ICANN

Customer Service is Law: The Panix Story

The NANOG list yesterday was the virtual equivalent of a nearby nocturnal car alarm: "panix.com has been hijacked!" (whoo-WEE, whoo-WEE); "those jerks at VeriSign!" (duhhhhh-WHEEP, duhhhh-WHEEP); "no one's home at Melbourne IT!" (HANK, HANK, HANK, HANK). Finally, on Monday morning in Australia, the always-competent and helpful Bruce Tonkin calmly fixed the situation. So the rest of us can get some sleep now. But as we nod off in the quietness, let's consider just exactly what happened here.

Hijacking of Panix.com: A Call for An Emergency Rollback Procedure

There's a thread on NANOG to the effect that Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, had its domain name 'panix.com' hijacked from Dotster over to MelbourneIT and it has pretty well taken panix.com and its customers offline. Looks like this may be among the first high-profile unauthorized transfer under the new transfer policy. It begs the question, despite the existence of the dispute policy under the new system, what provisions should there be for a situation like this where every hour causes untold damage to the party in question...

Where Did the .ORG Money Go?

A friend pointed me to the latest Internet Society budget for 2005 :- ISOC is expecting PIR (ie, .ORG) to contribute 3.4M to the society! Wow, thats 2-3x as much as what Internet Society gets from its membership! I think that's pretty neat because ISOC has been in the red for many years and could certainly use some help financially. After all, it is hosting IETF and also paying for the IANA registry and RFC-Editors, all of which is critical to the Internet standardization process...

OMB Focuses On Cybersecurity

Ensuring federal cybersecurity is essential to protecting national security. According to some media reports, recommendations have been made to the Bush Administration to "create a distinct administrative cybersecurity position within the Homeland Security Department to oversee progress in the federal government and act as a liaison with private industry." However, before new bureaucracy is created, it is important to recognize the practical cybersecurity policies and projects that are already being undertaken by the Administration.

Reforming Whois

Now that we're into the New Year and deadline for public comment on the proposed new .CA whois policy nears and now that my term as a CIRA Director enters its home stretch, I wanted to take some time to elaborate further on my Unsanctioned Whois Concepts post from long ago and revise it somewhat.

Chinese IDN in the News

News.com published a well-research article on the Chinese Domain Names by Winston Chai: "This approach works fine in the English-savvy world. However, for non-English speakers, they could be faced with the unenviable task of rote-learning numerical IP addresses, which is highly improbable, or the English spellings of dozens of Web sites they want to access." Just a few points of interest...

Engineers on TLDs: Do You Want Me With Fries?

During ICANN's public forum in Cape Town, an interesting conflict accidentally came up, even if somewhat concealed by the usual exchange of well-known views on whether ICANN should finally allow the world to get more new Top Level Domains (TLDs) on a regular basis. I know I am oversimplifying thoughts and positions, but basically the discussion was between a couple of 30-year-old engineers from the floor asking to be given the opportunity to try new things, and a couple of 60-year-old engineers from the podium putting up any kind of unproven excuses...

Reaction to New Top Level Domains

ICANN's latest announcement of preliminary approval for two new top level domains (.mobi and .jobs) and it's recently ended meetings in Cape Town, South Africa, have sparked off renewed discussions for the introduction of new TLDs -- more specifically, the expansion of sponsored and generic top level domains (TLDs). The following is a collection of recent commentaries made by both technical and non-technical members of the community with regards to the expansion of the domain name space. To add your comments to this collection, please use the comment entry form at the bottom of the page...

Time for Reformation of the Internet

An anonymous writer posted an article titled Time for Reformation of the Internet on Susan Crawford's blog. The article calls for a liberal approach towards ICANN, making a number of references to IETF and its process. "It's time for netizens to come to a similar realization about their direct relationship with the empowerment offered by the internet. None of the core principles that produced the net give any set of clerics -- even the original engineers, or ISOC, much less ICANN -- the right to prevent innovation at the edge..."

Are We Attending the Right ICANN Meeting?

I have no idea who wrote that wonderful piece, Time for Reformation of the Internet, posted by Susan Crawford. (It wasn't me - I never use the word "netizen".) Elliot Noss of Tucows wrote a partial rebuttal, I must be attending the wrong ICANN meetings. Elliot's company, Tucows, has been a leader in registrar innovation and competition. And Tucows has constantly been among the most imaginative, progressive, responsible, and socially engaged companies engaged in these debates. ...But the points made by Time for Reformation of the Internet go far beyond registries and registrars.