Internet Governance

ICANN May Not Be Perfect, But It Is Working

Though I have been critical of some of ICANN's shortcomings, I remain a strong supporter of ICANN's role as a private sector-led, multi-stakeholder global regulator for the Internet's core addressing systems. My recent blog post about my concerns with the communications processes relating to the addition of the first Arabic script IDN ccTLDs has been quoted in an ITU Staff Paper prepared for the ITU Council Working Group on the World Summit on the Information Society, to be held in Geneva tomorrow. This document seems to suggest... more

ICANN Reloaded - Will They Ever Learn?

Less than a week ago, I posted a short blog piece entitled "Can ICANN Please Stop Shooting Itself in the Foot?" in which I questioned ICANN's actions in connection with the recently announced key signing ceremony. At the end of this piece I asked the question: "While it seems that ICANN continues it propensity to shoot itself in the foot, does the community need to start worrying about when ICANN takes aim at other more vital organizational body parts?" Well it looks like I only had to wait five days to get the answer to that question. more

Cyber Threats Yes, But Is It Cyber War?

Last night Intelligence Squared and Neustar conducted a fascinating, Oxford style debate on whether the threat of cyber war has been exaggerated. A packed house at the Newseum in Washington, DC heard four cyber heavyweights go toe-to-toe verbally both for and against the proposition that the threat has been exaggerated. more

Can ICANN Please Stop Shooting Itself in the Foot?

One would think with an annual budget in excess of 60 million dollars a year and a staff of upwards of 140 (including consultants), that someone would have figured out how to prevent the organization from repeatedly shooting itself in the foot. Unfortunately not even a year of star-fish management oversight by the likes of Rod Beckstrom seems to have done the trick. Exhibit One, earlier this week on CircleID we learned about the first Root Zone DNSSEC KSK Ceremony on Wednesday 2010-06-16 in Culpeper, VA, USA. Of course given the significance of this event one would reasonably assume that ICANN might mention this somewhere on the main page of their website? more

For ICANN, a New Path Toward an Old Goal

The DNS White Paper has stood the test of time remarkably well. More than a decade after it was published, its principles of stability, competition, and private-sector-led DNS management remain the gold standard for DNS governance. ICANN is struggling to achieve that standard, however, and a dramatic change in direction may need to be considered. more

Registrar Abacus America is in Corporate Delinquency

KnujOn has retrieved a document indicating that the ICANN-Accredited Registrar Abacus America is in Corporate Delinquency in the state of Kansas. Kansas defines a company as Delinquent if "The business entity has not filed its annual report and fee by the due date." ... This incident is significant because Abacus America was cited by LegitScript and KnujOn for sponsoring an unlicensed pharmacy selling Schedule 3 substances... more

What Digital Divide on IP Addresses?

I took an instant dislike to The Digital Divide on IP Addresses post for some reason, well for many reasons actually. First and foremost is that the implication that the "digital divide" is somehow caused by IP address allocation policies. While it is certainly true that there are "digital divides" between developed and developing parts of the world, the historical imbalance in IP addressing is not one of them. The fact is that while we will "run out" of IPv4 addresses at some point in the not too distant future, there are an unimaginably large number of IPv6 addresses available. more

The Digital Divide on IP Addresses

This growth is clearly unsustainable within the IPv4 address space. Not every country can have these utilization levels. The hunger for new addresses is greatest in China (currently at 1 IPv4 address per 4 inhabitants) and India (1 address per 53 inhabitants). To put these at the modest level of 1 address per inhabitant requires more than 2.2 billion addresses, where there are currently only 290 million left... Given these numbers and the overall strong growth, any hopes of being able to reuse space that is allocated but not used (i.e. pre-CIDR) are futile. This demand dwarfs the entire US allocation. more

Regulating and Not Regulating the Internet

There is increasingly heated rhetoric in DC over whether or not the government should begin to "regulate the internet." Such language is neither accurate nor new. This language implies that the government does not currently involve itself in governing the internet -- an implication which is clearly untrue given a myriad of laws like CFAA, ECPA, DMCA, and CALEA (not to mention existing regulation of consumer phone lines used for dialup and "special access" lines used for high speed interconnection). more

Hello, Australia: Please Vote These Guys Out

So I heard about this ridiculous news the other day that now Australian customs officers have been given new powers to search incoming travelers' laptops and mobile phones for pornography, according to The Age. Really? Come on. Really? First the Internet filtering, a la porn wall, and now this? more

Scene Behind the Screen of IDN ccTLDs

Fundamental & imperative story behind this enablement of a meaningful string as IDN ccTLD name script in local language is very interesting. Previously there was a limitation of two letters as abbreviation for the IDN ccTLD name script and it is I, who proposed and convinced ICANN to remove this limitations that enabled all countries and territories of the world (who use non-Latin base script of their official language) to apply for a meaningful abbreviation or full name of the country as IDN ccTLD. more

The Sad State of WHOIS, and Why Criminals Love It

I'm not even sure how to begin this post, but let me tell you -- my head explodes when I try to contact WHOIS "contacts" about criminal activity - FAIL. I think ICANN wants to do the right thing here, and has stated on multiple occasions that inaccurate WHOIS data is reason for registrar termination. That's a Good Thing... more

The Real Issue About ICANN and .XXX

Way back in 2004, ICANN invited applications for a round of new TLDs. They got quite a few. Some were uncontroversial, such as .JOBS for the HR industry. Some were uncontroversial but took a long time, such as .POST which took five years of negotiation, entirely due to the legal peculiarities of the registry being part of the UN. But one was really controversial, .XXX. By 2005, the applicant, ICM registry, had satisfied all the criteria that ICANN set out in the 2004 round to get .XXX approved, and ICANN has been stalling them ever since... more

ICANN Documentary Information Disclosure Policy Request

Listed below is correspondence that I have submitted to ICANN's general counsel in connection with the organization's stated documentary information disclosure policy. more

Take That Down Right Now - and Give Me That Too

Google has released a government requests tool. It's highly illuminating and may end up being quite disruptive. That's what surprising data visualizations can do for us. ... The tool allows us to see the number of requests from different countries that Google received during the last six months of 2009. More than 3600 data requests from Brazil during those six months and more than 3500 from the US. But just 40 or so from Canada and 30 from Israel. more