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Good taste has never been a criterion in ICANN's new domains program, and domains including .fail and the remarkably vulgar .wtf have become part of the DNS with little comment. Now we have .sucks, which is intended to empower consumers, but does so in a way so clumsy that ICANN is asking regulators in the U.S. and Canada for an excuse to shut it down. more
Yesterday was the deadline for the submissions of responses to the .NET re-bid RFP. As of my last count, there are five companies that I am aware of that submitted proposals for the .NET rebid. Three of these were quite publicly announced, Afilias, Denic, and Verisign. The other two bidders are Multi-Stakeholder groups. Sentan and Core++. Sentan appears to be a Joint Venture between .jp and Neulevel, and Core++ is ISC, Telfonica, and .br, with participation from Core, Nida (.kr), and .zaDNA (.za). more
Until a few weeks ago, almost everyone in the Internet governance circus seemed to ignore the very existence of WSIS. After it popped up on international newspapers, however, things have been changing; and suddenly, I have started noticing plenty of negative reactions, on the lines of "we don't need WSIS, we don't need the UN, we don't need governments, we don't need internationalization - just go away from our network". However, I often find that these reactions are based on fundamental misunderstandings of the issues at stake; so please let me offer a different perspective. more
For more than a decade, aggressive website registrants have been engaged in 'typosquatting' -- the intentional registration of misspellings of popular website addresses. Uses for the diverted traffic have evolved over time, ranging from hosting sexually-explicit content to phishing. Several countermeasures have been implemented, including developing policies for resolving disputes. Despite these efforts, typosquatting remains rife. But just how prevalent is typosquatting today, and why is it so pervasive? (Co-authored by Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman) more
Earlier this year, ICANN began to seriously consider the various effects of adding DNS protocol features and new entries into the Root Zone. With the NTIA announcement that the Root Zone would be signed this year, a root scaling study team was formed to assess the scalability of the processes used to create and publish the Root Zone. Properly considered, this study should have lasted longer than the 120 days -- but the results suggest that scaling up the root zone is not without risk -- and these risks should be considered before "green-lighting" any significant changes to the root zone or its processes. I, for one, would be interested in any comments, observations, etc. (The caveats: This was, by most measures, a rush job. My spin: This is or should be a risk assessment tool.) Full report available here [PDF]. more
A recent study by researchers at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Super Computer Center (SDSC) revealed that a staggering 98% of the global Internet queries to one of the main root servers, at the heart of the Internet, were unnecessary. This analysis was conducted on data collected October 4, 2002 from the 'F' root server located in Palo Alto, California.
The findings of the study were originally presented to the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) on October 2002 and later discussed with Richard A. Clarke, chairman of the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and Special Advisor to the U.S. President for Cyber Space Security. more
A decade has passed since Jon Postel left our midst. It seems timely to look back beyond that decade and to look forward beyond a decade hence. It seems ironic that a man who took special joy in natural surroundings, who hiked the Muir Trail and spent precious time in the high Sierras was also deeply involved in that most artificial of enterprises, the Internet. more
ICANN confirmed today that Judge A. Howard Matz of the U.S. District Court, Central District of California has issued an order dismissing VeriSign, Inc.'s anti-trust claims against ICANN, with prejudice. In dismissing VeriSign's anti-trust claims, Judge Matz noted that VeriSign had failed in its first amended complaint to sufficiently allege an anti-trust claim. more
It is ICANN's responsibility to make sure domain names do not infringe on trademarks. To determine infringement, ICANN should rely in the short term on predictive models. Thus, domain name and trademark owners must start putting pressure on ICANN to assume its trademark responsibility. more
Some domains are too big to fail. Quite apart from the obvious ones like google.com and facebook.com, upon whose availability our everyday lives depends, there are many others upon which the infrastructure of the Internet (and much of the modern world itself) depends. These are domains like w3.org and ietf.org, which host the technical specifications which describe the World Wide Web and the Internet themselves. more
Most commentators on Vixie's astounding message have gotten sidetracked. People don't seem to see the most important feature of his statement: Vixie's endorsement of Open Root Server Network (ORSN) is based on explicitly political criteria. As ORSN says on its web site: "The U.S.A (under the current or any future administration) are theoretically and practically able to control "our" accesses to contents of the Internet and are also able to limit them. A manipulation of the Root zone could cause that the whole name space .DE is not attainable any more for the remaining world - outside from Germany." So ORSN sees this as a "backup"... more
As the ICANN's week-long meeting in Wellington, New Zealand is now fully underway, the approval of the proposed .XXX top-level domain (TLD) continues to remain a key topic of discussion and its eventual approval yet uncertain. The .XXX TLD was widely expected to receive its final approval at the ICANN's last meeting held in Vancouver about 4 months earlier but the discussion was unexpectedly delayed as the organization and governments requested more time to review the merits of setting up such a domain. Stuart Lawley, president of the would-be .XXX operator ICM Registry LLC offers his comments from Wellington. more
The ICANN Board and GAC will be having a meeting in Geneva next month to resolve outstanding issues in connection with the new gTLD implementation process. Unfortunately to date details of whether this meeting will be open or closed to observers has not yet been publicly addressed. As a strong advocate toward openness and transparency I have drafted the following text which calls for the meeting to be open to observers. more
I'm going to try something new here. I'm sitting here at the ICANN meeting on whois and I'll try to jot down some of my thoughts as they occur to me in reaction to what is being said:
- What is the "purpose" of whois? When a person acquires a domain name he/she has a decision to make: whether he/she will give the vendor/registrar his/her personal information? (If not, the person might have to forego getting the name, but that's his/her choice.) It seems that that is the context in which we need to evaluate the "purpose" of whois. In other words, the person relinquishes the information for the purpose of acquiring a domain name and not the broad panopoly of uses that have grown around whois. more
On April 24th the NETmundial "Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance" concluded with the issuance of an eight-page statement. This non-binding document falls short of the "Magna Carta for the Internet" called for in an opening statement delivered by Tim Berners Lee, but it does set the stage for the other two major 2014 events that will affect the course of Internet Governance (IG) - the IGF meeting in Istanbul, Turkey and the ITU meeting in Busan, Korea. more
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