTLD registries, to discuss the technical implementation of the Trademark Clearinghouse, the database of rights holder information that will support the mandatory rights holder protection mechanisms for new gTLDs. more

Is America Getting More Like China?

Since Obama became President -- and yes, I voted for him -- there has been a great deal of optimism and energy around the idea that the Internet can be used to improve or "reboot" our democracy. The Administration has hired some great people to work on making government more open and transparent. This is all great. But how much good will all of this nifty e-government do for American democracy if citizens' rights to privacy and free expression are not also fiercely defended? more

Spam Kings: Book Review (Part 2)

I'd like to continue on in my review of the book Spam Kings (read part 1) and make some more comments, particularly regarding the antispammers. One thing that I really liked about the book is learning the history of some of the spam tools. I was never a participant on NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email; a USENET newsgroup which discusses e-mail spamming), that was before my antispam time. But I was intrigued by its history. People would gather together and discuss spammers and tools for stopping them, and sometimes spammers would stop by and the flame wars would ensue. more

Carriers Are Trying to Take Back Control of the Home Network

With all the focus on neutrality in the provider networks we must not lose sight of what is happening in our own homes. As with some of the efforts to make the networks work better (as measured in the providers' paternalistic) view, their attempt to retake the home is about serving us better by reducing the operators' costs. "Better" is of course in terms of the operator's own measures. It's not quite the same as in 1995 when providers opposed home networks and want to charge us for each machine... more

Are Domain Names Recession Proof?

We'll only be able to tell whether domain names are recession proof by waiting for the performance of e-commerce sites during the holiday shopping season. Domain name owners and buyers have to remain in suspense a while longer. Some domainers are experiencing drops in sales and prices. However, it is not clear whether those drops are because of changes in valuations by buyers, sellers, or both. more

ICANN, Civil Society, and Free Speech

Gordon Crovitz's Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the relationship between ICANN and the future of free speech quotes me a couple of times... Crovitz emailed me last week when he was researching his column. I was somewhat more critical of ICANN's status quo in our exchange than in the quotes he ended up using. Following are my full answers, emailed to him on Thursday. more