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ICANN is now seeking public comments regarding the .net bids. Unlike before, I am not going to offend one friend or another by siding with one proposal over another. They are all qualified and experienced registry operators. Instead, I will make some general observations. 1. None of the Revenue and Pricing Model (i.e. Section 4) about the bids are available to public... more
NameSmash has interviewed Garth Bruen, Internet security expert and creator of Knujon, on some key issues under discussion during the recent ICANN meetings in San Francisco. Topics include Whois, DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) -- issues of critical importance particularly with ICANN's expected roll-out of thousands of new gTLDs in the coming years. more
The DoC seems to have finally realized it went too far by using ICANN to serve the interests of some conservative groups, as mentioned in a previous post. The new story is now that the ICANN board did not reject the .XXX application as such, but only the agreement negotiated between ICM Registry and the ICANN staff at that time. How subtle these things are... more
In 2002, VeriSign, the registry for .COM and .NET domain names, proposed the idea of a centralized, registry-level "wait list" for currently registered domain names. The system would let anyone around the world get "next in line" for a name that is registered now but may become available later.
This new registry service, titled Wait List System (or WLS), would augment what is now an ad-hoc group of registrar-level services that are useful, but aren't always fully dependable or even available to the general public. more
Later today, Senator Conrad Burns, who chairs the U.S. Senate subcommittee responsible for supervising ICANN, will be holding a hearing on a number of issues.
At the beginning of the year, a press release called "Burns Unveils NexGenTen Agenda For Communications Reform and Security in the 21st Century", had reported:
"U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) announced his top priorities for his chairmanship of the Senate Communications Subcommittee during the 108th legislative session. The ten items, called the Burns NexGenTen Tech Agenda, aim to strengthen security and usher reform for 21st Century Communication... more
"ICANN remains the frontier institution and the test case for global governance in the IT sector," writes Zoe Baird in an article in the November-December 2002 issue of "Foreign Affairs". Baird is the President of the Markle Foundation. Her article "Governing the Internet: Engaging Government, Business and Nonprofits" appears in "Foreign Affairs", a magazine usually devoted to the discussion of American foreign policy interests.
The opening line of the article is striking. "The rapid growth of the Internet," Baird writes, "has led to a worldwide crisis of governance." On the surface, a serious problem has been identified. There is the promise of a fruitful discussion to follow. more
RIPE NCC and CENTR have released a statement today in response to the upcoming European Commission's Digital Services Act, urging policymakers to distinguish between the Internet's core infrastructure and operations. more
In response to ICANN's request for proposal (RFP) for the selection of new sponsored Top-Level Domains, Wendy Seltzer for the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) urges ICANN to move quickly beyond "testing" to more open addition of a full range of new gTLDs in the near future and offers some general principles to guide that expansion. more
I'm writing this column in November, and that means that it is time for the traveling circus known as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to come down to earth, unpack its tents and sell tickets for its annual song and dance routine. The script for this year's show has been changed, and after being excluded from the main arena last year at the Athens gig, the headline act of "Critical Internet Resources" is taking a starring role this year in Rio. Some folk are even saying that it is the single most contentious issue to be scheduled at this year's IGF show. So what are "Critical Internet Resources" anyway? If folks are going to spend all this time, energy and carbon emissions traveling to Rio to talk on this topic, then wouldn't it be helpful to understand what it means in the first place? There are probably a number of ways to answer this question, so in this heavily opinionated column I'd like to look at the range of possible answers to this question. more
Passwords are no longer sufficient to maintain an adequate level of security for business critical infrastructure and services. Two-factor authentication should be considered the minimum acceptable level of access control. There have been two types of security stories in the technology news over the last few months that should be of particular concern to system administrators and those responsible for maintaining business network infrastructure. more
The following provides and introduction to a study by Venugopalan Ramasubramanian and Emin Gun Sirer, called "Perils of Transitive Trust in the Domain Name System". The paper presents results from a large scale survey of DNS, illustrating how complex and subtle dependencies between names and nameservers lead to a highly insecure naming system... "It is well-known that nameservers in the Domain Name System are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. We recently performed a large scale survey to answer some basic questions about the legacy DNS." more
As the industry-wide paradigm shift to cloud computing and software-as-a-service gradually continues to make the transition from buzz to reality, security and availability continue to emerge as the main barriers to customer adoption. A recent ISACA survey of over 1,800 US IT professionals found that only 17 percent believe the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the risks. Only one in 10 respondents said they would consider using software-as-a-service (SaaS) for mission-critical applications. more
The claim that the *only* way that reliable wait listing can be done by *the* registry is not true. The registrars could, as a technical matter, if they chose to do so, "wrap" the registry with a new entity that mediates all acquisitions and releases. Whether this accords with ICANN's hyper intricate contractual scheme or with laws against restraint of trade, I don't know.
Personally I consider WLS to be contrary to the idea that a contract contains an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing - it seems to me that WLS violates that implied covenant - It is as if my doctor is selling contracts on parts of my body should I die while under his care. more
We all use the Internet daily. Practically every element of our reality has its equal in the virtual realm. Friends turn into social media contacts, retail establishments to e-commerce shops, and so on. We can't deny that the way the Internet was designed, to what it has become, differs much. One example that we'll tackle in this post is the seeming loss of connection between domains and their distinguishable owners. more
The ICANN Generic Names Supporting Organization has had tasting on its agenda since last fall, with a staff report issued in January, and a proposed anti-tasting policy written in March. On Thursday the 17th, the GNSO put the proposed policy to a vote, and it passed overwhelmingly. Under ICANN rules, the ICANN board has to take up the resolution at its next meeting, and since it was approved by a supermajority, it becomes ICANN policy unless 2/3 of the board votes against it, which in this case is unlikely. more
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