High-Speed Fiber Overtakes DSL as OECD Countries Add 21 Million Fixed Broadband Connections in the Pandemic Year

High-speed fiber Internet subscriptions surpassed copper-wire DSL connections across OECD countries for the first time in 2020 as the need to move work and home life activities online during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a record 21.15 million new fixed broadband connections (including fiber, DSL, cable, and others) in the year to end-December 2020. more

gTLDs: Why Are Your Overarching Issues Not Relevant In IDN ccTLDs?

"If I would have a voting right, I would vote like this" said Janis Karklins, chair of the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) as he empathically raised two arms in the air. He was showing his, and the GAC's, overwhelming support for the ICANN Board unanimously (barring one abstention) passing the resolution that ratified the IDN ccTLD Fast Track process, propelling it toward an imminent release. A standing ovation was given from a grateful and exuberant audience and everyone seemed pleased with this momentous decision. more

Urban Identity by City Top-Level Domains

This document is intended to be a starting point for a discussion on upcoming city Top-Level Domain Names (city TLDs) such as .berlin, .nyc, or .london. It reflects considerations about the impact of city TLDs on the city society, the individuals in the city, the regional and global environment, and the Internet at large. more

Court Approves Nortel’s Sale of IPv4 Addresses to Microsoft

Yesterday morning (26-April-2011), in US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Judge Kevin Gross signed an order authorizing Nortel's sale of IPv4 addresses to Microsoft. This is an important moment for the Internet community, as it represents the beginning of a new market-based mechanism for the distribution of scarce IPv4 address resources. As the various Regional Internet Registry (RIR) organizations exhaust their supply, traditional "needs-based" distribution will become impossible. more

Hope for Human Resources with .Jobs Domain

Yesterday, at the annual SHRM Conference in San Diego, the .jobs domain was formally unveiled to the public, and offered exclusively through ICANN authorized registrars. As a HR professional myself, I have conversed with many HR professionals who are often frustrated by the inability to provide an exact destination (i.e., a "jobs" page) that restricts the ability to communicate and otherwise effectively carry out the organizational strategy HR is charged with in our communication to the labor market... more

.PARIS : Can the Backend Registry Help Sales?

As published on June 24, 2025, it is with no surprise that the AFNIC was renewed as the backend registry provider of the .PARIS new generic Top-Level Domain. What caught my attention in the announcement was this paragraph: “Afnic’s remit will also be expanded to include communication and promotion of the .paris TLD, as well as the development of initiatives designed to increase its adoption by businesses and private individuals.” more

The BIG Impact: How Cloud Computing is Changing the Face of Small Business

While 86 percent of small businesses see the importance of the cloud, 70 percent aren't using cloud solutions. This data, from a Microsoft report for National Small Business Week and reported by Talkin' Cloud, yields a sobering conclusion: Small businesses understand the broad value of cloud computing, but aren't sure how to apply the technology on a case-by-case basis. more

Malware Detection Provider Gets Important Victory Allowing It to Flag Unwanted Driver Installer

Despite a recent Ninth Circuit decision denying immunity to malware detection software for targeting competitor's software, court holds that Section 230 protected Malwarebytes from liability for designating software driver program as potentially unwanted program. Plaintiff provided software that works in real-time in the background of the operating system to optimize processing and locate and install missing and outdated software drivers. more

What Became of the ARCOS Undersea Cable Connection to Cuba?

Cuba's primary connection to the global Internet is through the ALBA-1 undersea cable linking landing points on the south-east shore of the island to Venezuela and Jamaica; however, the bulk of Cuban traffic originates in Havana which is on the north-west coast. Traffic from Havana and other cities in the west travels over a backbone to reach the cable landing points. A landing point near Havana would reduce the load on the backbone... more

Received a Questionable Email From NABP? It May Be Illegal Spoofing

Has your organization recently received an email claiming to be from NABP's Internet Drug Outlet Identification Program (IDOI)? If so, it is possible that someone is trying to trick you. The NABP IDOI team's email account has recently been illegally "spoofed" by unaffiliated persons or organizations. Email spoofing involves the forgery of an email header so that the email appears to have originated from someone other than the actual source. more

DPI is Not a Four-Letter Word!

As founder and CTO of Ellacoya Networks, a pioneer in Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), and now having spent the last year at Arbor Networks, a pioneer in network-based security, I have witnessed first hand the evolution of DPI. It has evolved from a niche traffic management technology to an integrated service delivery platform. Once relegated to the dark corners of the central office, DPI has become the network element that enables subscriber opt-in for new services, transparency of traffic usage and quotas, fairness during peak busy hours and protection from denial of service attacks, all the while protecting and maintaining the privacy of broadband users. Yet, DPI still gets a bad rap... more

You Don’t Need to Hack Twitter.com to Control All Its Traffic and Email

A big security news event last night and today is that the Twitter.com Web site was hacked and content on the site replaced. TechCrunch reported it and it has been picked up globally. But - was the Twitter.com website really hacked? We now know it was not so. There are four ways that users typing in Twitter.com would have seen the Iranian Cyber Army page. more

Securing a Domain: SSL vs. DNSSEC

There has been quite a bit of talk lately about the best way to secure a domain, mainly centered in two camps: using Secure Socket Layer (SSL), or using DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). The answer is quite simple -- you should use both. The reason for this is that they solve different problems, using different methods, and operate over different data. more

A Responsible Domain Industry Needs a Responsible Registrant Appeals Process

As the steward of .ORG, Public Interest Registry is committed to serving as an "exemplary registry" for the DNS. As part of that mission, PIR published our Anti-Abuse Principles last year that serve as our north star to address questions of abuse. As PIR has stated on many occasions, generally speaking, the DNS is not the appropriate place to address questions of website content abuse because of the blunt tool we as a registry have and the collateral damage that can be caused by suspending a domain name for a piece of content. more

Why Do We Care About Names and Numbers?

An article based on the most recent study for the European Commission on the Policy Implications of Convergence in the Field of Naming, Numbering and Addressing written by Joe McNamee and Tiina Satuli of Political Intelligence.

"With relation to the Internet and also IP addresses, the "scarcity" is more complicated: there are not only intellectual property issues with regards to domain names, but there is also an issue of managing the integrity of the system. For any naming or numbering system to work, it is essential that the names and addresses used cannot be confused with any other -- in other words, no one system can have two end-points with the same fully qualified number or name..." more