Rod Beckstrom announced today that he will be ending his work at the the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) by July of next year. Beckstrom, a former U.S. cybersecurity chief, was elected as the President and CEO of ICANN in Jun of 2009 following Paul Twomey who had been serving the position since March 2003. more
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief published by Verisign reports more than 5 million domain names were added to the Internet in the second quarter of 2011, bringing the total number of registered domain names to more than 215 million worldwide across all domains. The increase of 5.2 million domain names marks a growth rate of 2.5 percent over the first quarter. Registrations have grown by more than 16.9 million, or 8.6 percent, since the second quarter of 2010. more
For close to 15 years, when it comes to domain name management, I've personally touted two things: 1) the importance of using a single, secure, corporate domain name registrar and 2) the importance of having a fully-consolidated domain name portfolio for even the largest portfolios. And in many ways, this made sense back then. With a single, corporate-focused registrar, domain professionals were able to access and manage all domains from within a centralized repository. more
As opposition grows against the Government's controversial plan to censor the internet, the head of one of Australia's largest ISPs has labeled the Communications Minister the worst we've had in the past 15 years. Despite significant opposition from internet providers, consumers, engineers, network administrators and online rights activists, the Government is pressing ahead with its election promise of protecting people from unwanted material, this week calling for expressions of interests from ISPs keen to participate in live trials of the proposed internet filtering system. Michael Malone, head of iiNet, Australia's largest ISP, said he would sign up to be involved in the "ridiculous" trials, just to show how impractical it is. more
Big tech's ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications, says Tyler Cooper, a broadband policy watcher, and editor at BroadbandNow. more
As a former FCC senior staff member, the Commission's increasing disengagement in international telecommunication technology forums over the past two decades has been dismaying. One of the adverse effects of this obliviousness-by-design approach has been felt by American consumers in the massive, exponentially increasing volume of spoofed calling numbers and CallerIDs on communications from outside the United States. more
More than 50 major environmental groups have called on ICANN to protect the .ECO domain, representing a ground swell of public interest and support. Their letters are included with Big Room's community-priority .ECO application to ICANN... "This is one of the highest-level global mobilizations of the environmental community in history. Over 190 countries, more than 1,000 entities and over 10 million individual members are represented." more
In a significant move to advance IPv6 adoption, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has directed local router manufacturers to default to the IPv6 protocol from December 1, 2023 onwards. more
A recent report by Pingdom looks at the booming growth of Internet's DNS infrastructure. From the article: "Five years ago there were 123 DNS root server sites (the "backend" of DNS) spread out on the Internet. Today there are more than twice as many, over 300. Five years ago, 46 countries had root servers. Today, 76 have them. In other words, not only has the number of root servers grown tremendously, but their geographical spread has increased as well. This is good news for the overall stability and performance of DNS worldwide." more
Last October the FCC issued a Notice for Proposed Rulemaking that proposed expanding WiFi into the 6 GHz band of spectrum (5.925 to 7.125 GHz). WiFi has been a huge economic boon to the country, and the FCC recognizes that providing more free public spectrum is a vital piece of the spectrum puzzle. Entrepreneurs have found a myriad of inventive ways to use WiFi that go far beyond what carriers have provided with licensed spectrum. more
Ari Levy reporting in CNBC: Negari is the founder and CEO of XYZ.com, an Internet domain registry that owns alternative suffixes like .rent and .college. His 10-person company also owns .xyz. Abc.xyz is the web address for Google's new parent entity, Alphabet Inc. more
Based on the total number of transactions, Zscaler reports botnets as the biggest security risk on the Internet for the enterprises. "Once a host gets infected, the botnet usually spreads quickly within an enterprise. It also generates a significant amount of traffic to the command and control server, to download additional malware or perform other actions." more
Around 500M Africans, Indonesians, and Indians are regular Internet users without a landline. Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico add about 200M more. In total, something like 1B people were wireless-only at the end of Q3 2017. I'm comparing the number of Facebook users (over 250M in India) with the number of landlines (less than 20M in India) for a rough guess at how many are wireless only. In the developed world, 70-90% of all homes have a landline connection... more
The upcoming World Economic Forum (WEF), taking place 21-24 January, 2015 in Switzerland, is dubbed "The New Global Context". The theme aims at reflecting "the period of profound political, economic, social and technological change that the world has entered, which has the potential to end the era of economic integration and international partnership that began in 1989, says WEF's recent announcement." more
Much has already been written about the prospects and challenges associated with the introduction of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). This post were originally written for my personal blog but a good industry friend has persuaded me to post it (and more) on CircleID. During this series I will attempt to show how the introduction of new gTLDs is ultimately a "win win win" scenario. A win for innovation, a win for commerce and most importantly a win for internet users. So where to begin? more
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