ICANN

The Accountable Net: Who Should Be Accountable?

Two weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission held a summit on e-mail authentication in Washington, DC; the community of people who handle bulk mail came together and agreed on standards and processes that should help reduce the proliferation of spoofed mail and fraudulent offers. This was a big, collective step in the right direction. But e-mail sender authentication alone won't solve the Net's fraud and phishing problems - nor will any single thing. It requires a web of accountability among a broad range of players. Yet this week there's another meeting, in Cape Town, South Africa, that could make even more of a difference...but it probably won't. more

‘Internet Fragmentation’: A Defining Challenge for Digital Technology Governance?

At the recent Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 80 Policy Forum meeting, one notable takeaway was its close focus on questions around the stability and security of the technical layer of the Internet: the growing risks which assail it, and potential ways to address these through governance. more

Is NIST’s Recent Letter on o.com a Bureaucratic Coup d’Etat?

Verisign recently informed ICANN that it had received a letter from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, regarding the proposed auction of o.com described in the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement agreed to by ICANN and Verisign in March 2019. This letter, which doesn't appear to be on official letterhead, is from a NIST Grants Officer and purports to overturn a letter raising objections to the auction... more

The Next Internet Revolution Will Not Be in English

Imagine if, every time you wanted to visit a website, you were expected to type in letters from a foreign language, or worse, an entirely foreign script, such as Arabic, Cyrillic, or Chinese. For more than a billion people, this is how they experience the Internet today. The Internet was designed to be global, but it was not designed to be multilingual. For decades, this limitation was most evident in website and email addresses, which permitted only a small set of Latin characters. more

Last Decade in Spam

CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, has looked back at the notable events of the last decade in our industry. Each year/link in the post explodes to a discrete blog entry with a month-by-month break-out of notable events. more

Please, Keep the Core Neutral

Many in the technical community attribute the rapid growth and spread of the Internet to innovation that took place at the "edge" of the network, while its "core" was left largely application neutral to provide a universal and predictable building block for innovation. It is this core neutrality that provides a basis for the security and stability of the Internet as a whole. And it is this same core neutrality that is critical to the continued spread of the Internet across the Digital Divide. Unfortunately, when the politics of censorship rather than solely technical concerns drive the coordination of these "core" Internet resources, it threatens the future security and stability of the Internet. This paper proposes a paradigm upon which all the governments of the world have equal access to these core Internet resources to empower them and their citizens with the rights acknowledged in the WSIS Declaration of Principles. more

Help! This is Not an Emergency

I like the drift of the Pulver/Evslin proposal on emergency communications, and wish there was as vigorous a debate going on over here. I just hope we in the UK aren't jerked out of complacency by some major disaster -- although widespread use of pre-paid cellular means the problem of sunken landlines isn't as acute. Yet I can't help but wonder why the poor public has to wait for a disaster before they're given partial control over how their number maps to different destinations and services. Why can't I get a voicemail service from someone other than my connectivity provider? Why is ENUM hostage to the telcos, whose interest lies in ensuring that new services can only come from them? more

ICANN Delays Plans to Change DNS Cryptographic Key, Says Near 750 Million People at Risk if Rushed

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has postponed plans to change the cryptographic key -- a critical step in updating protection measures for the Domain Name System (DNS). more

California Frets about Goodmail Email

On Monday the 3rd, California state Senator Dean Flores held a hearing of the E-Commerce, Wireless Technology, and Consumer Driven Programming committee grandly titled AOL: You Have Certified Mail, Will Paid E-mail Lead to Separate, Unequal Systems or is it the Foolproof Answer to Spam?. The senator's office said they were very eager to have me there, to the extent they offered to fly me out from New York, so since I happened to be on the way home from ICANN in New Zealand that weekend, I took a detour through Sacramento. Sen. Florez conducted the hearing, with Sens. Escutia and Torlakson sitting in briefly. Unfortunately, Sen. Bowen, who is very well informed on these topics, wasn't there. There were five panels of speakers, and I got to lead off... more

Freenom Halts Domain Name Registrations After Meta Lawsuit

Freenom, the domain name registrar famous for offering free domain names, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. This action comes just days after the Dutch registrar was sued by social media giant Meta for allegedly ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites and monetizing the traffic to those domains. more

A Sustainable Framework For The Deployment Of New gTLDs

At the Fourth Annual Meeting of the ICANN Board in Amsterdam, the ICANN Board asked the DNSO Names Council (who have since become "the GNSO Council") to provide the Board with advice and input on the issues that surround the creation of new generic top-level domain names. Based on the Council's publicly documented conversations thus far, it is becoming clear that Council is moving in directions that do not seem to be consistent with the continued health of the namespace or development of a competitive market for registration and DNS services. more

WHOIS Users Facing Serious Challenges Caused by Post-GDPR Fragmentation

On May 25, 2018, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect, meaning that European data protection authorities (DPAs) can begin enforcing the regulation against non-compliant parties. In preparation, the ICANN Board passed a Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data - essentially a temporary policy amendment to its registrar and registry contracts to facilitate GDPR compliance while also preserving certain aspects of the WHOIS system of domain name registration data. more

ICANN’s Strong Rebuke to Verisign’s Chuck Gomes

Word to the wise: Fadi Chehadé's ICANN isn't going to take criticism lying down! In the past, the organisation has tended to react to criticism with a silence that was probably considered a way to avoid aggravating critics any further, but instead tended to infuriate people that were expecting answers. No longer. Since Chehadé came in as CEO, they get answers! more

ICANN Submits Seventh Annual Report

ICANN has just submitted its seventh status report under ICANN/US Government Memorandum of Understanding to United States Department of Commerce (DoC) titled: "Report by ICANN to United States Department of Commerce Re: Progress Toward Objectives of Memorandum of Understanding". The report provides a review of recent ICANN developments including... more

Domain Name Price Jump: Moore’s Law or Parkinson’s Laws?

As expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.) ...So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign's registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage... yet the cost is going up. How is this justified? more