.Brand Applications Account for One Third of All New gTLD Applications

ICANN announced today that they received a total of 1930 New gTLD applications from 60 countries for 1408 unique strings. Of the 1930 applications received, .Brands accounted for 664 of them. There are an additional 80 .Brand TLDs which we have classified as "Other", as they do not fall into any of the categories listed above. more

Wow, That’s a Lot of Applications

ICANN unveiled all the applications for new top level domains today, all 1,930 of them. Most of them were fairly predictable, big companies applying for their own names like .IBM, .DUPONT, .AUDI, and .HSBC. The most applications for the same name were 13 for .APP, 11 for .INC and .HOME, 10 for .ART, 9 for .SHOP, .LLC, .BOOK, and .BLOG. None of those claim community support so they'll have to slug it out in the contention process. more

The Business Parallels Between IPv6 and DNSSEC

For two things that would seem to be completely unrelated there is an interesting parallel between IPv6 and DNSSEC. In both cases there is a misalignment of interests between content providers and service?providers. Content providers aren't highly motivated to deploy IPv6 because only a small proportion of users have v6 connectivity and even fewer only have v6. Service providers aren't anxious to deploy IPv6? because there isn't a lot of content on v6, and virtually none exclusively on v6 - so they don't expand the universe of interesting stuff on the web by deploying IPv6. Basically the same things could be said about DNSSEC. more

UN Internet Takeover Rumours Mask Bigger Governance Shortcomings

In recent months the Internet has been buzzing about the prospect of a United Nations "takeover" of the Internet, including responsibility for governance of the domain name system. The concern hit a fever pitch late last month when the U.S. Congress held hearings on the issue. A steady stream of technology companies and consumer groups expressed fears with potential U.N. and foreign government involvement and members of Congress pledged to take a strong stand against the takeover. more

ICANN’s New gTLDs: The Game Changers Have Landed

The day after 'reveal day' two big questions will emerge; firstly was the advertising branding world so wrong or secondly, the parties behind the proposed names so invincible and can turn their $350 million dollars into many tens of billions. To be fair the jury may be out nevertheless, here are some facts... The Internet was never designed to solve the global business naming problems; it was the extension of DARPA, a failsafe military communication system later adventured into public use. more

Romney Emails Hacked

US presidential candidate Mitt Romney will likely be reconsidering his email passwords after his online email account was reportedly hacked. A hacker claims to have accessed Romney's Hotmail and Dropbox accounts after guessing the answer to the Republican candidate's 'favourite pet' security question. It's suspected Romney used the same password for more than one account. more

Measurement Results from World IPv6 Launch

As announced on RIPE Labs we monitored the behaviour of a number of networks that participated in the World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012. For that, we looked at the full list of participating organisations as shown on the ISOC website and chose 50 websites from that list. We looked at 'interesting' sites and at geographic distribution. We also tried to find a good mix of networks that had IPv6 switched on already and those that didn't have IPv6 deployed at the time they registered on the ISOC web site. more

Password Leaks

The technical press is full of reports about the leak of a hashed password file from LinkedIn. Worse yet, we hear, the hashes weren't salted. The situation is probably both better and worse than it would appear; in any event, it's more complicated. more

The Biggest Glitch of All - ICANN’s Batching Program for New gTLDs

ICANN's batching program, called digital archery, is deeply flawed and should be abandoned before it causes havoc with the new gTLD program. As well as arbitrarily creating winners and losers, creating unfair advantages for certain types of applicants and for certain regions, the program may be suffering from another software "glitch" of the kind that damaged the application process. There is a much better solution: a single batch for all applications. more

ICANN Proceeds With Batching… For Now

Yesterday, ICANN released a statement to confirm its intention to evaluate new Top-Level Domain applicants in batches using the proposed timestamp system (digital archery) to determine the batches. Whilst this is not the result I was hoping for, I was not surprised by this move. more