Featured Blogs

Just Make It Stop

In a recent discussion among mail system managers, we learned that one of the large spam filter providers now has an option to reject all mail from ESPs (e-mail service providers, outsourced bulk mailers) regardless of opt-in, opt-out, spam complaints, or anything else, just block it all. Some of the ESPs wondered what would drive people to do that... more

Google and Verizon: Interesting Open Internet Bedfellows

The debate around Network Neutrality is sometimes simplified as carriers against content providers, the owners of networks against the businesses that have grown due to Internet connectivity. So it was interesting to read that Google and Verizon filed a joint submission to the FCC last week, laying out in detail how the two companies agreed on many issues regarding an "Open Internet." more

Forward-Thinking Remedies

Just a year ago, I gave a talk at David Isenberg's 2005 Freedom to Connect conference. I said, essentially, that we should be careful in asking for regulation to protect the net, because the power to protect carries with it the power to constrain. This was a very troubling message for the audience, and the chatroom projected behind me went wild with disapproval. Since then, I've become very concerned about the concentration in broadband service provision in this country, and worried that there won't be any competition for unfettered internet access. more

End-to-End Email Encryption - This Time For Sure?

Phil Zimmerman's Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and its offspring have been encrypting and decrypting email for almost 25 years -- but require enough knowledge and determination to use them that adoption has never taken off outside the technoscenti. Now initiatives from several quarters aim to fix that -- but will it all "just work," and will end users adopt it even if it does? more

Anonymous, LulzSec, and the Option of Internet Security

As hacking groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec continue to make headlines, many of us in the Information Security field can only sit back and shake our heads. The large number of successful system breaches, web site defacements, and the publication of confidential data is not at all surprising, and for the most part was only a matter of time. more

Getting gTLDs Into the Marketing Mix

For those of us in the domain space, the hype and fanfare in the years leading up to new gTLDs was loud and pervasive. As early as 2010 or 2011, we saw news of their impending launch propagating through marketing and advertising publications, and even popping up on occasion in mainstream press. Yet somewhere along the way (perhaps in the confusion over procedure, dates and deadlines that seemed to plague the process), we seem to have lost the attention of a group vital to the implementation of the new extensions -- marketers. more

Open Systems Lead to ‘Economies of Scope’

The 'economies of scope' is an appealing concept implying that if we share knowledge in an open way we can create new, healthy economies that do not just depend on 'scale'. As we have seen, over the last decade in particular, some of the companies that are trying to achieve exponential growth can endanger the economy and society in general - the global financial crisis surrounding the large financial institutions, the scandals around News Corp, the political lobbying (bullying) by the super rich and the destruction of the environment by some developers. more

CircleID Launches the First in a Series of Community Dialogues on COVID-19 and the Internet

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rapid migration of the world's workforce and consumer services to virtual spaces, has amplified the Internet governance and policy issues including infrastructure, access, exponential instances of fraud and abuse, global cooperation and data privacy, to name but a few. The need for practical, scalable and efficient solutions has risen dramatically. more

Supporting New DNS RR Types with dnsextlang, Part I

The Domain Name System has always been intended to be extensible. The original spec in the 1980s had about a dozen resource record types (RRTYPEs), and since then people have invented many more so now there are about 65 different RRTYPEs. But if you look at most DNS zones, you'll only see a handful of types, NS, A, AAAA, MX, TXT, and maybe SRV. Why? A lot of the other types are arcane or obsolete, but there are plenty that are useful. more

The Internet’s Obesity Crisis

In 2001, I published a report on website weights and their impacts on website performance. Why you might ask, was I researching website weights all the way back in 2001... At the time, in the United States and many other countries, homes and businesses were in the process of upgrading from dial-up internet connections to broadband connections. Because businesses were on the leading edge of this upgrade, many web teams designed fancy new websites that relied heavily on images and this fancy new technology known as Flash. more

Your Domain Name Does Matter in Search Results – Microsoft Says So!

I stumbled upon a study conducted by Microsoft eons ago back in the paleolithic era of search; 2012... It is about how "premium domains" are perceived by the consumer when seeing them in the search results compared to a lower value "non-premium" domain. I like to use quotations sparingly, but I felt it was necessary because the varying opinions on premium v non-premium domains is a bridge I do not want to cross in this post.  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

Upcoming Brands and Domains Conference to Explore Various Views on DotBrands

After its first edition in Valencia, Brands and Domains will travel this time to the Netherlands where the second conference will take place from the 2nd to 3rd of October 2017. This time, Dot Stories, the main organizer, chose the Hotel Amrath Kurhaus for the event. Nowadays, more than 600 applicants hold already the right to start their own dot brand, but there are not so many who have been brave enough to use it. 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

Expansion of Top-Level Domain Names: Why Current Brand Protection Procedures Will Be Impractical

As ICANN introduces new generic top level domains (gTLDs) and separates itself from US oversight, it has the opportunity to distance itself from the taint of cybersquatting, brand abuse, and criminal activity involving domains... To underscore the scope of the issue, consider this research on just 30 top Interbrand-ranked global brands. The most recent MarkMonitor Brandjacking Index found cybersquatting incidents increased over 40% in the last year for the brands that were studied; these leading brands suffered as many as 15,000 incidents per brand... more