Featured Blogs

Belgian Country Code Now Supports Internationalized Domain Names

Earlier this week dns.be launched Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). The Belgian registry opted to support the accented characters for Dutch, French and German. In so doing they've also ended up providing support for other European languages, such as Swedish, Finnish and Danish... The registry reported quite a bit of interest in the launch with over 3000 IDN domains being registered in the first hour. That number had practically doubled by close of business on the first day. more

Global Payments Breach Confirmation

This morning, Global Payments held a conference call with investors and analysts covering their earlier breach announcement and projected earnings. Global Payments had also released an update advisory yesterday stating that "the company believes that the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers have been exported" and that only Track 2 card data may have been stolen. more

ICANN and the Developing World: Examining The Outreach Program

Shravanti Reddy?s recent piece draws attention to an important issue that has nagged at ICANN ever since the ill-fated at large elections, when participants from the developed world greatly outnumbered those from the developing world. This imbalance was somewhat mitigated by the regional delineation of candidates, but it nonetheless raised two important questions that have yet to be settled:

First, how can ICANN (and, more generally, Internet governance) be more inclusive of developing countries? And second (less often asked, but perhaps even more important): Why should developing countries care about ICANN -- i.e., why does the answer to the first question even matter? This article discusses some recent developments related to the first question; a later article will consider some specific reasons why ICANN matters to the developing world. more

Eliminating Access to WHOIS - Bad for All Stakeholders

Steeped deep in discussions around the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the past several months, it has occurred to me that I've been answering the same question for over a decade: "What happens if WHOIS data is not accessible?" One of the answers has been and remains the same: People will likely sue and serve a lot of subpoenas. This may seem extreme, and some will write this off as mere hyperbole, but the truth is that the need for WHOIS data to address domain name matters will not disappear. more

Privacy and Security - Five Objectives

It has been a very busy period in the domain of computer security. With "shellshock", "heartbleed" and NTP monlink adding to the background of open DNS resolvers, port 445 viral nasties, SYN attacks and other forms of vulnerability exploits, it's getting very hard to see the forest for the trees. We are spending large amounts of resources in reacting to various vulnerabilities and attempting to mitigate individual network attacks, but are we making overall progress? What activities would constitute "progress" anyway? more

A Look at How the Internet Routes Around Damage: Measuring Global Effects of Storm Sandy

Hurricane Sandy caused major damage in both the Caribbean and the North-Eastern part of the USA. In an earlier article (RIPE Atlas - Superstorm Sandy) we showed data on 15 RIPE Atlas probes that are located in or near the affected areas in the USA. Most of these locations now appear to be back to normal round trip times to targets we monitor. But the effects of Hurricane Sandy were felt beyond the immediately affected area. more

Return of Net Neutrality: Discussion of European Net Neutrality Proposal Relevant for U.S. Broadband Market

There is an interesting recent discussion in Europe about net neutrality that has relevance to the U.S. broadband market. The European Commission that oversees telecom and broadband has started taking comments on a proposal to force content generators like Netflix to pay fees to ISPs for using the Internet. I've seen this same idea circulating here from time to time, and in fact, this was one of the issues that convinced the FCC first to implement net neutrality. more

GDPR and What Comes Next: The Parade of Horribles

The compliance deadline for the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is nearly upon us, the unveiling of a proposed model to bring WHOIS into compliance is said to come from ICANN next week, and everyone is scrambling to understand all that's involved. Implementation of a revised WHOIS model is clearly on the horizon, but what comes after may be the real story! Specifically, if WHOIS information becomes more than nominally restricted, what's the consequence to the data controllers (ICANN and the contracted parties) who implement this revised model? more

ICANN’s New gTLDs: The Game Changers Have Landed

The day after 'reveal day' two big questions will emerge; firstly was the advertising branding world so wrong or secondly, the parties behind the proposed names so invincible and can turn their $350 million dollars into many tens of billions. To be fair the jury may be out nevertheless, here are some facts... The Internet was never designed to solve the global business naming problems; it was the extension of DARPA, a failsafe military communication system later adventured into public use. more

Starlink Sales Are Straining Capacity in Parts of the U.S. And Canada

On June 5th Elon Musk said SpaceX had nearly 500,000 customers in 32 nations and 9 languages. By now, there must be 500,000 customers, most of whom are in the U. S. and Canada, and their performance is suffering. In the first quarter of this year, OOKLA reported that the median Starlink download speed fell from 104.97 to 99.55 Mbps in the U.S. and from 106.64 to 97.4 Mbps in Canada. more

Challenges for .brands - Launching Your .brand

One of the consistent themes of this blog series is that despite similarities across .brand TLDs, no two brands will settle on the exact same strategy and process for moving their TLD to launch. As I discussed last week, an implementation plan ensures that each required action is documented, responsibility for it is assigned and a more detailed project plan can be developed to take this process further. 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

Appearing Respondents Called Out as Cybersquatters

UDRP complainants prevail in the range of 85% to 90% which approximately correlates with the percentage that respondents default in responding to complaints. The annual number of complaints administered by ICANN providers has been hovering around 4,000 +. Astonishingly, the number has remained steady for a good number of years despite the phenomenal increase... Compared to the whole, there are a relatively small number of contested disputes, perhaps in the annual range of 400 to 500, and of those a larger percentage are called out as cybersquatters. more

Watch Live Thurs 28 May: The Way Forward for the WSIS+10 Review Process

Would you like to learn more about what the WSIS+10 Review process is all about? How can you participate in the process if you are not with a government? What is "WSIS" all about anyway -- and why should you care? Those questions and more will be part of a luncheon briefing on Thursday, May 28, 2015, from 13:15 - 14:45 Central European Time (UTC+2). more

Slippery Slope

Last week, I visited Budapest to deliver a speech at the ICANN Studienkreis, an annual conference where experts study and address some current issues relating to Internet governance. I discussed how the Internet is on a slippery slope. Starting with the legitimate concern over how to deal with cybersquatters, we have moved to an unreasonable focus on legal control of Internet content and the domain name system. more