Featured Blogs

ICANN Meetings in Luxembourg

The ICANN Meetings are in full flow here in sunny Luxembourg. The venue is immense and located a cab, bus, or shuttle ride from the various hotels. So far, the big topics are the .Net finalization (focusing on the readjustment of the pricing verbiage), the USDOC root announcement, the shell registrar accreditations used in the batch pool for the purposes of getting dropped names, and the practice of registrars exploiting the 5 day add grace period to register in excess of 50000 names to watch how much web traffic they have, and returning the ones that do not at no cost... 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

Copyright Infringement and ccTLDs

.tk was once designated as the riskiest ccTLD. .ru is often said to be, after .com, the most used in the content of spam messages. But is there a ccTLD that is a favorite destination for copyright infringement? The question is worth asking in view of the growing trend for .com domain names seizures related to copyright infringement. more

Preliminary Thoughts on the Equifax Hack

As you've undoubtedly heard, the Equifax credit reporting agency was hit by a major attack, exposing the personal data of 143 million Americans and many more people in other countries. There's been a lot of discussion of liability; as of a few days ago, at least 25 lawsuits had been filed, with the state of Massachusetts preparing its own suit. It's certainly too soon to draw any firm conclusions... but there are a number of interesting things we can glean from Equifax's latest statement. more

Why Are the EU Data Protection Authorities Taking Away Our Fundamental Right to be Safe?

What if we created a rule that gave everyone - good or bad - the right to hide their license plate, where they live, who they are, and just go incognito? What if we made it a right to walk into any building in the world, and simply say "No, thank you" when the security guards asked for one's identification? The criminals would celebrate, and we'd all be utterly alarmed. We would immediately be afraid for our personal safety. more

The Future of Home Networking: A Problem Statement

I'm a network engineer, and like many engineers I often gravitate to the big projects; large networks with problems of scale and complexity in my case. However, I also consider myself a student of Occam's razor and often quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." In this spirit of "less is more" I have recently become intrigued by the problems appearing in home networking. more

Examining Actual State of IPv6 Deployment

There have been quite a number of recent articles about various IPv6 issues. Thus the question: how far along is the actual IPv6 deployment? This is a quick-and-dirty survey that focuses mainly on the content provider side. What domains were surveyed? Alexa offers country depended TopSites listings. Domains listed are frequently visited by users from that country, not necessarily hosted there... more

Corporate Domain Registration Practices in Light of New gTLDs

For years, corporate domain name administrators have scoffed at every new second-level and third-level country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) liberalization, and rightly so. Until recently, most had continued the practice of registering significant numbers of variations, misspellings and typo-squats. While I have never encouraged the practice of registering every variation in every geography, as this becomes prohibitively expensive over time... With what seems to be the imminent launch of hundreds of new TLDs as a result of ICANN's new initiative, companies appear to be saying enough is enough, and meaning it. 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

DNSSEC Deployment at the Root

The DNSSEC is a security protocol for providing cryptographic assurance (i.e. using the public key cryptography digital signature technology) to the data retrieved from the DNS distributed database (RFC4033). DNSSEC deployment at the root is said to be subject to politics, but there is seldom detailed discussion about this "DNS root signing" politics. Actually, DNSSEC deployment requires more than signing the DNS root zone data; it also involves secure delegations from the root to the TLDs, and DNSSEC deployment by TLD administrations (I omit other participants involvement as my focus is policy around the DNS root). There is a dose of naivety in the idea of detailing the political aspects of the DNS root, but I volunteer! My perspective is an interested observer. more

Searching Under Lampposts with DKIM

Email is a complex service and email abuse adds confusing deceptions. Worse, like postal mail and even telephone service, Internet mail is inherently open, flexible and even anonymous, making things much easier for abusers. Bad actors hide their true identity and their true purpose. Most other communication tools for users also are also quite open, and problems with email are being replicated elsewhere, such as instant messaging and social media. more

ICANN Needs a Good Root

It's not been the best of years for ICANN. Leaving aside for a few seconds the controversy about xxx, and the allegations of improper behavior about the .Net assignment, ICANN has had a lot to deal with. The troubles began with the UN Working Group on Internet Governance hell bent on fixing ICANN, even though ICANN says nothing is broke. That trouble remains and isn't likely to go away for some time. And then, just when it seemed that the UN and ITU was the cause of all ICANN's problems, the old ally, US Government's DOC, decided that it was going to be in charge of ICANN. ...This could be the beginnings of a distinct change where the centralized DNS as we know it gradually gives way to some next generation structure which is far more decentralized. The coming 12 months may see some significant changes in this area. more

Moving Telephone Numbers Into the Internet Age

Now that we're 20 years past TN 2.0, well into the 21st century, and onto the 3rd generation of the web; it is about time we move telephone numbers into the Internet age. They are still managed as if they all connect to four copper wires. We manage to the lowest common denominator rather than acknowledging the power of mobility and Internet technology. more

ICANN’s Uniform Rapid Suspension: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

With so many new gTLDs moving into their respective general availability periods, and incidents of cybersquatting beginning to appear, many companies are now looking towards the URS (Uniform Rapid Suspension) as a possible solution for quickly remediating abuse. As a reminder, domains that are the subject of a successful URS ruling are suspended for the remainder of the registration term, or can be renewed for an additional year at the current registrar. more

June Court Decision Detrimental to Domaining Practices

In a June court ruling, domainer Navigation Catalyst and registrar Basic Fusion lost a cybersquatting lawsuit to Verizon... This is an extremely interesting and potentially precedent-setting case regarding domaining and domain name tasting. The court condemns both practices, leading to a preliminary injunction against the domainer and its registrar based on the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). As far as I can recall, this is the first time that a domainer has lost an ACPA lawsuit in court, and it provides an important data point confirming that domaining can be cybersquatting (a previously unresolved issue)... more