DNS

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. more

WSIS Deal: Oversight

The UN Secretary-General has been invited to "convene a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue." Everyone can see his/her hearts' desires in the WSIS deal: ICANN can believe that it has survived for another day; governments can believe that they will have "an equal role and responsibility for international Internet governance"; and there will be an enormous meeting in Greece by the second quarter of 2006 to start the Internet Governance Forum going. more

NASA Teething Troubles Teach a DNSSEC Lesson

On January 18, 2012, Comcast customers found they could not access the NASA.gov website. Some users assumed that Comcast was deliberately blocking the website or that NASA, like Wikipedia and Reddit, was participating in the "blackout" protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) going on that day. As it turned out, the truth was much less exciting, but it offers important lessons about DNSSEC. more

Vint Cerf: 2009 a Turning Point for the Internet

Patrick Neighly reports on CommsDay about the Pacific Telecommunications Council 2009 Conference held last week where Vint Cerf was a keynote speaker. From the report: "Historians will view 2009 as a turning point in Internet history, according to Google internet evangelist Vint Cerf. Speaking to PTC'09 attendees, the legendary figure warned the industry to brace for 'significant change' and said Asia was poised to forever change the look and experience of the online landscape. The region boasts 578.5 million surfers with nearly 85% of its population still to come. That influx is likely to combine with the launch of non-Latin-character addresses to reshape the Web into a very different beast." more

NIST Publishes Guide for DNS-Based Email Security, Draft Open for Public Comments

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has invited comments on a draft practice guide to help organizations improve email security and defend against phishing, man-in-the-middle, and other types of email-based attacks. more

ICANN’s Accountability Mechanisms – in Name Only?

On December 14, 2021, Dot Hip Hop, LLC (DHH) filed an Urgent Reconsideration Request following ICANN staff inaction (for its over four-month delay) of its Assignment Request for the .hiphop Registry Agreement. Not only did the ICANN Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) decide against considering the Reconsideration Request on an urgent basis, but on its last day of business for 2021, ICANN Org decided to retaliate against DHH for filing the Reconsideration Request in the first place ... more

Is NIST’s Recent Letter on o.com a Bureaucratic Coup d’Etat?

Verisign recently informed ICANN that it had received a letter from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, regarding the proposed auction of o.com described in the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement agreed to by ICANN and Verisign in March 2019. This letter, which doesn't appear to be on official letterhead, is from a NIST Grants Officer and purports to overturn a letter raising objections to the auction... more

As WGIG forms, Ideas about Defining its Scope Circulate

The Internet Governance Project (IGP) issued a set of reports analyzing the current "state of play" in Internet governance. The reports were commissioned by the United Nations ICT Task Force as an input into the deliberations of the UN Secretary-General's Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). The report identifies the international organizations and agreements affecting the Internet, and points out where there are conflicts and gaps. more

Please, Keep the Core Neutral

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

Help! This is Not an Emergency

I like the drift of the Pulver/Evslin proposal on emergency communications, and wish there was as vigorous a debate going on over here. I just hope we in the UK aren't jerked out of complacency by some major disaster -- although widespread use of pre-paid cellular means the problem of sunken landlines isn't as acute. Yet I can't help but wonder why the poor public has to wait for a disaster before they're given partial control over how their number maps to different destinations and services. Why can't I get a voicemail service from someone other than my connectivity provider? Why is ENUM hostage to the telcos, whose interest lies in ensuring that new services can only come from them? more

ICANN Delays Plans to Change DNS Cryptographic Key, Says Near 750 Million People at Risk if Rushed

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

ISC Changes Name to Internet Systems Consortium

Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), formerly Internet Software Consortium, has changed its name to better reflect the new direction of the organization. The renamed company has expanded the mission of the original ISC to include more focus on Global DNS operations. In addition to developing and maintaining production quality Open Source software, such as BIND and DHCP, ISC will now enhance the stability of the global DNS through reliable F-root nameserver operations and ongoing operation of a DNS crisis coordination center, ISC's OARC for DNS; and further protocol development efforts, particularly in the areas of DNS evolution and facilitating the transition to IPv6. more

Study Shows German Internet Users Prefer Memorable Domain Names for Cities and Regions

The majority of private Internet users in Germany favour the increased usage of local domain endings as in .city or .region in the future because the more memorable names will help them to better find the information that they are looking for. That is the core result of a representative survey that was commissioned by eco Verband der deutschen Internetwirtschaft and conducted by the market research company eResult at the beginning of October. eco is the registered association of German Internet enterprises... more

Last Decade in Spam

CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, has looked back at the notable events of the last decade in our industry. Each year/link in the post explodes to a discrete blog entry with a month-by-month break-out of notable events. more

Study Finds $9.8B Opportunity In Universal Acceptance of All New Generic and Internationalized TLDs

Report from a new study by Analysys Mason, commissioned by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), says there is a potential USD $9.8 billion growth opportunity in online revenue through a routine update to Internet systems, including those for speakers of languages that do not use the English script. more