Featured Blogs

Wow, That’s a Lot of Applications

ICANN unveiled all the applications for new top level domains today, all 1,930 of them. Most of them were fairly predictable, big companies applying for their own names like .IBM, .DUPONT, .AUDI, and .HSBC. The most applications for the same name were 13 for .APP, 11 for .INC and .HOME, 10 for .ART, 9 for .SHOP, .LLC, .BOOK, and .BLOG. None of those claim community support so they'll have to slug it out in the contention process. more

Satellite Companies Fighting Over RDOF

There has been an interesting public fight going on at the FCC as Viasat has been telling the FCC that Elon Musk's Starlink should not be eligible for funding from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). At stake is the $886 million that Starlink won in December's RDOF auction that is still under review at the FCC. Viasat had originally filed comments at the FCC stating that the company did not believe that Starlink could fulfill the RDOF requirements in some of the grant award areas. more

The Battle for “.nyc”: Is RFP the Answer?

New York City government officials announced that they will be applying for the ".nyc" top-level domain (TLD) extension and are looking to choose a qualified vendor to operate the TLD on their behalf. New York City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) recently issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to try to find a qualified vendor to manage and market the city TLD in hope that they can raise more revenues for the city, to help local small businesses, promote tourism and help extend the branding image of NYC. more

ICANN Reloaded - Will They Ever Learn?

Less than a week ago, I posted a short blog piece entitled "Can ICANN Please Stop Shooting Itself in the Foot?" in which I questioned ICANN's actions in connection with the recently announced key signing ceremony. At the end of this piece I asked the question: "While it seems that ICANN continues it propensity to shoot itself in the foot, does the community need to start worrying about when ICANN takes aim at other more vital organizational body parts?" Well it looks like I only had to wait five days to get the answer to that question. more

The Third Wave of Internet Exceptionalism

From the beginning, the Internet has been viewed as something special and "unique." For example, in 1996, a judge called the Internet "a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication." The Internet's perceived novelty has prompted regulators to engage in "Internet exceptionalism," crafting Internet-specific laws that diverge from regulatory precedents in other media. Internet exceptionalism has come in three distinct waves... more

Key Steps for Operational Readiness and Successful Launch of a New gTLD

31 August 2013 marked a historic day for Internet users worldwide. It marked a very key day in the introduction of new gTLDs. On that day ICANN, who oversees the gTLD programme, six years in the making, announced the completion of gTLD Initial Evaluation (IE) results based applicant's ability to demonstrate their financial, technical and operational capability to operate and manage a TLD Registry. more

Domain Related Crime: The 4 Steps of Effective Investigations

There is no rest for the wicked. If you think that 2018 was the climax of cybercrime, wait until you see what happens in the next few years as cybercriminals are constantly learning new ways to strike. Take for instance domain-related attacks now coming in a variety of forms. There's domain hijacking which involves gaining of access to domains and making changes without owners' permission. You have typosquatting where phishing is often utilized to steal valuable information. more

New gTLDs Questions Not Answered: Which Kind of Auction?

I was expecting something that would discuss the unique properties, if any, of the domain name market, and the types of inventory theoretically available to allocate, and the expected outcomes for the various types of auctions, and some showing that for some desired policy goals, whether greatest gain to seller or lowest loss to buyer, or something entirely different, the expected outcomes. This would assist the better informed, bottom-up, stakeholder-driven, consensus policy making. Is the domain name market indistinguishable from the spectrum market? If name spaces are distinguishable from units of spectrum... more

Mac Hit by Another Wave of Malware… Users in Denial?

In case you haven't been watching cyber news recently, last week various security researchers published that Macs were infected by the Flashback Trojan and that the total number of infections worldwide was 600,000. This number was published by a couple of blogs. I debated writing about this topic since we had a previous Mac outbreak last year that initially spiked up, caused Apple to go into denial about the affair before issuing a fix, and then the malware kind of went away. Will this follow the same pattern? more

Netflix Has Buyer’s Remorse Over Its Paid Peering Deal With Comcast

Soon after capitulating to Comcast's surcharge demand for improved treatment of its traffic, Netflix got better downstream delivery speeds. Apparently Comcast did not have to undertake a major bandwidth expansion program. Much to the immediate relief of Netflix, Comcast merely needed to allocate more ports for Netflix traffic. So with a reallocation of available bandwidth, Comcast solved Netflix's quality of service dilemma apparently without degrading service to anyone else, upstream or downstream. more

An Economic Outlook on Information Security

As enterprise information security spending is scrutinized in unprecedented fashion in 2009 Information Technology management will seek to get more for their security dollar. While budgets tighten and risks grow due to the global economic downturn IT departments will be looking for point solutions, not suites of security tools. more

The IETF’s *Other* Diversity Challenge: An Update

Last June I wrote an article titled "The IETF's Other Diversity Challenge" where I discussed the positive steps the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is taking to increase the diversity of its participants and raised a potentially overlooked demographic: Network Operators. That essay was a problem statement of sorts, and I was long ago taught that you should only raise problems that you have a solution for, or are at least willing to help solve. more

First Square Mile is not the Last or First Mile: Discovery not Just Choices!

The term "last mile" highlights the fact that we are the consumers at the end of a broadband "pipe". Saying "first mile" is a little better but the Internet is not a pipe to or from somewhere else. It's about what we can do locally and then what we can do when we interconnect with other neighborhoods. It's better to describe our neighborhood as the first square mile. Telecom is about selling us services; the Internet is about what we can do ourselves locally and then interconnecting with others everywhere. In writing the First Square Mile - Our Neighborhood essay which I just posted I came to better understand the fundamental difference between the world of telecom which is about giving you choices and the Internet which provides opportunity to discover what we can't anticipate... more

Radix Wins 3-way Applicant Auction for .website, Donuts wins .lawyer, .fish, .discount

As of today, Innovative Auctions has successfully completed private auctions for a total of 18 contested generic Top-Level Domains, resolving contention for more gTLDs than all other mechanisms combined -- including straight-up withdrawals, private negotiations, and swaps. Here is this week's update. more

US Telecoms Market Further Deteriorating

Some worrying signs are emerging in the USA. During the last decade I have questioned the economic viability of two parallel telecoms infrastructures. When these two network rollouts commenced no issue existed in relation to conflicting interests -- one delivered telephone services, the other broadcasting services. But this all began to change when it became possible to use the HFC network more