A U.S.-led Task Force in ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) released version 3 of its "Whois Principles" in preparation for the ICANN meeting in Brazil, where it will be debated and finalized. European countries pushed back against U.S. Government efforts to stop ICANN from respecting privacy concerns in its handling of domain name registrant contact data... more
I admire Annalisa Roger. I know from my single email interaction with her that she means well. Nonetheless, dot Green apparently ranks below 330 in the list of operational new gTLDs with an apparent total of 117 domains, give or take a few. Why is this the case? It seems to me that dot Green is one the few new gTLDs that actually deserves support... The notion that most generic gTLDs [like dot Green] are already positioned to accommodate brand channel partners such as this or that 'brandchannel.green' is illusion. more
The offices of the .cat gTLD registry Fundació puntCAT were raided by the Spanish police this morning. The company reported the incident via a series of tweets as the raid was being carried out. more
According to IDC, smartphones outsold personal computers, laptops included in Q4 2010! Nokia just announced the demise of the Venerable Symbian in favour of Windows 7 phone and Microsoft's bing search engine! Tectonic shifts are under way to adapt to the rise of wireless broadband, an all IP world, and the growing weight of Apple and Google Android. It is also time to head once again for Barcelona with the Mobile World Congress starting on the 14th. Highlights this year? more
It's ironic and amusing that while a few well-connected opponents of the new gTLD program were testifying before the U.S. Senate committee, I was asked to help educate top executives of one of the largest global ad agencies and their major clients on the brand marketing and advertising implications of the program. It was clear from the start that virtually all these high-powered executives knew about the program they had learned from the eleventh hour negative campaign. more
Internet Archive contains a vast library of screenshots of websites that its Wayback Machine captures sporadically over the course of domain names' histories. While it doesn't compile daily images it opens a sufficient window to past use which is unique, invaluable, and free. (There are also subscription services, but they come at a hefty cost!). How it's used (and why the Wayback Machine should be in a party's toolkit) for supporting and opposing claims of cybersquatting is illuminated in a number of recent UDRP cases. more
From time to time the IETF seriously grapples with its role with respect to technology relating to users' privacy. Should the IETF publish standard specifications of technologies that facilitate third-party eavesdropping on communications or should it refrain from working on such technologies? Should the IETF take further steps and publish standard specifications of technologies that directly impede various forms of third party eavesdropping on communications? more
From time to time, a party can get out of control. Raucous celebration can become careless, even destructive. Combine a critical number of young people, a certain amount of beer and lots of music and damage often happens. Partygoers leave a mess behind them. The same thing happens to some IP addresses. Malicious actors use IP addresses properly registered to someone else. more
The canonical specification of the DNS that is normally cited are the pair of quite venerable RFCs, RFC 1034, "Domain names - concepts and facilities", and RFC 1035, "Domain names - implementation and specification", both published in November 1987. However, these two specification documents are just the tip of a rather large iceberg. One compendium of all the RFCs that touch upon the DNS lists some 292 RFCs. more
China has revealed plans to create a national data repository for information on cyberattacks and will require telecom firms, internet companies and domain name service providers to report threats to it. more
The banking industry is evaluating security benefits of using blockchain to send encrypted information. more
The ICANN Board met on September 24-25 2010 in Trondheim, Norway, to consider and act on the impediments still in the way of the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program. They passed a number of resolutions that provide very clear indications of how things are going. The short version is that the news is good for new gTLDs. ICANN is nailing down the final outstanding issues and the timetable is clearer than ever. more
Back in the 1990s as the Internet was starting to become visible to the world, several people had the bright idea of setting up their own top level domains and selling names in competition with what was then the monopoly registrar Network Solutions (NSI). For these new TLDs to be usable, either the TLD operators had to persuade people to use their root servers rather than the IANA servers, or else get their TLDs into the IANA root. Attempts to get people to use other roots never were very successful... more
Recently, a blogger whose website features posts and ads from domain speculators wondered what the cost of registering a .com domain name would be if somebody else ran the .com registry. But this blog post asks the more relevant question: "How much could businesses and consumers save if the benefit of .com price caps were passed along to consumers?" Now is a good time to focus on this question, since Verisign and the US Department of Commerce just amended their Cooperative Agreement to allow limited, regulated .com price increases. more
A "New IP" framework was proposed to the ITU last year. This framework envisages a resurgence of a network-centric view of communications architectures where network-managed control mechanisms moderate application behaviors. It's not the first time that we've seen proposals to rethink the underlying architecture of the Internet's technology (for example, there were the "Clean Slate" efforts in the US research community a decade or so ago) and it certainly won't be the last. more
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