Featured Blogs

Have You Monitored Your DNS Performance Lately?

Domain Name System (DNS) surveys such as that recently conducted by Men & Mice continually demonstrate that the DNS is riddled with errors. Since the DNS continues to work, this raises three questions:

1. Does it matter that the DNS is riddled with errors?
2. Why is it riddled with errors?
3. How can it be fixed? more

United Nations Establishes Working Group on Internet Governance

Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced today the members of the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance, which is to prepare the ground for a decision on this contentious issue by the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005. The establishment of the Working Group was requested by the first phase of the Summit, held in Geneva last December. At that time, countries agreed to continue the dialogue on the management of the Internet, at both the technical and policy levels. more

Slovaks Worry About the Future of Their Country’s .SK TLD

Almost every country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) has had some kind of rough and clumsy start at its sunrise. Internet was young, everything was new, and whoever took the national TLD first, got power over it. The situation eventually sorted out, and now most ccTLDs are drama free, well-operated for the benefit of people and the Internet communities in those countries. Unfortunately, not in Slovakia. more

Will Blocking a TLD Fracture the Internet?

In his eloquent dissent against approving .XXX, ICANN Board member George Sadowsky talked about blocking and filtering top-level domains. It's a concise statement of a concern that has been identified by various people, including members of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), as an impediment to the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program. It's a thorough defense of a common point of view about blocking TLDs, but while no-one can disagree about the fact of blocking, what is the actual effect? more

ICANN Registrar Stakeholder Group Leadership Handover

The ICANN Registrar Stakeholder Group (RrSG) is one of several stakeholder groups within the ICANN community and is the representative body of ICANN accredited domain name registrars. It is a diverse and active group that works to ensure the interests of registrars and their customers are effectively advanced. The leadership team (ExCom) consists of five officers who manage the Registrar Stakeholder Group. more

When will we run out of IPv4?

A paper by Tony Hain was recently published in the Internet Protocol Journal which sparked a debate on Slashdot. Particularly, Tony's paper suggested that IANA will run out of IP addresses in 5 years or less. However, there is another paper written by Geoff Hutson which projects that we have enough IPv4 address until 2022. The differences got most people confused. So who is right? more

Internet Governance: Countdown to Tunis

In a paper entitled "DNS Détente", written in the authors' personal capacities, Tricia Drakes (a former member of the ICANN Board) and Michael D. Palage (a current member of the ICANN board) have attempted to address some of the unresolved issues of the recent Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) 3 session in Geneva as discussions head to the final phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis (Nov 16 to 18, 2005). More specifically, the paper focuses on one of the "fundamental stumbling blocks to the continued evolution of Internet Governance"; The insistence of the United States Government (USG) that it retain its historically exclusive role in connection with authorizing changes to the Root A server, particularly with respect to country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Shared further is the content of this paper. more

Paul Vixie in Response to Site Finder Controversy

As a domain holder myself (of vix.com), I would not have chosen ".com" for my parent domain name back in 1988 had there been a wildcard domain name [that activates Site Finder service] under ".com". The risk of someone attempting to reach me but ending up talking to someone else instead would have been seen as "too great". I am now searching for a new parent domain whose publisher will guarantee me, in perpetuity, that there will be no wildcard name as there now is in "com". more

EU NameSpace is Dead?

The European Union's .eu Top-Level Domain (TLD) sunrise and landrush has probably been discussed to death, but what is the landscape like over a year later? A lot of industry insiders were right to express their doubts about the stability of .eu following on from the high profile squats that have been discussed here at length. Of course any discussion on a new TLD would have to wait until after the first wave of renewals. That happened in April, so now, in July, it's a good as time to take stock of the situation... more

Ireland’s .ie To Come Under Government Control

The Irish domain registry (IEDR) is to come under the control of the Commission for Communications Regulation ComReg. At present the registry is managed by a "not-for-profit" company, however it has come under increasing criticism with regard to both its management and policies. Although there are approximately 40,000 IE domains currently registered, it is still one of the strictest and most expensive ccTLDs in the world. more

.MS: Alternate Root and Monoculture as Good Things

Why shouldn't there be a .gadi TLD? Why not one for Microsoft? This post is not about alternate roots or why they are bad, this post is about something else. We do need to go over some background (from my perspective) very quickly though. ICANN has a steel-fist control over what happens in the DNS realm. They decide what is allowed, and who gets money from it. Whether it's VeriSign for .com or any registrar for the domains they sell. They decide if .gadi should exist or not. ...What I am here to discuss is why Microsoft, as a non-arbitrary choice this time, indeed, of all the world, should kick it aside, creating an alternate root while at the same time not disturbing the world's DNS. more

Security and Fort N.O.C.‘s

In an article by MSNBC called "Fort N.O.C.'s" [Network Operating Center] Brock N. Meeks reports: "The unassuming building that houses the "A" root sits in a cluster of three others; the architecture looks as if it were lifted directly from a free clip art library. No signs or markers give a hint that the Internet's most precious computer is inside humming happily away in a hermetically sealed room. This building complex could be any of a 100,000 mini office parks littering middle class America." ...It is hardly the "most precious computer"!!!  more

Internet Governance Outlook 2022: A Global Digital Compact or a Bifurcated Cyberspace?

This is the 10th edition of my annual Internet Governance Outlook. The first one was published on CircleID on January 3, 2013, just a couple of weeks after ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). I wrote: "Anyone who expected that with the end of the Dubai Conference, the heated debate on the future regulation of the Internet will slow down should remember the fairytale of the knight's battle with the seven-headed dragon. Hardly a head is cut off, another one is growing." more

Are Domain Name Registrars Ready for IPv6?

Now that ICANN has added IPv6 name servers for the root zone, and that many registries have enabled IPv6 on their DNS servers, I thought it would have been easy to update the DNS records pointing to my domain to mention a IPv6-only DNS server. This way, we could have native name resolution end-to-end in IPv6. We are not there yet, it seems. more

Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders

For more than a decade, aggressive website registrants have been engaged in 'typosquatting' -- the intentional registration of misspellings of popular website addresses. Uses for the diverted traffic have evolved over time, ranging from hosting sexually-explicit content to phishing. Several countermeasures have been implemented, including developing policies for resolving disputes. Despite these efforts, typosquatting remains rife. But just how prevalent is typosquatting today, and why is it so pervasive? (Co-authored by Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman) more