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ICANN has initiated arbitration (before the ICC's International Court of Arbitration) against VeriSign under the .net Registry Agreement, seeking declaratory judgments that many things VeriSign has done or attempted to do over the years (Sitefinder, ConsoliDate, IDN, WLS, and stemming the abusive actions of shell registrars when they destructively query the registry for secondary market purposes) violate that agreement. more
ICANN has announced today that it has tentatively agreed to settle a longstanding dispute with VeriSign Inc. The dispute which began in part from SiteFinder, a controversial search service VeriSign created in late 2003 for users who mistype Web addresses. The following is an excerpt from today's press release... more
A small but intriguing paragraph in the VeriSign settlement says that ICANN gets to maintain the root zone. I thought they did now, but I guess VRSN does, following advice from ICANN. This has two and a half effects. The most obvious is political -- if ICANN rather than VRSN is distributing the root zone, it removes the symbolic significance of VeriSign's A root server. The second is DNSSEC key management. Until now, the contents of the root zone have been pretty boring, a list of names and IP addresses of name servers. If DNSSEC is deployed in the root, which is not unlikely in the next few months, ICANN rather than VeriSign will hold the crypto keys used to sign the root zone. If a tug of war develops, whoever holds the keys wins, since without the keys, you can't publish a new version of the root with changed or added records unless you publish your own competing set of keys and can persuade people to use them. more
According to media sources, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) wrote to Verisign last Friday, objecting to the company's plan to auction o.com to the highest bidder. The planned release for o.com - described by the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement and intended as a pilot for the remaining reserved single-character .com names - involved an opaque consideration process that ignored community input and set aside hard-won trademark protections developed by stakeholders in order to maximize dollars earmarked for an unidentified cadre of non-profit organizations. more
I've always been a fan of co-ops. In New York, we shop at greenstar.coop and my wife banks at alternatives.coop, in the UK we shop at co-operative.coop. So when the .COOP domain opened, I wondered if I could get my own clever domain name, but found that chicken.coop was taken by a small producer co-op in the southern U.S. Drat. more
Dell filed a suit in Florida in early October against a nest of domain tasters in Miami, widely reported in the press last week... The primary defendant is a Miami resident named Juan Vasquez, doing business as several registrars called BelgiumDomains, CapitolDomains, and DomainDoorman, as well as a whole bunch of tiny companies of unknown authenticity... Those registrars have an egregious history of domain churning. I gave a talk on domain tasting at MAAWG in October in which I picked out the registrars who churned the most domains from the May registrar reports, and those three were the worst, each having registered about 500,000 domains, refunded over 10 million... more
Danish businessman Joacim Bruus-Jensen challenged the domain name www.joacimbruus-jensen.com in ICANN UDRP proceeding. He failed to prove enforceable trademark rights in his name and was denied relief in this decision by Panelist Derek Minus. Joacim Bruus-Jensen v. John Adamsen, Case No. D2004-0458 (WIPO Sept.29, 2004). The case should be considered before seeking to use the ICANN UDRP to take action based on the personal name of a business executive. more
Can we trust ICANN to conduct itself in a predictable, open, transparent, and accountable manner if it takes over governance of the Internet's domain name system from the U.S. government? That was the main question up for discussion Wednesday in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, as lawmakers heard feedback from a diverse group of stakeholders about the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) plan to relinquish its historical oversight of key technical Internet functions. more
Imagine a California non-profit corporation providing material assistance to a criminal wanting to do you physical and financial harm. Then, imagine that corporation is ICANN. Imagine no longer, because that is precisely what the ICANN Compliance department managed to pull off this week, in an all-too-common demonstration of the havoc they can cause by sheer ineptitude, without apology or concern. This is the situation which crossed my desk this week. more
Guilllaume Rischard setup a parody on verisign.com using the IDN spoofing trick. He managed to get one registrar to register verisign.com with a cyrillic S (U+0405) (ie xn--veriign-mog.com :-) This actually started in #joiito a couple of weeks ago after the Eric published the spoofing attack paper. A joke was made that it would be funny if someone did it to verisign.com and so he did. I suppose I could rant why VeriSign should adopt the JET Guideline (or ICANN Guidelines) but this parody would send a louder message. more
It's approximately 2 months to go before the grand application process for the new gTLDs begins, ICANN the international internet body made a revolutionary announcement in June that is going to change the entire internet namespace. With the current 21 gTLDs, the world is bracing for a surge of close to 500 new applications. Among the domains of my interest is the .Africa gTLD. more
In the last few years there have been many discussions on how the Internet is governed, and how it should be governed. The whole World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) ended talking about this problem. It caused exchange of letters between the US Secretary of State and the European Union presidency. And it caused a public discussion, organized by the US Department of Commerce on that issue. I saw some reflection of this discussion and here are some comments on that. My colleague Milton Mueller of the Syracuse University sent me an e-mail today in which, among other, it says, "A global email campaign by IGP generated comments from 32 countries... more
Over the course of the last week, ICANN has released several pieces of information that taken together begin to allow us to piece together the overall gTLD landscape. ICANN is releasing partial information, without explanation or context, in dribs and drabs, and rumors are flying that we won't get the "Reveal" until the ICANN meeting in Prague at the end of June. This partial information and delay from ICANN is creating consternation and confusion among the many applicants and those watching the new gTLD scene. more
The report of the Whois Working Group was published today. The Working Group could not achieve agreement on how to reconcile privacy and data protection rights with the interests of intellectual property holders and law enforcement agencies. So the Working Group Chair redefined the meaning of "agreement." See the full story at the Internet Governance Project site. more
At ICANN San Juan, I found out from Tina Dam, ICANN's IDN Program Director, that she was putting together a live IDN TLD test bed plan which includes translations of the string .test into eleven written languages (Arabic, Chinese-simplified, Chinese-traditional, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish) and ten scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, Tamil)... Two days ago, ICANN provided an update on this project... more
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