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I recently read an interesting post on LinkedIn Engineering's blog entitled "TCP over IP Anycast -- Pipe dream or Reality?" The authors describe a project to optimize the performance of www.linkedin.com. The web site is served from multiple web server instances located in LinkedIn's POPs all over the world. Previously LinkedIn used DNS geomapping exclusively to route its users to the best web server instance, but the post describes how they tried using BGP routing instead. more
I have struggled over the past couple of weeks to come up with a metaphor to succinctly describe the standoff between the ICANN Board and the ICANN Government Advisory Committee (GAC) over the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) implementation process. So here's my best attempt to explain these dynamics in terms a layperson may be better to understand. I chose the metaphor for its timeliness, without meaning to offend anyone. more
The IANA Stewardship Transition process may have started more than a year ago, but last week it reached its pinnacle with the publication of the compiled Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions from the US Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to the Global Multistakeholder Community" by the IANA Coordination Group (ICG). more
Amidst a firestorm of debate, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has experimented with various forms of governance of the domain name system (DNS) involving input from the Internet community since its founding in 1998. ICANN's experimentation in running a representative and open corporate decision-making process has largely failed. This failure has manifested itself most explicitly by ICANN's retreat from its effort to enable the direct election of a subset of its Board members and, less explicitly, by the extent to which other efforts to engage the Internet user community in the decision-making process have proven ineffective. more
Former President Theodore Roosevelt is not one whose remarks are usually associated with the domain name industry, but his commentary in 1913 could just as easily have been written today:
"The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of 'liberty', while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure 'order'. Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word 'liberty' at the one time, and the use of the word 'order' at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many individuals, by a state or by a private corporation." more
For many years the consuming topic in DNS circles was that of the names themselves. If you wind the clock back twenty years or so, you will find much discussion about the nature of the Internet's namespace. Why were there both generic top-level labels and two-letter country codes? If we were going to persist with these extra-territorial generic country codes in the namespace, then how many should there be? Who could or should manage them? And so on. more
March 22, 2019, saw the completion of the final important step in the Key Signing Key (KSK) rollover - a process which began about a year and half ago. What may be less well known is that post rollover, and until just a couple days ago, Verisign was receiving a dramatically increasing number of root DNSKEY queries, to the tune of 75 times higher than previously observed, and accounting for ~7 percent of all transactions at the root servers we operate. more
You wake up, make coffee, sit down by the computer and start reading your favorite web sites. You fire up your favorite browser and type 'www.site.com' on the address bar, hit enter and continue sipping on that coffee. You wait for the page to load, sipping some more coffee - a few seconds later you get the Google search results for 'www.site.com'. You scratch your head, sip some more coffee, and start wondering if you did a typo, but no it is correct - Google is not correcting your spelling. more
After wading through the various IANA Notice of Inquiry (NOI) submissions I thought I would take a break and do a secondary review of the recently concluded ICANN regional meeting in San Francisco. In doing this review there were three things that kind of jumped out at me as still missing in action. more
Convincing competitors, disparate business entities and researchers to collaborate - many donating their services and resources - to protect millions of end-users worldwide is no small feat. Yet FBI Supervisory Special Agent Thomas X. Grasso did just that by quietly working behind the scenes to create the DNS Changer Working Group that saved an inestimable number of end-users from losing access to the Web over the last two years. more
Yesterday's Wikipedia outage, which resulted from invalid DNS zone information, provides some good reminders about the best and worst attributes of active DNS management. The best part of the DNS is that it provides knowledgeable operators with a great tool to use to manage traffic around trouble spots on a network. In this case, Wikipedia was attempting to route around its European data center because... more
In research, one of the important steps is to identify the problem that needs exploration. Another step is to identify how to find a solution. Once it is possible to agree on the nature of the problem, then it begins to be a matter of how to approach the problem. more
At the IGF2010 in Vilnius, two folk are floating a trial balloon about separating the allocation function from the registry services function. Currently, these functions are seen as indivisible by the Internet addressing community. In other words, one gets an allocation or assignment from a RIR and the RIR adds the assignment to their database... The question being asked is "Is it time for a split between allocation and services for Internet number resources as was the case for domain name resources?" My answer is no more
Last month a bill in the Israeli Knesset would have required ISPs to provide portable e-mail addresses, analogous to portable phone numbers that one can take from one phone company to the other. As I noted at the time, e-mail works differently from telephone calls, and portability would be difficult, expensive, and unreliable. So I was wondering, idly, if we really wanted to provide portable e-mail addresses, how hard would it be? more
Though I have been critical of some of ICANN's shortcomings, I remain a strong supporter of ICANN's role as a private sector-led, multi-stakeholder global regulator for the Internet's core addressing systems. My recent blog post about my concerns with the communications processes relating to the addition of the first Arabic script IDN ccTLDs has been quoted in an ITU Staff Paper prepared for the ITU Council Working Group on the World Summit on the Information Society, to be held in Geneva tomorrow. This document seems to suggest... more
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