Featured Blogs

ISOC Bulgaria Urges Chapters to Help Governments Answer to a Question from the ITU

ISOC-Bulgaria has been following the developments around Internet governance on the global arena since 2001, when we started participate in the WSIS process. Our representatives supported the efforts of the Bulgarian government to make sure the Internet is developed in an open, bottom-up, and transparent way. Last week in Geneva (November 11-12) at the ITU there was a meeting of the ITU Council Working Group on international Internet-related public policy issues. more

Trump Wants to Change the Communications Decency Act

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The law was passed in 1996 in order to shield ISPs that transported content or platforms that hosted it from lability. Bloggers were not responsible for comments on their posts, YouTube and Facebook were not responsible for things users posted, etc. more

Vulnerabilities of Weak Marks and Uncurated Websites

Dictionary words, alone, combined as phrases, modified by other parts of speech, and single letters that function as marks also retain in parallel their common associations that others may use without offending third-party rights. As a rule of thumb, generic terms are not registrable as marks until they perceivably cross a threshold to suggestive and higher classifications. more

No Time Bar, No Laches under the UDRP

Two Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) decisions posted this month involved domain names registered 20 and 21 years ago, David Duchovny v. Alberta Hot Rods c/o Jeff Burgar, 21 years and Commonwealth Bank of Australia v. Registration Private, Domains By Proxy, 20 years. Complainants prevailed in both cases. The domain names stand out as being the oldest to have been found registered in bad faith, and transferred. more

Reselling Domain Names on the Secondary Market: Bona Fide Offering, or Not?

On the question of reselling domain names on the secondary market, a dissenting panelist in a 2005 case observed that "[t]here is no doubt Respondent is in the business of being a reseller of domain names that consist of common English words" and then suggested that the "fundamental question before the Panel is whether or not such a business should be allowed under the UDRP." He concluded that such a business should not be allowed... more

Canada: Paying for E911 and Not Getting It - A Dangerous Proposition

While this article specifically discusses the issues of E911 service in the Canadian hinterlands, I fear that the same fiscal shell game is being played by wireless providers all over North America... Grant Robertson writes in The Globe and Mail: Every month when cellphone bills arrive, Northern Canadians are forced to pay for a 911 service they can't access. more

“Capacity” - The Hidden Word?

What is so secret about the word, "Capacity"? As I read and talk with people I realize the word, "capacity" is typically missing from the DNS discussion. "Capacity" and "Security" are the two cornerstones to maximizing DNS resilience; both of which are typically missing from the DNS discussion. Have you seen a single DNS node easily process over 863,000 queries per second? Have you seen a network routinely handle over 50Gbits/second in outbound traffic alone without breaking a sweat? more

ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires: What Happened and What’s Next?

Last month, some of my colleagues at MarkMonitor and I traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina for ICANN 48. With the recent delegation and launch of the first new gTLDs, the atmosphere had an air of both excitement and anxiety. In my opinion, there is much to be done before brand owners should begin to feel comfortable in the post-new gTLD Internet environment, which brings a host of new challenges, as companies attempt to scale monitoring and enforcement to the new (huge) domain name space. more

Amid Shutdown, Gab.com Claims Free Speech Infringement While Many Others View Them as Hate Site

The controversial site gab.com has been shut down by GoDaddy and given 2 days to move the domain elsewhere. The deadline expires at midnight tonight Irish time. In recent days the site has seen itself become increasingly disconnected as various service providers and online platforms including PayPal have shut the door to them. At present the site is displaying this notice... more

Leadership and Persuasion: Internet Freedom

Secretary Clinton's major address on internet freedom made the connection between humanity and technology. We've been waiting a long time for our political leaders to have the courage to express thoughts like this, to have a vision about the role of the internet in human history, and yesterday the day arrived. The speech wasn't an isolated event, of course. more

Will LTE Steal the Broadband Revolution?

There is no doubt that LTE is going to take a prime position in broadband developments. With competitively priced services, innovative smartphones and an increasing range of very innovative apps this market is set to continue to boom. So how will all this impact the overall broadband market? ...this is not an 'us or them' issue between fixed and mobile broadband. As a matter of fact, the companies that are rolling out LTE are increasingly dependent on deep fibre rollouts as they need to handle massive amounts of data, to which the mobile infrastructure technology is not well-suited. more

Getting On Board With DNSSEC - A Personal Recount

I first became familiar with DNSSEC around 2002 when it was a feature of the Bind9 server, which I was using to setup a new authoritative DNS platform for customers of the ISP I was working for. I looked at it briefly, decided it was too complex and not worth investigating. A couple of years later a domain of a customer got poisoned in another ISPs network. And while the DNS service we provided was working properly, the customers impression was we hadn't protected them. more

DNSSEC - Let’s Stay the Course!

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to think that DNSSEC being so hot these days is a mixed blessing. Yes, it's wonderful that after so many years there is finally broad consensus for making DNSSEC happen. But being so prominent also means the protocol is taking shots from those who don't want to make the necessary software, hardware and operational modifications needed. And DNSSEC has taken some shots from those who just want to be contrarian. more

ICANN to Reconsider the .Amazon Domain Applications

Amazon filed applications for the .AMAZON top-level domains in several scripts in 2012. Five years later, ICANN will re-examine the applications after an Independent Review Process (IRP) proceeding. The IRP Panel found that ICANN's Board failed to demonstrate the existence of public policy reasons for denying the applications. more

Stay Current, Achieve Excellence: 4 Emerging Cloud Techniques

How do you achieve excellence in the cloud? Enterprises know it's not enough to simply locate and leverage the services of a cloud provider: using cloud resources effectively marks the difference between "adequate" and "excellence" in achieving long-term IT and revenue goals. But to maximize cloud use, you need to know what's next for this disruptive market: here are four emerging techniques. more