An Attack on DNS is an Attack on the Internet

On Saturday Aug 7th, DNS provider DNS Made Easy was the target of a very large denial of service attack. As far as can be determined the total traffic volume exceeded 40 Gigabit/second, enough to saturate 1 million dialup Internet lines. Several of DNS Made Easy's upstream providers had saturated backbone links themselves. There are indications that not only DNS Made Easy suffered from this attack, but the Internet as a whole. more

Net Neutrality: A Net-Head View

Net neutrality is a complex issue with some strongly opposed views that at times sound more like religion than sensible argument, so this article is an attempt to provide some sense for those still not completely sure what it is all about. Be warned though, that this article is not an unbiased appraisal of the arguments, it is written from the perspective of a confirmed net-head. more

Accepting New Top-Level Domains As Suffix-Less Cyber Brands

First off all, still unknown to the masses, this newly proposed $185,000 USD generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) scheme is in reality a suffix-less, custom-made, designer, globally exclusive domain name. Well done ICANN, as it is what the world needs now. However, ICANN has never mentioned this special marketing feature to date, as this suffix-less quality alone brings a major and a very positive revolution in cyber branding architecture for the net savvy marketers and dramatically changes the global thinking which has been primarily locked into a suffix based mentality when trying to reach for anything on the net; what name and what suffix? more

New Paper Discusses Global City TLD’s in the Public Interest

"The Internet's impact on cities grows daily as it electronically enables the meeting, movement, and exchange of people, ideas, products, and cultures at a range and frequency never before possible, creating what Marshall McLuhan called the 'global village'." So begins a paper in which Dr. Michael Gurstein and I present a short review of the history of TLDs and the negative effects their omission from the Internet's naming schema is having on cities. We then identify 12 areas where city-TLDs will benefit Global Cities if planned and developed in the public interest. more

.MS: Alternate Root and Monoculture as Good Things

Why shouldn't there be a .gadi TLD? Why not one for Microsoft? This post is not about alternate roots or why they are bad, this post is about something else. We do need to go over some background (from my perspective) very quickly though. ICANN has a steel-fist control over what happens in the DNS realm. They decide what is allowed, and who gets money from it. Whether it's VeriSign for .com or any registrar for the domains they sell. They decide if .gadi should exist or not. ...What I am here to discuss is why Microsoft, as a non-arbitrary choice this time, indeed, of all the world, should kick it aside, creating an alternate root while at the same time not disturbing the world's DNS. more

EFF on Goodmail: Further Confusing an Already Confused Issue

Cindy's piece on the EFF website seems to be a bit of a pastiche, with elements taken out of various articles (some outright wrong, some merely misinformed) that have been doing the rounds of the media for quite a while now about Goodmail. She started off comparing AOL and Goodmail with the old email hoax about congress taxing email. That same line was used in a CircleID post by Matt Blumberg, CEO & Chairman of Returnpath... Various other quotes from different places - Richard Cox from Spamhaus on CNN for example. However a lot of the quotes in those articles are being based on wrong or out of context assumptions, starting with one that goes "AOL is going to remove all its existing whitelists and force people to use Goodmail". more

Abusive Anti-Anti-Spam Scheme a Dreadful Strategy

A new company called Blue Security purports to have an innovative approach to getting rid of spam. I don't think much of it. As I said to an Associated Press reporter: "It's the worst kind of vigilante approach," said John Levine, a board member with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "Deliberate attacks against people's Web sites are illegal." more

We Hate Spam Except, Of Course, When It’s Inconvenient to Do So

Paul Graham is a smart guy who popularized naive Bayesian spam filtering in 2002 with A Plan for Spam and has organized a series of informal spam conferences at MIT. Earlier this month he was shocked and horrified to discover that his web site, hosted at Yahoo where he used to work, had appeared on the widely used Spamhaus blacklist... more

Law Enforcement Agencies Will Have Authority on Registries and Registrars

Accessing Whois information and acting on a litigious domain name is becoming a nightmare for law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement agencies must have an access to the information provided by registrants in the Whois database and, in specific cases, have authority to act FAST on a domain name. The EU has a solution for this and it's coming in 2020. more

GDPR Didn’t Affect Spam? Not So Fast

I have recently become aware of a blog post from Recorded Future that attempts to analyze the effects of the GDPR on online security. Unfortunately, it starts by asking an irrelevant question and then goes on to use irrelevant metrics to come to a meaningless answer. The premise of Recorded Future's article - that spammers would send more spam and register more domains because GDPR came into effect - tells us nothing useful about how GDPR affects anything. It's the wrong question... more

How Big Is the Domain Business?

When you're standing close to ICANN, the domain business may seem pretty big, but when you stand farther away, not so much. Verisign's revenues are about $1 billion/year. The .COM and .NET top-level domains together have about 150M names. The next biggest gTLDS are .ORG with 25M and .INFO with 12M. The biggest new TLDs are TOP with 2.9M and .XYZ with 1.8M, with both bloated by firesale prices. The rest are smaller, mostly much smaller. more

Big Price Increases Needed to Keep New gTLDs Alive, Says Uniregistry CEO

"Uniregistry is to massively increase the price of some of its under-performing new gTLDs in an effort to keep them afloat," Kevin Murphy reporting in Domain Incite. more

So you want to apply for a new gTLD in the second Round of the ICANN new gTLD program?

New domain names are now on the market and you start to realize that you may have missed the train by not submitting your own new gTLD application. So why not get your part of the cake and consider applying for your own new Top-Level Domain in the second Round of the ICANN new gTLD program? Why not become a "Registry" and sell domain names... to the world? more

ICANN is MIA on .XYZ

By now anyone who's part of the domain investment or broader ICANN community is aware of the curious saga of the recently launched .XYZ registry. Soon after its young CEO boldly stated, "we hope to reach 1 million .XYZ registrations in the first year and 5 million registrations in the first three years", the registry launched with a remarkable total of nearly 18,000 registrations on its first day, a total that has quickly grown to more than 100,000. But it was soon noted that "the zone files showed that over 70% of all .XYZ registrations had been made at NetworkSolutions... more

The Two Sides of Net Neutrality

Over the last decade or so the telecoms industry has been at loggerheads with the content providers and distributors (OTT companies) regarding the use of the infrastructure by the OTT players. On one side we have the people arguing for net neutrality (leave the OTT players alone), and on the other we have the telcos wanting to charge certain players for using their network. The whole issue came to a head, when in mid April the FCC decided to allow telecom operators (or ISPs as they are called in the USA) to charge content providers for higher quality services. more