Featured Blogs

Death of Transit: A Need to Prevent Fragmentation

Way back in the olden days, folks decided that cities should invest lots of money in public transportation systems. The reasons were many fold, including reducing the number of individual vehicles being driven in too, and parked in, congested "downtown" areas, and increasing traffic to businesses in those areas, increasing their commercial viability. Many of these systems are sold to the public with the idea that they will (at least) break even against capital and operational expenses over time, but the reality is far different. more

Online Critics and Unlawful Harassment from Trademark Holders

The following is based on my experience and interpretation of the UDRP and the relevant laws of the United Kingdom and European Union. This is not legal advice but just my own experience and interpretation. How does a UK citizen create a non-commercial trademark.tld parody criticism website and avoid harassment from the trademark holder? Here are the steps... more

What to Know About an ICANN Compliance Audit, and How to Handle One if You Are Selected?

Now that new gTLD registries have been operating for more than a year, a few registries have already experienced going through an audit and a few more are now receiving notifications that they are next in line. For all, the process of going through an ICANN audit is a first. Once you receive the Request for Information (RFI), you will have 15 days to respond, or seek an extension of time. Extensions may be available on a case by case basis. more

Net Neutrality Undermining Spreads to Developing Countries

After the USA set the bad example of allowing telcos to start charging different rates for content delivery services, other incumbent telcos elsewhere are only too happy to jump on the bandwagon and use the American example as a reason and an excuse to end net neutrality (NN) in their countries also. As did their American counterparts they too see this as another way to grab some extra monopolistic income. more

A Sophisticated Online Counterfeit Ring

Online fakes can be a lucrative business and difficult to crack down on, due to the ease and low-cost of setting up multiple virtual storefronts and the ability to obfuscate an operation's identity. A federal lawsuit filed on March 1, 2010 by Polo Ralph Lauren and VF Corp. illustrates these points and highlights many of the intricacies of an online counterfeit ring. more

A Telegraph-Era TLD?

While doing research for a paper on telegraph codebooks, I was reminded of something I had long known: one could have short addresses for telegrams. A short article in The New Yorker described how it worked in New York City. Briefly, one could pick more or less any name that wasn't in use, and list it with the Central Bureau for Registered Addresses... more

Is Starlink the Tesla of Broadband Access? I Have a Chance to Find Out

Starlink is satellite internet access from SpaceX, one of Elon Musk's other companies. If it lives up to its hype, it will cure the problem of broadband availability in rural areas, although affordability will still be an issue. Most satellite-based Internet access sucks (that's a technical term). If based on geostationary satellites (ones you can point a dish at), the distance to the satellite is so great that the round-trip time for data is forever; this problem is called latency. more

ICANN’s San Francisco Meeting

I was sitting around on a Sunday afternoon catching up with a backlog of work watching the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New York Giants in an unbelievable comeback, when I visited the ICANN website and noticed the new logo for the upcoming 40th ICANN regional. ...I personally thought the original choice of the San Francisco logo looked confusingly similar to Cisco's registered trademark. more

Yahoo’s 1 Billion Accounts Hacked is a Chilling Warning: Start Doing Things Differently or Die

Today, this is how easily "TRUST" by your users/customers can be shattered, your revenues devastated, your share value plunged into the abyss, and your business destroyed. Furthermore, conventional thinking belongs only in university libraries, not in board rooms. It is time to seriously consider other innovative Out-Of-The-Box Solutions and doing things differently, or start writing your business obituary. more

Commerce Department: Headed Toward ICANN 3.0?

The NTIA has published a Notice of Inquiry, Assessment of the Transition of the Technical Coordination and Management of the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System, in advance of the expiration of the Joint Project Agreement in September 2009. The document outlines the history and evolution of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Department of Commerce (DoC) and ICANN, and the questions posed cover fairly standard territory. However, the following might be worth paying attention to... more

Swiss Among World Leaders in Enabling DNSSEC

SWITCH, the registry for .CH and .LI domain names, enabled DNSSEC on day two of the annual Domain Pulse conference in Luzern yesterday. SWITCH became the third ccTLD registry to enable DNSSEC giving registrants of .CH domain names added security following .SE (Sweden) and .CZ (Czech Republic). more

Russian IDN ccTLD .?? Opens for Registrations, Makes History

November 11, 2010, marked the day when the new Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) contry code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) .?? (Cyrillic for ?????????? ?????????, Russian Federation) was opened for general registration. Prior to that date the registration was open only for trademark owners and governmental institutions. ... It turned out they needed less than three hours to reach to the 100,000 domain names! Such a gold rush was not expected, and numbers continued to grow - 200,000 within 6 hours... more than 460,000 by today. more

Aged Security Flaw Renews Open/Closed-Source Debate

The recent announcement of a 13-year old security flaw found in an Open Source security library has renewed the debate between open source and closed source software. The library, crypt_blowfish, allows for fast two-way password encryption. The flaw introduces the potential for passwords to be easily compromised and affects PHP and a number of Linux distributions that include the crypt_blowfish library. more

Who is Wagging Who? Same Dog, New Tale.

Today, my company AusRegistry International signed an open letter to the United States House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet as a show of support for ICANN and its new Top-Level Domain program. I'm disappointed by the nature of the oversight hearing the Subcommittee has called and I believe it will only be a distraction. Let's not kid ourselves; the reason for this hearing is to beat up ICANN over the new TLD program. I think this is unfair and unjustified... more

The World of the Subdomain

A web domain name is the foundational piece of internet property allowing its owner (registrant) to construct and host an associated website. On a domain, the owner is also able to construct whatever subdomains they wish -- a process that is technically achieved via the configuration of records on the authoritative domain name system (DNS) server. more