Verisign Dodges a Bullet, Gets to Keep .COM Pricing

According to a filing with the SEC, the Department of Commerce renewed the .COM agreement for six more years. The renewal was held up until the last minute (the old agreement expired yesterday) due to antitrust concerns, specifically about pricing. The main change in the new agreement is that Verisign is no longer allowed to increase the price above the existing $7.85... more

The ICANN Quilombo

Argentines use the word "quilombo" to describe "a real mess", which is what I feared was awaiting us at the outset of ICANN's meeting in Buenos Aires this week. Since then, ICANN President Fadi Chehade has done a good job cleaning-up the internal process quilombo he and the board created. But ICANN's leadership has left the ICANN community struggling to answer deep and ongoing questions about the future of the Internet and the multistakeholder model. more

Metrics of Major Standards Bodies

In a recent CircleID posting related to the ITU-T, the demise of that body over the years and the underlying causes were described. Among other questions, it raises the question of where has the industry technical collaborative activity gone. The short answer is just about everywhere else. This was exemplified by a recently compiled spreadsheet of some 200 different cloud forums prepared by the ITU-T's own cloud coordination group. more

ICANN 44 Prague: A Look at the Future

ICANN's 44th public meeting is about to start in a few days with a number of topics on the agenda. Some of them are new, while some of them are ongoing. First off, ICANN will be announcing the new CEO this Friday afternoon in Prague. Whoever it is will be coming to the organisation at a time when it faces a number of significant challenges. While the actual official meeting does not start until Monday morning there will be plenty of meetings on over the weekend as well... So what's on the "menu" for Prague? more

Call For Participation - ICANN 52 DNSSEC Workshop on 11 Feb 2015 In Singapore

If you will be at ICANN 52 in Singapore in February 2015 (or can get there) and work with DNSSEC or the DANE protocol, we are seeking proposals for talks to be featured as part of the 6-hour DNSSEC Workshop on Wednesday, February 11, 2015. The deadline to submit proposals is Wednesday, December 10, 2015... The full Call For Participation is published online and gives many examples of the kinds of talks we'd like to include. more

Enough With Blacklisting Online Pharmacies, Isn’t It Time to Consider White Lists?

Before I go back to the beginning, let me make clear that what follows are my personal observations vis-a-vis how National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) is managing the .Pharmacy Registry relative to personal experience as founder, President and CEO of Tralliance Corporation, the original manager of the .Travel Registry. My analysis may be a little long, but I promise that if you stay with me, you will be enlightened. more

We’re Asking the Wrong Questions

In my role as CMO of .CLUB I get to speak about domain names at different events all over the world, and have been doing so for more than two years now. From stages and podiums at countless events I have heard the same comments and questions again and again, and in all that time it seems that very little has changed when it comes to the perceptions of the new domain extensions, the so-called "new gTLDs"... more

The Economics of Hacking an Election

There have been many news stories of late about potential attacks on the American electoral system. Which attacks are actually serious? As always, the answer depends on economics. There are two assertions I'll make up front. First, the attacker -- any attacker -- is resource-limited. They may have vast resources, and in particular, they may have more resources than the defenders -- but they're still limited. Why? more

Accountability Group Charter Sets the Bar Too Low

In mid-August ICANN staff attempted to impose their own proposal for the process that will determine what overall new ICANN accountability measures should accompany the proposed IANA functions transition -- and thereby replace the restraining and corrective oversight role that the U.S. has played through periodic reevaluation of ICANN performance in conjunction with re-awarding of the IANA contract. In united reaction against that attempt, the ICANN community sent an unprecedented joint letter to CEO Fadi Chehade and the ICANN Board... more

Amazon Aerospace and Satellite Solutions: Integrating Satellites and Terrestrial Services

Since its founding, Amazon has reinvested profit in building infrastructure. They began with retail sales and distribution infrastructure and later added Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing data center and hosting infrastructure. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also established Blue Origin, a company to provide satellite launch service and eventually to support space travel. Last year Amazon filed an application for a 3,236-satellite constellation of low-earth orbit Internet service satellites - Project Kuiper. more

Dublin.tel Grabbed by Lantec

During the sunrise period for .eu domains there was quite a bit of controversy, as a number of high profile names were grabbed by companies that had no legitimate right to them. One of the domains that caught my attention at the time was dublin.eu (see Irish Times article). So what about the .tel sunrise?
Were companies like Lantec, who grabbed the dublin.eu domain, actively seeking high profile names this time round? more

Call the Routing Police!

There was a somewhat unfortunate outage for a major communications service provider in Australia, Optus, in mid-November. It appears that one of their peer Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) networks mistakenly advertised a very large route collection to the Optus BGP network, which caused the routers to malfunction in some manner. more

Why Aren’t We Fixing Route Leaks?

In case you missed it (you probably didn't), the Internet was hit with the Monday blues this week. As operator-focused lists and blogs identified, "at 17:47:05 UTC yesterday (6 November 2017), Level 3 (AS3356) began globally announcing thousands of BGP routes that had been learned from customers and peers and that were intended to stay internal to Level 3. By doing so, internet traffic to large eyeball networks like Comcast and Bell Canada, as well as major content providers like Netflix, was mistakenly sent through Level 3's misconfigured routers." more

GAC New gTLD No Fly Zone

I have struggled over the past couple of weeks to come up with a metaphor to succinctly describe the standoff between the ICANN Board and the ICANN Government Advisory Committee (GAC) over the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) implementation process. So here's my best attempt to explain these dynamics in terms a layperson may be better to understand. I chose the metaphor for its timeliness, without meaning to offend anyone. more

New Work in the Development and Management of EPP Extensions

On Dec. 12, 2013, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced the formation of a new working group, Extensible Provisioning Protocol Extensions (eppext). The working group was formed to create an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) registry of Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) extensions and to review specifications of extensions for inclusion in the registry. EPP is the standard domain name provisioning protocol for generic top-level domain (gTLD) name registries that operate under the auspices of ICANN. more