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In my last post I discussed some questions that remain about ICANN's generic Top-level Domain (gTLD) budget. Today I discuss the rights protections mechanisms as they currently appear. An economic study commissioned ICANN to analyze the new gTLD process recently concluded that "the biggest likely costs" of approving new gTLDs are "consumer confusion and trademark protection." more
Back in the mid 1990s, before ICANN was invented, a lot of people assumed that the way you would find stuff on the Internet would be through the Domain Name System. It wasn't a ridiculous idea at the time. The most popular way to look for stuff was through manually managed directories like Yahoo's, but they couldn't keep up with the rapidly growing World Wide Web. Search engines had been around since 1994, but they were either underpowered and missed a lot of stuff, or else produced a blizzard of marginally relevant results. more
Universal acceptance of top level domains hasn't really meant much to most Internet users up until now. As long as .COM was basically the default TLD, there wasn't much of an issue. No longer. With 263 delegated strings (according to ICANN's May 12, 2014 statistics) adding to the existing 22 gTLDs that were already live on the net after the 2004 round of Internet namespace expansion, the problem of universal acceptance gets very real. more
IPv6 deployment is in a chicken and egg situation. On the one hand, there is no willingness from ISPs and commodity DNS router manufacturers to include IPv6 support in their infrastructure or equipment because "there is no demand". On the other hand, there is no demand because the average Joe Blow could not care less if he accesses a web site under IPv4 or IPv6. It should just work. The equipment and infrastructure should adapt transparently... What we users can do is to stop waiting for the industry to get its act together and work around its limitations... more
A few weeks ago I came across an old interview of me by ITespresso.fr from 10 years back entitled "IPv6 frees human imagination". At the time, I was talking about the contributions IPv6 was expected to make and the challenges it had to face. After reading the article again, I realized that it has become a little dusty (plus a blurred photo of the interviewee :-)). But what caught my attention the most in the interview was my assertion: "If IPv6 does not prevail in 2006, it's a safe bet that it will happen in 2007". Wow! more
What's the difference between .local and .here? Or between .onion and .apple? All four of these labels are capable of being represented in the Internet's Domain Name System as a generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), but only two of these are in fact delegated names. The other two, .local and .onion not only don't exist in the delegated name space, but by virtue of a registration in the IANA's Special Use Domain Name registry, these names cannot exist in the conventional delegated domain name space. more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has postponed plans to change the cryptographic key -- a critical step in updating protection measures for the Domain Name System (DNS). more
A message on Dave Farber's Interesting People list complained that Comcast was blocking mail forwarded by DynDNS, a popular provider of DNS and related services for small-scale users... Actually, they're blocking it because a lot of it is spam. This is a problem that every mail forwarder and every mail system encounters; the only unusual thing here is that DynDNS is whining about it. It's yet another way that spammers have broken the mail for the rest of us. more
Social Science Research Network has published a paper examining "the large gaps and inconsistencies in current domain name law and policy" as compared with domain name use in the political context. The paper suggests that the current domain name policy is focused on protecting trademark uses of domain names against bad faith commercial 'cybersquatters' but does not deal with protecting use of domain names as part of the political process. more
NANOG 62 was held at Baltimore from the 6th to the 9th October. These are my observations on some of the presentations that occurred at this meeting. .. One of the more memorable sides in this presentation was a reference to "map" drawn by Charles Minard in 1869 describing the statistics relating to the Napoleonic military campaign in Russia, and the subsequent retreat. more
Ten years ago, I wrote an article that looked back on the developments within the Internet over the period from 1998 to 2008. Well, another ten years have gone by, and it's a good opportunity to take a little time once more to muse over what's new, what's old and what's been forgotten in another decade of the Internet's evolution... The evolutionary path of any technology can often take strange and unanticipated turns and twists. more
This is the second part of a multi-part series reported by ICANNfocus. This part discusses the congressional concerns regarding ICANN's governance of the Internet. "Since 1999 Congress has repeatedly expressed serious concerns regarding ICANN's governance of the internet. Congress has substantial responsibility for overseeing the key aspects of internet governance. Among its specific responsibilities, Congress has the duty to oversee implementation of the Department of Commerce's Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and contract with ICANN." more
The Metropolitan NY Chapter of the Internet Society continued its popular series of public events at the Jefferson Market library in Greenwich Village with a panel discussion on WHOIS policy, moderated by Danny Younger. This is a contentious issue, involving tradeoffs between privacy, anonymity, and accountability. more
Many in the technical community attribute the rapid growth and spread of the Internet to innovation that took place at the "edge" of the network, while its "core" was left largely application neutral to provide a universal and predictable building block for innovation. It is this core neutrality that provides a basis for the security and stability of the Internet as a whole. And it is this same core neutrality that is critical to the continued spread of the Internet across the Digital Divide. Unfortunately, when the politics of censorship rather than solely technical concerns drive the coordination of these "core" Internet resources, it threatens the future security and stability of the Internet. This paper proposes a paradigm upon which all the governments of the world have equal access to these core Internet resources to empower them and their citizens with the rights acknowledged in the WSIS Declaration of Principles. more
The new year is upon us and it's time for our annual look at CircleID's most popular posts of the past year and highlighting those that received the most attention. Congratulations to all the 2016 participants and best wishes to all in the new year. more
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