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The former contract with ICANN and the US Department of Commerce (DOC) was due to expire on September 30, 2002. In the statement announcing the renewal, the DOC acknowledged that ICANN was the subject of many complaints from many sectors of the Internet community. Some of these complaints had been presented to the US Congress during a hearing held in June 2002 by a Senate Subcommittee. At the hearing, a General Accounting Office (GAO) spokesperson, Peter Guerrero, testified, noting not only that ICANN had failed in its mandate, but that the U.S. Department of Commerce was also at fault in failing to properly oversee ICANN activities. He explains... more
The key to fixing any part of the Internet infrastructure is to understand the business cases for the parties whose behavior you want to influence and design the technology accordingly. People who follow this approach (Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web) have a chance of succeeding. People who ignore it (DNSSEC, IPv6) will fail. The root problem here is that the ICANN DNS does not differentiate between the parts of the Internet that are accountable and those that are not. more
The merits of a Registry Service Provider accreditation programs have been debated across the Domain Industry since the most recent round of Domain Name Registries were introduced starting in 2012. This post discusses the early reasoning in support of an accreditation program; changes in the policy considerations between 2012 and now; the effects of competition on the landscape; a suggestion for how such a program might be implemented; and why such a program should be introduced now. more
There is a definite advantage to knowing what users look for when typing in domain names that they think should work. This article from Government Computer News shows an excellent example in .gov. "600,000 visitors a year to FirstGov try to find the federal government's Web site by typing USA.gov into their browser", so they switched from firstgov.gov to usa.gov. It wasn't mentioned in the article, but firstgov.gov redirects automatically; this is more intelligence than I normally expect from US government web sites. more
This post is based on the scenario that a trademark.tld domain name is registered with a UK ICANN accredited registrar, (they have an exclusive UK jurisdiction clause in their contracts), the trademark.tld criticism website located at that domain name is strictly non-commercial, the servers are located in the UK, and the registrant is a British citizen. In the above circumstances, the corporations and/or their lawyers are taking a big risk when they use the Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policies (UDRP) in order to silence criticism at trademark.tld. more
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has shifted its campaign against ICANN's new gTLD program to YouTube with a video from its President accusing the organization of "lying" about having reached a consensus over its plans, reports Kieren McCarthy at .Nxt. "The video ends with a dramatic statement, clearly devised to produce stories such as this one: 'So we'd like to say to ICANN: your claim for consensus it wrong, it is false, it is a lie." more
In the second part of this two-part series article (part one here), Andrew McLaughlin concludes his critical look at the recently reported study, Public Participation in ICANN, by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School... "ICANN has never attempted to be -- and was never designed to be -- 'representative' of the worldwide Internet community in any mathematically precise way. In view of the vast size of the global population of Internet users, and the specialized technical focus of ICANN's policy-making responsibilities, it would be a hopeless task to try to achieve truly representative statistical proportionality among ICANN's participants, committees, task forces, or Board members. Rather, here's how the U.S. government's foundational 1998 DNS policy statement described the core principle of 'representation'." more
The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) meetings are an instance of a meeting that concentrates on the single topic of the DNS, and in this case, it delves as deep as anyone is prepared to go! It's two days where too much DNS is barely enough! The hot topic of the meeting was the news that the proposed roll of the Key-Signing-Key of the root zone of the DNS, originally scheduled for October 11, was to be postponed. more
The ICANN bylaws require a periodic review of ICANN structures and operations; the first of such reviews, that of the Generic Names Supporting Organization Council, is scheduled to be finalized in the next few weeks prior to the start of ICANN's annual meeting. To begin discussion on this topic, I draw your attention to a very thoughtful question posed by Joe Sims during the prior ICANN reform process... more
The .AU Domain Administration (auDA) will soon implement new .AU domain administration licensing rules either late this year or early next year. These rules apply to new registrations and around 3 million existing domain names in the com.au, net.au, org.au, and more .AU namespaces... Previously, an Australian trademark application or registration may constitute the required Australian presence for an .AU domain name, but the domain name need not match the trademark. more
As described in New RIPE Atlas Features in the Making, each RIPE Atlas probe performs "anycast instance discovery" measurements. This means, for each DNS root name server, we determine which instance of a name server a probe uses. We compile the data from all probes and build maps showing these results for each Atlas probe. In other words, the map shows the "gravitational radius" for root DNS server instances. more
ICANN's mission, and the avoidance of "mission creep", is currently the subject of intense debate in the Internet community. Multiple cross-community working groups are dealing with the proposal by an agency of the United States government, NTIA, to give up the last vestiges of its control of the IANA function. Many of the new organizational structures under consideration purport to deal with ICANN's expanding mission. more
After two decades of involvement with ICANN, I am stepping down from the Board of Directors, where I served for nine years. I have spent considerable time of late reflecting on the past 20 years, and I have isolated some memories that help frame my time with ICANN. ... November 2000, ICANN07 in Marina del Rey, California - With only a scant idea of what ICANN is all about, I am warmly welcomed by the flag-wearing country code top-level domain (ccTLD) community, who come to ICANN to ensure that nothing happens to affect the independence of ccTLDs... more
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... 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