The National Arbitration Forum today announced that a total of 1,770 cases were filed in its domain name dispute resolution program in 2008. The National Arbitration Forum, approved by ICANN, provides domain name dispute resolution services under policies like the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). Nearly all 1,770 cases filed (98%) in 2008 involved UDRP domain names, like .com and .org and the rest involved usDRP domain names with the .us extension, according to the announcement... more
"If at first you don't succeed, try and try again." A famous saying, that some within the ICANN world seem to think actually means: "if at first you don't get what you want, try and try again." The basic premise of the ICANN system is simple and fair: get all parties to work together, give everyone an equal voice, and act on whatever consensus emerges. ICANN insiders have coined this the "multi-stakeholder, bottom-up, policy development process". more
There are many blogs about new gTLDs. Some are interesting, others are not. Some are about domaining in which new gTLDs are included, some are from Law Firms and rather repetitive about the necessity to protect a brand in the Trademark Clearinghouse and how URS is the best (billable) mechanism to protect the brand; some are truly about domain names and remain must-read; very few are about new gTLDs only. more
"Sky completes roll out of IPv6 becoming the first major UK Internet provider to future-proof its service for customers," announced the company in a press release on Tuesday. more
The Intellectual Property Constituency's draft report on trademark issues is now available for comment. The draft report was put together behind closed doors, which would appear to go against the normal policy development process at ICANN, which is quite worrying. Its contents, however, are even more disturbing... more
According to ICANN’s latest budget predictions, new gTLD market will improve very slightly over the next year or so. more
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today announced that Plentyoffish Media Inc. has paid $48,000 as part of an undertaking for an alleged violation of Canada's anti-spam legislation. more
The year 2016 will go down in infamy for a number of reasons. It was the year an armed militia occupied an Oregon wildlife refuge, Britain voted to Brexit, an overarching event that will simply be referred to as The Election occurred, and Justin Bieber made reluctant beliebers out of all of us. 2016 was also the worst year on record for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by a margin that can only be considered massive. more
Today, anyone can use WHOIS to identify the organization or person who registered a gTLD domain name, along with their postal address, email address, and telephone number. Publishing this data has long been controversial, creating a system riddled with problems. On one hand, anonymous access to all WHOIS data enables misuse by spammers and criminals and raises concerns about personal privacy. On the other hand, incomplete or false WHOIS data prolongs Internet outages and leaves crime victims with little recourse. more
A paper published by the Naval War College titled, "China's Maxim - Leave No Access Point Unexploited: The Hidden Story of China Telecom's BGP Hijacking," accuses the Chinese government of manipulating BGP routing in order to intercept internet traffic. more
Equifax has blamed a flaw in the software running its online databases for the massive breach revealed last week that has allowed hackers to steal personal information of as many as 143 million customers. more
IPTV is on the horizon. Maybe I watch too much basketball, but the first thing I pictured was turning my flat screen into a big PC-like monitor with multiple windows showing several games, and perhaps even checking email and trying to do a bit work in another (admittedly much smaller) window. You could drag and drop, expand or shrink the games to whatever size you wanted just like you do on a PC with applications. Since the source video could come from different geographical regions in the country, you could catch the NCAA game they are showing in your local region while also watching another game from another region... For some, IPTV is a reality. But for the most part deployments are limited. more
On December 17th a US proposal for online commerce in a major trade negotiation, the Trade in Services Agreement ("TISA") leaked. A flurry of press releases and opinion pieces claim that TISA is a threat to the Internet. The headlines are lurid: "TISA leak: EU Data Protection and Net Neutrality Threatened" and "Leaked TISA text exposes US threat to privacy, civil rights"... Because I've spent years in Geneva regularly meeting with and advising negotiators on the networked economy I have a very different perspective. more
In doing a recent search, there it was: the first White House website archived at the U.S. Archives. It ended up changing the direction of markets and network development, if not world politics. How it came to be is known only to the few people involved. It is a great example of individual initiative, collective whimsy, serendipity, and unintended consequences... When Bill Clinton arrived at the White House on 20 January 1993, he brought with him a kind of rag-tag team who had helped him get there. more
Suppose for a moment that you are the victim of a wicked ISP that engages in disallowed "throttling" under a "neutral" regime for Internet access. You like to access streaming media from a particular "over the top" service provider. By coincidence, the performance of your favoured application drops at the same time your ISP launches a rival content service of its own. You then complain to the regulator, who investigates... It seems like an open-and-shut case of "throttling" resulting in a disallowed "neutrality violation". Or is it? more
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