Featured Blogs

NTIA Seeks Nominations to Serve on the Online Safety and Technology Working Group

In the midst of the election season, Congress passed a plethora of Internet related laws. Most involved child protection. One involved webcaster protection. Wasting no time, the impact of the new laws is already being felt through federal agency implementation. On Friday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in the Department of Commerce released the following notice... more

Global Domain Market: 368 Million Names and Growth in 2023 (Afnic Observatory)

Afnic, the association in charge of the .fr domain and several other French overseas and generic Top Level Domains, has published the 2023 edition of its annual observatory report "The global domain name market" containing all of the latest key figures and trends in the TLD market... At year-end 2023, the global domain name market represented some 368 million domain names. more

Former ICANN Board Member to Congress - ICANN Needs Oversight

Karl Auerbach has written a quite long but very detailed and well thought out letter to Congress. It's not clear which members of Congress were sent the letter. Karl Auerbach is a former member of ICANN's board and is probably best remembered by many as having taken ICANN to court (and winning) in order to gain access to the organisation's financial records. more

Interest Grows for Video-On-Demand Opportunities

With the DVD rental market continuing to dwindle, we are again seeing interest emerge for online video-on-demand, with both the large Hollywood Studies and online content distributors making recent strategic moves in this direction. ... A sign of the times came with the 2010 bankruptcy of Blockbuster, once one of the largest move rental companies. more

Why the Pandemic Makes Domain Names More Valuable Than Ever

In the United States, at least 25,000 brick and mortar businesses will close in 2020 due to the Coronavirus (source: Coresight). I believe this will only be the tip of the iceberg. The businesses that fight to stay alive will become 100% dependent on the Internet to generate their revenue. No longer able to rely on foot traffic to their old brick and mortars, the popularity and brand-ability of their websites will solely dictate their ability to survive in the coming years. more

Building a New Era of Trust on the Internet

Since Tim Berners-Lee first introduced us to the world wide web, we have seen several major phases of its growth. From the early years -- where researchers and open Internet pioneers led the way; to the dot-com boom; to the era of social media domination; the web has come a long way. While the pandemic circling the globe has undermined many critical systems and institutions of our society, I believe it also has the potential to strengthen is the resolve of the Internet community... more

It’s Time for the New gTLD Delays to End

The next few short weeks in the run-up to ICANN's Cartagena meeting could prove the most important time yet for the organization to show that it is a credible and capable overseer of the domain name system. After over two years of delays, tens of thousands of email exchanges, weeks of heated face-to-face discussions, and many millions of accumulated frequent flier miles, the time has arrived for ICANN to finally draw a line under the new top-level domain policy-development process and name the date for the opening of the first-round application window. more

EU Ruling on Google Ad Keywords: Implications for Brand Owners

In a landmark judgment issued this past Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Google is not liable for trademark infringement when an advertiser purchases a keyword based on a competitor's trademark to trigger a search ad, so long as it removes infringing ads promptly when notified by brand owners. However, and this is critical, individual advertisers could be held liable if ads triggered by a keyword involving a competitor's trademark are found to confuse consumers. So, what qualifies as consumer confusion? more

Making ICANN History in the Shadow of the Magna Carta

Two miles (and a short Tube ride) from where ICANN is gathering in London, rests an original copy of the Magna Carta, which introduced the concept of imposing limits on the powers of the king. I'm taking the proximity of this icon of constitutional history as a good omen for our task: to create a charter to limit ICANN's powers and enhance its accountability, in the wake of the U.S. Government's decision to terminate its legacy role. more

Advantage of Commercial Clouds vs. HPC for Scientific Research

The Department of Energy (DoE) recently came out with an excellent report, called the Magellan report, on the advantages and disadvantages of using commercial clouds versus in house High Performance Computers (HPC) for leading edge scientific research. The DoE probably supports the largest concentration of HPC facilities in the world. I agree with the report that for traditional applications such as computational chemistry, astrophysics, etc. will still need large HPC facilities. more

Poll on New TLDs Shows Value of Brand Loyalty, Willingness to Try New Equivalents to .COMs

Internet users are willing to navigate to, use, and trust new web addresses that will be flooding the Internet later this year, and brand name websites will carry more weight with Internet users than generic sites. These are among the results of a public opinion survey commissioned by FairWinds Partners. The poll also found that the owners and operators of these new addresses should be technically prepared or risk driving away or losing traffic intended for their sites. more

Beyond Words: Diverse Voices at ICANN and Miscommunications

A few days ago, I sat in a meeting here in Ottawa with our IT Director and Director of Marketing and Communications. These are two highly intelligent people working on the same team, for the same company, talking about a common subject. And yet, something was amiss in achieving mutual understanding. Each was seeing things from his own distinct perspective and as such, speaking his own language. As I reflected on my team's internal dynamic, I began to see parallels in areas that have an even more direct impact on the Internet ecosystem. more

Reputation and “The Cloud”

As Reddit recently learned it's not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers. When you're using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public. more

Call for Participation - ICANN DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN58 in Copenhagen

Do you have new information about DNSSEC or DANE that you would like to share with the wider community? Have you created a new tool or service? Have you found a way to use DNSSEC to secure some other service? Do you have new statistics about the growth or usage of DNSSEC, DANE or other related technology? If so, and if you will be in Copenhagen, Denmark, for ICANN 58 in March 2017 (or can get there), please consider submitting a proposal to speak at the ICANN 58 DNSSEC Workshop! more

What Must We Trust?

My Twitter feed has exploded with the release of the Kaspersky report on the "Equation Group", an entity behind a very advanced family of malware. (Naturally, everyone is blaming the NSA. I don't know who wrote that code, so I'll just say it was beings from the Andromeda galaxy.) The Equation Group has used a variety of advanced techniques, including injecting malware into disk drive firmware, planting attack code on "photo" CDs sent to conference attendees, encrypting payloads... more