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The Domain Industry in 2025: Infrastructure Consolidation, Regulatory Milestones, and the AI Pivot

The domain industry in 2025 saw rapid consolidation, rising regulatory pressure, and a strategic pivot toward AI, trust infrastructure, and tokenization, reshaping domains from static web addresses into dynamic assets for digital identity and commerce. more

EFF to FCC: ‘Restoring Internet Freedom’ Plan Riddled With Technical Errors and Factual Inaccuracies

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a post today pointing out that the FCC continues to ignore the technical parts of a letter sent to it earlier this year by nearly 200 Internet engineers and computer scientists. more

Calling Africa: ICANN’s New Approach to Africa Is a Welcome and Significant Opportunity

The announcement last month of a new approach by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to Africa is welcome, and significant for a number of reasons. Africa must participate in ICANN's activities to help shape its policies, and benefit from the domain name industry (estimated at $2 billion in 2008), where it lags behind other regions, given the few African registrars, and that there are no generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) registries that are African. more

US Senate to Hold Hearing on Consumer Data Privacy Issues

U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, announced today that it will convene a hearing titled, "Policy Principles for a Federal Data Privacy Framework in the United States." more

Internet Groups Inaugurate First of Three Cyber Security Facilities

ICANN and internet exchange firm Packet Clearing House (PCH) have joined forces with Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) to launch the first of three facilities designed to boost the adoption of Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) among country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs). The three new facilities, located in Singapore; Zurich, Switzerland (still under construction) and San Jose, California, provide cryptographic security using the recently deployed DNSSEC protocol. more

Cisco’s Kevin Shatzkamer Discusses the Future of Mobile Video

Kevin Shatzkamer, Chief Architect for Cisco Mobility, speaks to the mobile research Cisco has developed in helping Mobile Service Providers reach their ROI goals and objectives in projecting an increasingly demand driven market. ... There has been speculation for years that increased demand for mobile video would tax and possibly crash current networks and infrastructures of mobile operators. A predictor may be The World Cup games held in South Africa. more

The Race to Bury Net Neutrality

The Internet is currently full of news articles describing how the FCC will soon be putting to bed the last vestiges of its order a few years ago to eliminate net neutrality rules. The order that is widely being called the net neutrality ruling was a far-reaching change at the FCC that essentially wrote the FCC out of any role in regulating broadband. more

Domain Name Brand-Sharing Starts With Embracing Web 2.0

Irrespective of which solution to the current domain name brand-sharing impasse ends up being adopted by brand owners (option 1, option 2, or a combination), the owners must first understand and embrace current trends in online communications, information gathering, and entertainment. Thus, for a solution to succeed the corporate mindset toward new technologies needs to change; after that brand owners can work cooperatively with the domain name industry (owners and institutions) to increase the aggregate pie. more

ICANN Releases Paper on Domain Name Security

Today ICANN releases a paper with the title "DNSSEC @ ICANN - Signing the root zone: A way forward toward operational readiness". The paper explains in more detail than earlier documents what ICANN view on signing of the root zone is. I think the key points mentioned in this paper are true, and in general, I think this document is a good read. It is not long, and summarizes what I would call the current view is. more

USC: Solving the Digital Divide?

Like many in the UK communications industry my colleagues and I at Entanet have been eagerly awaiting the Digital Britain report. Darren Farnden, Entanet's Head of Marketing, has posted an interesting assessment of key parts of the report at opinion.enta.net. Given the content of Darren's article I thought it would be useful to post it in full here for CircleID readers... more

‘Registration Blocks’ Provide Protection

When the ICM Registry initially launched .XXX last year, the notion of a 'registration block' was a fairly novel idea. Essentially, the ICM Registry allowed companies who were not part of the "global adult entertainment industry", to seek permanent removal of names matching their trademarks from the general pool of names available for registration for a low-cost fee. Many saw this move by the ICM Registry as a genuine attempt to protect the rights of brand owners, while others saw it as yet another mechanism for generating revenue from rights owners under the guise of a "Sunrise Period." more

The Worm and the Wiretap

According to recent news reports, the administration wants new laws to require that all communications systems contain "back doors" in their cryptosystems, ways for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to be able to read messages even though they're encrypted. By chance, there have also been articles on the Stuxnet computer worm, a very sophisticated piece of malware that many people are attributing to an arm of some government. The latter story shows why cryptographic back doors, known generically as "key escrow", are a bad idea. more

Internet of Things Requires a Rethink of Business Models

There certainly is a lot of interest in machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT). But what we are seeing is only what is happening on the surface. Most of the M2M activities are taking place unnoticed. For example, most newly produced electronic devices are now all M2M enabled. Over 100 million smart meters have already been deployed by the electricity industry, with literally hundreds of millions of them in the pipeline. Healthcare is another key industry. more

Google, China, and the Future of Freedom on the Global Internet

Maybe it's because I was schooled in political science, not computer science. But frankly I've been surprised by the extent to which some respected commentators have focused on trashing Google for lacking purity of motive. As if that were some kind of brilliant revelation. Of course Google's actions are motivated by self-interest. Self-interest is a complicated thing, and isn't only financial... But let's be honest with ourselves. How many people on the planet do anything for 100% selfless reasons? If having a free, open and just society depends on purity of motive, God help us all. more

French NIC Warns Against Slamming

Everyone knows there are many frauds linked to the growth of domain names. According to AFNIC (the French NIC), there has been a significant increase in the number of cases of slamming since the beginning of this year. ...To fight against these practices, AFNIC issued a guide where it describes different categories of slamming... more