ICANN

Universal Acceptance Issues with .TUBE, ASCII and IDN Domains

This open letter, penned by Rami Schwartz, the CEO of Latin American Telecom LLC, addresses Universal Acceptance issues related to the .TUBE top-level domain (TLD). Published to the ICANN Board, it highlights challenges faced in making .TUBE domains function correctly in popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. more

The .XXX Fiasco is Almost Over

At Friday's meeting of the ICANN board in Brussels, they voted, probably for the last time, to approve the 2004 application for the .XXX domain. Purely on the merits, there is of course no need for a top level domain for porn. This isn't about the merits, this is about whether ICANN follows its own rules. Despite overheated press reports, .XXX will not make porn any more available online than it already is (how could it?), there is no chance of all porn being forced into .XXX (that's a non-starter under US law), and .XXX will have no effect on the net other than perhaps being a place to put legal but socially marginal porn far away from any accidental visitors. more

The .DOCTOR Quarantine

ICANN should reconsider its decision to quarantine .DOCTOR, given that it's not even sick. In an utterly surprising move, ICANN staff and the Board's New gTLD Program Committee ("NGPC") recently informed the applicants for .DOCTOR that it has singled out the gTLD as a test case for controlling content and limiting speech on the Internet. In the epitome of top-down policy making, ICANN issued an edict that it will implement nearly year-old advice from the Government Advisory Committee ("GAC") differently from all other similarly situated gTLDs and in contravention of subsequent GAC advice. more

The Government of Niue Launches Proceedings With ICANN to Reclaim Its .nu Top-Level Domain

The Government of Niue, a small island 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, launched proceedings today demanding a "redelegation" of its country code top-level domain, .nu, from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). more

XXX Saga Continues

Sex and the internet. Put the two together and you are bound to find an interesting story. While the saga surrounding sex.com took a new twist in the last couple of days, with the current owners going dotbomb, the .xxx story also took an interesting turn... For several years ICM and ICANN tangoed. more

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

Four senators (Rockefeller, Bayh, Nelson, and Snowe) have recently introduced S.773, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. While there are some good parts to the bill, many of the substantive provisions are poorly thought out at best. The bill attempts to solve non-problems, and to assume that research results can be commanded into being by virtue of an act of Congress. Beyond that, there are parts of the bill whose purpose is mysterious, or whose content bears no relation to its title. more

Verisign Gets .COM Forever, But ICANN Gets a Lobbyist

A press release on the ICANN web site says that ICANN and Verisign have agreed to settle all pending lawsuits, and there’s a new .COM agreement, all tentative but if history is any guide, nothing short of DOC action is going to stop it. The good news is that VeriSign has agreed not to make unilateral changes like Sitefinder. They have to give prior notice to ICANN for any material change in the operation of the registry, and if ICANN has any concerns there’s a lengthy process full of expert panels and Consensus and the like to decide whether they can do it. more

Splitting the Root: It’s Too Late

One of the consistent chants we've always heard from ICANN is that there has to be a single DNS root, so everyone sees the same set of names on the net, a sentiment with which I agree. Unfortunately, I discovered at this week's ICANN meeting that due to ICANN's inaction, it's already too late. Among the topics that ICANN has been grinding away at is Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) that contain characters outside the traditional English ASCII character set. more

The Geo-Politics of ICANN vs ITU

Over the past couple of years I have had the opportunity to talk to US policy makers and have seen how ITU and ICANN have emerged as proxies for a much wider diplomatic dispute over who is going to control cyberspace. The Internet is now the engine of the new global economy. It is a communication infrastructure. Both have been correctly regarded as national security interests of the very highest level of priority. Some of the participants in the ICANN/ITU world are former participants in arms limitation circles. Their mode of thinking is illustrated by the frequent use of phrases such as 'why would we give up...'. more

NAF Panelists and Complainants Caught Systematically Copying/Pasting Nonsense Into UDRP Decisions

In a recent article at DomainNameWire.com, CitizenHawk was called out by a National Arbitration Forum (NAF) panelist for the submission of automated complaints which contained complete nonsense. Through the discussion in the comments to that article, the community discovered that the problem is far deeper. It turns out that UDRP panelists at NAF have been churning out boilerplate cut/paste decisions of their own, with utter nonsense of their own, and that this has been going on for years. more

ICANN and IAB Ask VeriSign to Suspend Site Finder

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has released an "Advisory" concerning VeriSign's deployment of DNS wildcard (Site Finder) service: "Since the deployment, ICANN has been monitoring community reaction, including analysis of the technical effects of the wildcard, and is carefully reviewing the terms of the .com and .net Registry Agreements. In response to widespread expressions of concern from the Internet community about the effects of the introduction of the wildcard..." more

Tiered (Variable) Pricing Compromise?

The new and proposed ICANN registry contracts contain no definite price terms, and thus permit potential tiered pricing on a per domain name basis. This has raised concern within the community that a registry operator might abuse its sole source position to engage in pricing practices detrimental to registrants. ...Notwithstanding the possibility of tiered pricing on a per domain name basis in connection with the recently executed sponsored registry contracts (.MOBI, .JOBS, .TRAVEL, .CAT, and .TEL), there have been numerous comments submitted in connection with this possibility in connection with the proposed contracts for the .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG registry contracts. There were four messages that motivate me to write this article... more

What the US Government Said About IANA in Singapore

Two weeks ago, the US government announced it would transition its role in the IANA functions to the global Internet community. It tasked ICANN with the job of arriving at a transition plan and noted that the current contract runs out in 18 months' time, 30 September 2015. This week, ICANN started that process at its meeting in Singapore. And on the ground were the two key US government officials behind the decision. more

Jurisdiction over Domain Names: Too Much Law Or Too Little?

In the prior issue of CircleID, I described registrations by John Zuccarini. Many of Zuccarini's registrations are typographic variations on well-known domain names, and Zuccarini typically redirects users to sexually-explicit content and pop-up advertisements. Despite scores of UDRP claims and ACPA suits, plus a major case brought by the Federal Trade Commission, Zuccarini's registrations remain in effect -- more than 5,000 strong, in my research. more

Microsoft, Facebook and Others Demand ICANN Take a Closer Look at Questionable Registrars

Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft and eBay are among a group of leading companies demanding ICANN to take a closer look at an "immediate and urgent matter" involving a subset of questionable domain name registrars. more