General Data Protection Regulation and the Future of WHOIS

Why does all of the discussion around potential options for WHOIS in the era of the EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) feel like déjà vu? Is it because issues around WHOIS never really go away, and become a hot topic every few years? Is it because no one is really happy with the current system? Privacy advocates would be delighted to do away with it altogether, while business and Intellectual Property professionals press for improvements to accuracy and availability, which I fully support. more

Wi-Fi Offload, Not Femtocells

Mobile operators face soaring data demand. The natural evolution of 2G/3G/4G infrastructure delivers about 2X additional capacity every 24 months. That's a major disconnect! (At least) two solutions are on the table, Femtocells and Wi-Fi offload. Both approaches solve the backhaul issue by using customer or 3rd party links (DSL, DOCSIS, T1/E1, WISP or otherwise)... As a solution for mobile data capacity, Wi-Fi wins, for many reasons. more

Universal Acceptance of All TLDs Now!

Universal acceptance of top level domains hasn't really meant much to most Internet users up until now. As long as .COM was basically the default TLD, there wasn't much of an issue. No longer. With 263 delegated strings (according to ICANN's May 12, 2014 statistics) adding to the existing 22 gTLDs that were already live on the net after the 2004 round of Internet namespace expansion, the problem of universal acceptance gets very real. more

The Term Web3 Has Been Seized by the Crypto Market: An Internet Governance Perspective

In late 2021, the term Web3 began to increasingly appear in mainstream media outlets. This does not refer, however, to a sudden increase in interest in the Semantic Web as defined by Tim Berners-Lee, but rather to something entirely different. Enthusiasts of cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) seized this term and changed its meaning to reflect a supposed new stage of the Web, running on top of blockchains and having decentralization as its core value. To summarize the narrative being spun, the first generation of the Web afforded independence to the owners of websites, but this did not extend to the average user... more

In Praise of OpenDNS and a Wii Factoid

If you are not already using OpenDNS on your home network I have one question for you. Why not? When it debuted, OpenDNS' main advantage was speed. It is a great deal faster than the DNS operated by most ISPs so, if you configure your border router/DHCP server to use OpenDNS name servers, the t'internet magically speeds up... On looking at the OpenDNS stats for my home network the other day, one item gave me cause to scratch my head a little. There was a non-trivial number of AAAA look-ups going on. In case you don't know (and I know you do), AAAA look-ups are IPv6 address look-ups... more

BT Confirms IPv6 Will Be Enabled on Their Network as Early as Fall

BT, United Kingdon's ISP, has confirmed IPv6 will finally be enabled on their network from this Autumn 2016 – but it will be early 2017 before all of their customers can use it, Mark Jackson reported today in ISPreview.co.uk. more

Six Key Issues About Operating a TLD Registry

Brand owners unfamiliar with the domain name system (DNS) are hearing that their first step in registering a top level domain (TLD) is to select a back-end TLD registry provider. The fear instilled in them is that if they don't act quickly, all available service providers will have reached their capacity. Given ICANN's tight and inflexible application submission schedule, brands don't want to be left at the starting gate. more

Denmark Encounters Largest Cyber Attack on Its Critical Infrastructure to Date

Denmark experienced its largest-ever cyberattack in May, targeting the nation's critical infrastructure. SektorCERT, the Danish cybersecurity authority, reported breaches in 22 companies within days. Many resorted to 'island mode,' isolating themselves from the internet to contain the threat. more

Google Received 65.9 Million Take Down Requests Last Month, Company Reports

As part of its transparency report, Google says Copyright removal requests continue to be on steady rise and that the company received a new record 65,923,523 requests just last month. more

ALAC on New Domain Registry Services

This is a preliminary input for the current policy-development process on "new registry services" that was prepared by ALAC members; Jonathan Weinberg has provided input and comments in response to earlier drafts. The ALAC is currently soliciting comments on this text. Comments can be submitted either to CircleID (see comment section), or to the ALAC's public comment address at [email protected]. ..."In the present document, we will focus on substantive criteria to be used by ICANN in evaluating requests to review proposed changes to the architecture or operation of a gTLD registry. We are, however, not stating any opinion about the kinds of requests that ICANN currently has the authority (or obligation) to consider." more

CIRA Suspends Participation in ICANN

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has issued a public letter to ICANN calling on the organization to follow accountable, transparent, and fair processes. Until the concerns are addressed, CIRA says it is suspending its voluntary contributions to ICANN... more

IPv6 “Ripeness”: The Hard Numbers on ISPs and Deployment Rates

As the unallocated IPv4 address pool runs out, are Internet Service Providers (ISPs) actually deploying IPv6? The graph, first in a series from RIPE Labs, looks at the IPv6 "ripeness" of all ISPs registered as RIPE NCC members. We created a rating system that gives ISPs up to four "stars" for IPv6 services that they provide, based on the following criteria... more

Online Registries: The DNS and Beyond

As the world grows more connected and more complicated, we all need ways of defining, identifying and keeping track of things and cross-referencing them with their owners. The simplest way to do that is with registries -- everything from the Domesday Book, a medieval registry of land, property and people; to current-day auto registries on the one hand and the worldwide Domain Name System on the other...But now, companies and organizations have to keep track of ever more things and people, not just inside their walls but across extended organizational boundaries. Call this new wrinkle an "external registry". Finally, they may want to interact with things and people, rather than just look them up, via an "active registry".  more

Facebook, Privacy, and the Loss of Trust

Facebook sure is getting beaten up recently. There's even a crowd-funded initiative to replace it with something open, called Diaspora -- everyone on Facebook is talking about it. Yet it wasn't even two full years ago that Facebook was the darling of the ditherati. For a while it seemed as if nearly everything Facebook did was hailed as the future of messaging, perhaps the future of the Internet - or maybe the Internet didn't matter anymore, except for Facebook. more

What ICANN’s Strong Stance on the UN’s Global Digital Compact Says About Current Internet Governance

On 21 August 2023, ICANN org. made its position in relation to the current state of the UN's Global Digital Compact (GDC) clear in a blog post by Sally Costerton (ICANN CEO), John Curran (ARIN), and Paul Wilson (APNIC), entitled "The Global Digital Compact: A Top-down Attempt to Minimize the Role of The Technical Community." The publication strongly criticizes the GDC's attempt at folding the technical community into the civil society umbrella under a "tripartite" approach also involving the private sector and governments, as proposed by the Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology, Amandeep Gill. more