ICANN

ICANN / Featured Blogs

ICANN and DOC Announce New Three-Year Agreement

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the United States Department of Commerce (DoC) today announced that they agreed to extend their joint Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for three additional years until September 30, 2006.

ALAC Statement on Site Finder

The ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee would like to bring to ICANN's attention concerns about VeriSign's surprising roll-out of the "SiteFinder" service for .com and .net. This practice raises grave technical concerns, as it de facto removes error diagnostics from the DNS protocol, and replaces them by an error handling method that is tailored for HTTP, which is just one of the many Internet protocols that make use of the DNS.

Petition Against Site Finder

We Internet users, who either own domain names or have an interest in the domain name system, wish to object to the VeriSign's Site Finder system. We believe that the system: 1) Breaks technical standards, by rewriting the expected error codes to instead point to VeriSign's pay-per-click web directory, and threatens the security and stability of the Internet; 2) Breaks technical standards affecting email services, and other Internet systems...

Brad Templeton in Response to Site Finder Controversy

A harmful, highly unilateral and capricious action. Tons of software out there depended on the ability to tell the difference between a domain name which exists and does not. They use that to give a meaningful, locally defined error to the user, or to identify if an E-mail address will work or not before sending the mail. Many used it as a way to tag spam (which came from domains that did not exist). It is the local software that best knows how to deal with the error.

Warning: The .EU Domain Registration

While the registration policies and accreditation of registrars are yet to be finalized for the newly announced .eu TLD, the following email may find its way to your inbox, if not yet already: "We are now accepting registrations for .eu domain names. You can check on our site to see if your ideal domain has been taken yet..."

Report on Reaction to Zuccarini’s Arrest

On September 3, 2003, United States federal law enforcement officers arrested the notorious John Zuccarini accused of allegedly creating misleading domain names to deceive children and direct them to pornographic websites. Zuccarini's arrest is the first to be made under the Truth in Domain Names Act, which took effect earlier this year prohibiting people from creating misleading domain names as a means to deceive children into viewing content that's harmful to minors, or tricking adults into clicking on obscene websites. What follows is a collection of commentaries made by experts in response to this event...

ICANN Can’t Take Care of Everything

Bruce Young tells a story of an Internet user who gets into trouble because "his" domain name was registered in the name of a web hosting provider that went bankrupt later on...As far as registrars are concerned, ICANN is currently doing its homework on domain name portability. As far as web hosting companies are concerned, though, these suggestions only look appealing at first sight. Upon closer inspection, they wouldn't be good policy...

A Voting System for Internet by Domain Name Owners - Part II

This is the second part of a 2-part series article describing a method for voting among owners of domain names. To read the first part of this article click here.

After a ballot closes, each registrar will send the summary results to at least two vote counting entities. These organizations will tally summary results obtained from each registrar. The totals of the summary results will be cross-checked against totals from the other vote counting entities.

A Voting System for Internet by Domain Name Owners - Part I

This is the first part of a 2-part series article describing a method for voting among owners of domain names.

The primary intended use for this is to allow identifiable participants in the domain name system to vote on matters that affect the whole domain name system in an easy (and easily-verifiable) fashion. The method for voting is specifying a string in the whois data for a domain name.

Al’s Story: Another Small Domain Holder Falls Victim to Flawed ICANN Policy

Al Bode is typical of the many small, individual domain name holders throughout the United States and the world. He is a high school teacher of the Spanish language, not a techie, and he registered the domain IOWAWLA.ORG to provide an online presence for the Iowa World Language Association, a professional association for foreign-language educators in the US State of Iowa, of which he is a member. This domain could in no way be considered a commercial venture. In his own words, "I am a school teacher from Iowa whose websites are personally funded for the express purpose of education. There is no profit motive or even profit other than the knowledge that others may gain from my website."