Radio Interview Discusses Domainers and Domaining

Damien Allen of VTalk Radio recently interviewed Professor Eric Goldman of the Santa Clara University School of Law on the topic of "Domaining". The interview covers the nature of domaining as a business and how it differs from cybersquatting. From the interview: "Often times the domainers are not particularly interested in profitable resale and, in fact, in my experience many times when domainers get complaints about domains, they'll just hand the domain name back, no questions asked and no money charged. They're not looking to make money from the resale of the domain names..." more

Microsoft Files Three More Cybersquatting Cases

Microsoft has filed 3 cybersquatting cases at the beginning of September 2007, as reported in an Inside Indiana Business article. I took the liberty of accessing the cases via the PACER system, and posted the major documents... It looks like they're stepping up efforts to defend their trademarks, and seeking big damages in court, rather than go the way of the UDRP. These cases demonstrate that new TLDs should not be a priority with ICANN until the problems in existing TLDs are addressed. more

Congestion in the Backbone: Telecom and Internet Solutions

When a network is subject to a rapid increase in traffic perhaps combined with a rapid decrease in capacity (for example due to a fire or a natural disaster), there is a risk of congestion collapse. In a congestion collapse, the remaining capacity is so overloaded with access attempts that virtually no traffic gets through. In the case of telephony, everyone attempts to call their family and friends in a disaster area. The long standing telephony approach is to restrict new call attempts upstream of the congested area... This limits the amount of new traffic to that which the network can handle. Thus, if only 30% capacity is available, at least the network handles 30% of the calls, not 3% or zero... more

Zango Verdict is Good News for Spam Filters and Blacklists

Zango, a company that used to be called 180 solutions, has a long history of making and distributing spyware. (See the Wikipedia article for their sordid history.) Not surprisingly, anti-spyware vendors routinely list Zango's software as what's tactfully called "potentially unwanted". Zango has tried to sue their way out of the doghouse by filing suit against anti-spyware vendors. In a widely reported decision last week, Seattle judge John Coghenour crisply rejected Zango's case, finding that federal law gives Kaspersky complete immunity against Zango's complaint... more

Is Bandwidth Infinite? It All Depends…

On August 23 ( while I was in China) a list member Lee S. Drybrugh wrote in jest: I happened to bump into Peter Cochrane stating, "The good news is -- bandwidth is free -- and we have an infinite supply." Next by sheer accident I bumped into this in relation to Gilder, "Telecosm argues that the world is beginning to realise that bandwidth is not a scarce resource (as was once thought) but is in factinfinite." Can anyone explain this infinite bandwidth as I think I am getting ripped off by my ISP if this is true? Craig Partridge then offered what I think is a very good commentary of a difficult question where the answer depends very much on context... more

Lawyer-Impersonator Pleads Guilty over False C&Ds

As if there weren't enough problems with lawyers sending out improper cease-and-desists, Wired News reports that a Nevada man has pleaded guilty to impersonating a lawyer to extort domain registrants to turn over their domain names. "A Nevada man pleaded guilty Thursday to his plotting to steal domain names from their legitimate owners by impersonating a California intellectual property lawyer and send threatening letters to domain name owners in hopes of convincing them to turn over the domains to him..." more

A Possible Missing Piece of Net Neutrality Puzzle: Backbones and Peering?

I remember being told three years ago that, in general, internet backbone issues weren't really a subject for regulatory involvement, and didn't need to be. Although the last mile was a problem, the upstream fat-pipe relationships weren't - they were all competitive and thriving. Or at least that's what people thought. Over the last couple of days I've been looking around trying to figure out what the facts are about backbones and peering. It seems that we don't even know what we don't know... more

FreeNum Links Phone Numbers to the Internet

I loved John Todd's ETel presentation (podcast) on FreeNum, a scheme for bringing phone numbers to the Internet. Of course, I love identifiers and addresses and all that they enable, so it was a natural. Suppose you were a university campus and when you looked at your phone bill, you noticed that a lot of calls were to other universities. You've got a VoIP telephone system; they've all got VoIP telephone systems. You might wonder "isn't there some way to route these calls over the Internet and save some serious money?" The answer, of course is "yes" but making it usable is a little harder... more

Rent vs. Buy: The Driver of Economics

We the people like to own stuff and not pay rent to use it (BTW, rent includes taxes but that's another story). They the oligarchs like to own the stuff and charge us rent to use it. The rise of a middle class has historically meant the rise of a property-owning class. The underclass pays exorbitant rents. The telecommunications world -- or at least the US part of it -- is a battle of rent vs. buy. Economics says that ownership or rentership is all based on access to capital. Certainly capital is a huge part of the equation -- can you spell "home loan"?; but it's not the whole story... more

More on WHOIS Privacy

Last week I wrote a note the ICANN WHOIS privacy battle, and why nothing's likely to change any time soon. Like many of my articles, it is mirrored at CircleID, where some of the commenters missed the point. One person noted that info about car registrations, to which I roughly likened WHOIS, are usually available only to law enforcement, and that corporations can often be registered in the name of a proxy, so why can't WHOIS do the same thing? more