Featured Blogs

How the Internet Can Be Enormously Accelerated Without Fiber-Optic Cables or LEO Satellites

We got used to it: if we open a website, it's always like stop and go on a high-traffic highway or city traffic jam. At some point, we will reach the destination. The constant stalling is due to a traffic rule for the Internet called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). The TCP/IP protocol family comes from the American defense industry. It was introduced by DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) in the early 1970s. At that time, no one had the Internet as the need of the masses on the screen. more

FCC’s Comcast Ruling Inconsistent and Incoherent

After voting on the Comcast order today, Kevin Martin and his Democratic Party colleagues issued press releases telling us how they saved the Internet from Comcast's discriminatory practices, but they've failed to release the actual order they adopted and subsequently re-wrote. Commissioner McDowell wasn't allowed to see the revised order until 7:00 PM the night before the meeting. Rumor has it that high-level spin doctors are still trying to remove all the rough edges, inconsistencies, and factual errors. more

Wikileaks DDoS of Spamhaus: Political Activism at Its Dumbest

A week ago, Paul Vixie wrote a thoughtful piece on the morality of DDos, for both sides of the equation of the Wikileaks issues. In it he summarizes things nicely: "Denial of service is not merely a peaceful protest meant to garner attention for a cause. Denial of service is forcible and it is injurious. It is not like any form of civil disobedience, but rather it is criminal behaviour more like looting." Well said, Paul... more

Exposing A Famous Secret: Well-known Trademarks Are Not Easily Diluted

Regarding a domain name dispute involving famous authors, the novelist, Louis Sachar, observed that "if some unrelated person is going to co-opt my name in cyberspace, and fails to use it to identify a web site related to my books or myself, that's going to endanger my career, as well as my reputation." Louis Sachar is one of nine famous authors for whom the Authors Guild, recently successfully snatched personal name domain names from a United Kingdom domain name registrant known as Old Barn Studios... more

So you want to apply for a new gTLD in the second Round of the ICANN new gTLD program?

New domain names are now on the market and you start to realize that you may have missed the train by not submitting your own new gTLD application. So why not get your part of the cake and consider applying for your own new Top-Level Domain in the second Round of the ICANN new gTLD program? Why not become a "Registry" and sell domain names... to the world? more

Putting String Similarity into Context: Bulgaria’s IDN (.??) vs. Brazil’s ccTLD (.br)

Bulgaria is a nation which is directly impacted by the current Fast Track automatic disqualification when Top-Level Domain (TLD) strings are "confusingly similar" to other TLDs, in this case an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD). Bulgaria has already been declined twice (in late 2009, and in May of 2010) to register the *.?? Cyrillic IDN on the premise that it looks confusingly similar to Brazil's *.br ASCII TLD. Being a native Bulgarian, I did not see how these two strings are similar more

Who Should Bear Domain Name Risk?

Domain owners are bearing tremendous risk that someone else is better equipped to absorb. In this post, I outline the motivation of risk ownership, the sources of risk associated with owning a domain name, and the ways by which some of these risks have been transferred to institutions that are better equipped to handle them. I close by pointing out that we would be better served by having a trademark risk-management entity. more

The Ugly End of the Phone Network

I was a little early. "By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country, I blogged just after Obama had been elected. Before that I'd prophesized the end of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) by 2010. Nevertheless, the end is nigh. And it's gonna be ugly without some planning. more

IGP on Future U.S. Role in Internet Governance

On June 30, 2005, the United States Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administrtation (NTIA) released the "US Statement of Principles on the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System." The Internet Governance Project (IGP) has issued 7 points in response to the "Statement of Principles" showing the direction believed to be in the interests of the United States and the world. more

Hints and Solution for the Protection of Wine Geographical Indications in the ICANN New gTLD Program

This article is a copy of a letter sent today, 3 of April 2013, to the attention of Mr Fadi Chehadé, CEO of ICANN and other members of the ICANN board. Protecting wine Geographical Indications in the new gTLD program is a problem. This letter is also an article providing hints for the protection of Wine Geographical Indications in the ICANN new gTLD program. more

Wall Street and Virtual Space Data: Internet Domain Name Index (IDNX) Listed on Bloomberg, Reuters

The financial industry is all about pinstripe suits, excessive Excel sheets and boring data. Or is it? Financial markets are more colorful than their reputation: take a look at Bloomberg's or Reuters' sites, and you'll see that pork belly is as much an object of investment speculation as coffee, electricity, bananas, hides, or fishmeal. Recently, the universe of data available to financial analysts and investment bankers grew further, with the addition of the Internet Domain Name Index (IDNX) to leading financial data distributors Bloomberg (ticker symbol: IDNX <Index>) and Reuters (ticker symbol: .IDNX). more

Brand Protection Domain Registrations: There Are More Than You Think

One of the major problems for brand owners is protecting the brand in new TLDs. Most new Top-Level Domain (TLD) registries will depend on brand protection registrations for a major part of their registration volume and some may become almost completely dependent on these registrations if the new TLD fails to capture the public's imagination. Short of comparing the registrant data for each individual domain, there is no 100% accurate method of measuring the level of brand protection registrations in a TLD. more

Tangible Property: First Domain Lawsuit Filed After Federal Ruling

Storage specialist Optima Technology Corporation has filed a lawsuit against Network Solutions alleging that the registrar gave away its domain name without its permission causing damage to its business. The suit alleges that Network Solutions transferred ownership of its domain name "optimatech.com" to a former Optima employee Michael DeCorte, which has allowed him to redirect Optima's revenue to his possession. Optima claims that DeCorte along with another former employee Raymond Martin, used a fake webiste to divert Optima's revenue. more

Spamming the News Cycle: Spamhaus Non-Story Goes Viral

Google News now shows more than 300 stories about Spamhaus, most about a proposed court order following a district court default judgment. To me, the most interesting is the meta-story -- why the non-event of a proposed order has the blogs scrambling with claims of constitutional crisis and even the notoriously close-lipped ICANN issuing an announcement "in response to community interest expressed on this topic." more

ICANN Subject to the Data Quality Act

CRE notified Dr. Twomey, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN, of the applicability of the Data Quality Act to ICANN in a detailed letter of October 29th. CRE asked ICANN for a meeting to discuss the issue of the applicability of the Data Quality Act to ICANN since CRE received no communication in response to the letter. In mid-December ICANN agreed to a January 23rd meeting with CRE. Notwithstanding CRE's trip to ICANN's headquarters in California for the scheduled meeting, the organization refused at the last moment to meet with CRE. CRE now knows how Dr. Twomey felt when he was expelled from an ICANN-related planning meeting in Geneva. more