DNS

Transition to IPv6 Address

Last month's column looked at the exhaustion of the IPv4 unallocated address pool and the state of preparedness in the Internet to grapple with this issue... There has been a considerable volume of discussion in various IPv6 and address policy forums across the world about how we should respond to this situation in terms of development of address distribution policies. Is it possible to devise address management policies that might both lessen some of the more harmful potential impacts of this forthcoming hiatus in IPv4 address supply, and also provide some impetus to industry to move in the originally intended direction to transition into an IPv6 network?

Neustar Losing .us Could Be Good for .com Registrants

Neustar is facing a potential loss of the Dot-US franchise as competitors bid against them. Why might this be of interest to .com registrants? ...The issue of antitrust with regards to the .com agreement has never really been properly settled, as a well-funded complainant hasn't brought forward a case to full fruition in the courts. ICANN sold out the public by agreeing to a settlement that would see its own coffers swell, at the expense of registrants, so they do not count.

Let’s Be Careful Out There: Bogus Windows Domains

Last week, my colleagues over at Sunbelt Software discovered a bogus Windows domain being registered earlier this month (where the "w" in "windows" is actually two "v"s). Today, I've been alerted to the fact that are several additional Windows domains which have registered where the "w"s have been also been replaced with "v"s...

DotAsia Auctions Aim to Address Problems of the Past

The announcement this week that DotAsia will work with Pool.com on an auction system to introduce its new domain names is a good reaction to problems of the past. Previous launches worked (sometimes not well) on a first-come, first-served basis. For example, sex.eu had over 280 potential applications but only the first was even considered. Yet, today, nearly 2 years later, the domain application is still being reviewed...

Call for Domain Owner Code of Rights and Responsibilities

This article discusses grassroots progress toward the development of a "Domain Registrant's Code of Rights and Responsibilities." This Code is an effort to create a balanced combination of the rights that domain name registrants should enjoy and the responsibilities that domain name registrants should fulfill. Discussion and survey results concerning this Code at domain-related forums show far greater grassroots consensus than one might think between what might be called the "domainer" and "intellectual property" communities. Informal surveys at some domain-related forums show very strong support in favor of this Code.

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...

Google Buys VeriSign (not really)

No that's not really happening, Google is not buying VeriSign. But given Google's ravenous appetite for data, it might find VeriSign quite attractive. VeriSign has both root domain name servers and servers for the .com and .net top level domains (TLDs). VeriSign could data mine the queries coming into those servers and produce a very valuable real-time stream of what users on the net are doing... Google just bought Postini -- and one would have to be fairly naive to believe that Google does not intend to dredge through all...

Does the iPhone Keep dotMobi Awake at Night?

We've had a number of questions (and seen plenty of commentary) regarding the recent launch of the iPhone and how it might affect us and the mobile web in general. ...the iPhone changes the way that tastemakers think about their online existence. Interacting with the web, clearly, is no longer a solitary, sedentary and constrained activity.Now I've personally believed this for a while, so arguably it's no big deal -- the long-term evolution of the web to become a largely mobile (and, by the way, subtly different) medium is inevitable.

The Inextricable Issue of Internationalized Domain Names

ICANN has embarked on the IDN boat at the same time it wants to introduce DNSSEC and new gTLDs. This promises lots of fun. Or grey hair, depending how you look at it. First is the issue of country code IDNs. The ISO-3166 table, based on two letter codes, is a western convention. Some cultures do not use abbreviations or acronyms. Some do not use a character-based alphabet, but a syllabic one. Hence, the next logical step would be to represent the full country name in local script, rather than a transliteration of the ISO string... Imagine the case of India, where there are 1.652 languages, of which 24 are spoken by more than one million people...

Aging the Internet Prematurely, One PDP at a Time

After blogging about ICANN's new gTLD policy or lack thereof [also featured on CircleID], I've had several people ask me why I care so much about ICANN and new top-level domains. Domain names barely matter in a world of search and hyperlinks, I'm told, and new domains would amount to little more than a cash transfer to new registries from those trying to protect their names and brands. While I agree that type-in site-location is less and less relevant, and we haven't yet seen much end-user focused innovation in the use of domain names, I'm not ready to throw in the towel. I think ICANN is still in a position to do affirmative harm to Internet innovation.