Featured Blogs

Parsing Predatory and Parasitical from Innocent and Good Faith Domain Name Registrants

When the World Intellectual Property Organization began deliberating in 1998 and 1999 about creating an arbitral regime that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers transformed into the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy the curse words of choice were "predators" and "parasites" to describe cybersquatters. (In an early UDRP decision a Respondent who had also featured as a defendant in a trademark case asserted he had "just as much right to own the Domain Names [with typographic variations of the mark] as the person who owns the correct spelling of [the mark]" more

Deploying DNSSEC: Lessons from Domain Registrar Implementation

As a registrar at the front end of the DNSSEC deployment effort, our technical team has made a sustained investment in DNSSEC deployment so that our customers don't get overwhelmed by this wave of changes to the core infrastructure of the Domain Name System. Along the way, we've learnt a lot about how to implement DNSSEC which might hold useful lessons for other organizations that plan to deploy DNSSEC in their networks. more

The IPv4 Price Inversion

A curious price inversion has occurred in IPv4 markets. The long-term trend that discounted large blocks has reversed. The graph identifies /15 and /16 (large) block pricing per IP address throughout the period in the form of dark spots. It is evident that, for most of the timeframe here (2014 to the first half of 2021), large blocks sold at a significant discount. One might guess that the administrative chores related to large-network needs were most efficiently and cheaply satisfied with large blocks. more

Disputes Falling Outside the Scope of the UDRP

The UDRP is a forum of limited jurisdiction designed for trademark owners to combat a certain kind of tortious (sometimes tipping to criminal) conduct by which registrants register domain names with the bad faith intent of taking economic advantage of owner's marks and injuring consumers by beguiling them to disclose personal information. The forum is not open to trademark owners whose claims are outside its scope, even though they may include allegations of cybersquatting. more

FCC Commissioner O’Rielly’s Appalling Op-Ed on the ITU

The FCC Commissioner Michael O'Reilly's recently contributed opinion on the ITU in "The Hill" is beyond bizarre. It also sadly displays an appalling lack of knowledge of the organization and its history. I find it disturbing - as someone who held senior positions at both the FCC and the ITU and wrote the organization's history - how fundamentally ignorant an FCC Commissioner could be today of the global telecommunications ecosystem. more

When No Action Is the Wisest Action (ICANN Does Good)

Although ICANN is now getting a lot of ridicule for the "glitch" in its TLD application System, it deserves some praise and respect for the results of its April 10 board meeting. In that meeting, the board showed the involved community - and the rest of the world - that it is no longer going to be stampeded by extra-procedural political pressure to make yet another round of hasty amendments to its new TLD program's policies and procedures. more

The Crimeware Infection Lifecycle

The distribution and installation of malicious and unauthorized software has evolved consistently throughout the 21st Century. The evolutionary path from annoying viruses, to destructive malware and on to financially driven crimeware, is well documented and can even be conveniently traced via the parallel evolution of technologies that were designed to counter each new aspect of the then contemporary threat. more

Next gTLDs: 2016 or 2019?

On September 22, 2014, ICANN published an analysis of the review and assessment work that remains to be done before a new round of gTLD (generic Top Level Domain) applications can be initiated. According to the document, 2016 is the earliest a call for the next lot of applications to operate an Internet suffix could come. To many, a subsequent application window so soon after the 2012 round seems unrealistic. more

What Your ISP (Probably) Knows About You

Earlier this week, I came across a working paper from Professor Peter Swire - a highly respected attorney, professor, and policy expert. Swire's paper, entitled "Online Privacy and ISPs", argues that ISPs have limited capability to monitor users' online activity. The paper argues that ISPs have limited visibility into users' online activity for three reasons: (1) users are increasingly using many devices and connections, so any single ISP is the conduit of only a fraction of a typical user's activity; (2) end-to-end encryption is becoming more pervasive, which limits ISPs' ability to glean information about user activity; and (3) users are increasingly shifting to VPNs to send traffic. more

How Not to Stop Spammers

Spam Arrest is a company that sells an anti-spam service. They attempted to sue some spammers and, as has been widely reported, lost badly. This case emphasizes three points that litigious antispammers seem not to grasp: Under CAN SPAM, a lot of spam is legal; Judges hate plaintiffs who try to be too clever, and hate sloppy preparation even more; Never, ever, file a spam suit in Seattle. more

What Ever Happened to the Closed Local Internet Registries?

Since the establishment of the RIPE NCC, 5,000 Local Internet Registries (LIRs) have closed. We wanted to find out why. Many of them were probably victims of the burst of the dotcom bubble. But how many? And which countries were mostly affected? How many closures were the results of mergers? We've got answers. more

International Law of Critical Internet Infrastructure [CII]: A Comparative Analysis

On Friday December 13, 2024 at 10:00–12:00 CET (09:00-11:00 AM UTC) the Lodz Cyber Hub at the University of Lodz Law School, an ICANN EURALO ALS, and the United Nations University – Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) hosts an online workshop 'International Law of Critical Internet Infrastructure: A Comparative Analysis of Europe and China'. more

When It Comes to gTLDs, Follow the Money (Part 1)

Introducing new generic Top-Level Domains represents, as ICANN says, "the biggest change in the Internet since its inception 40 years ago." Among the least understood aspects of this change is its potential to alter the economic power of ICANN as an institution. To see how that might happen, let's follow the money as it is expected to flow from the gTLD application process. ICANN expects to get a lot of money from gTLD applications: $92,500,000, to be exact. more

Wow, Sanford Wallace Owes a Lot of Money

Last September MySpace sued ur-spammers Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walt "Pickle Jar" Rines were for egregious violations of CAN SPAM. Neither responded, so as was widely reported, earlier this week the court granted a default judgement. Since they sent a lot of spam, the statutory damages came to an enormous $235 million. Even for Spamford, that's a lot of money. more

What Mobile Malware Looks Like

Last month at the Virus Bulletin Conference in Barcelona, I took in one of the sessions on mobile malware. This type of malware is foreign to me because I mostly stay in the email space at work (and even then, I am focusing more on day-to-day issues of running a large mail provider than I am on spam and abuse). What's mobile malware like? What are the threats? How do users get infected? more