100 Years of Monopoly Phone Service

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Kingsbury Commitment which effectively established AT&T, a.k.a. The Bell System, as a government sanctioned monopoly. It was on December 19, 1913 that AT&T agreed to an out-of-court settlement of a US Government's anti-trust challenge. In return for the government agreeing not to pursue its case, AT&T agreed to sell its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph company... more

Domain Holders Urged to Ensure Their Domains Are Ready for ‘DNS Flag Day’

Domain holders need to test their sites for 'DNS Flag Day' which will kick off on Friday, Feb. 1, 2019. more

2017, Year of Consolidation for Domain Name Market, AFNIC Study Suggests

AFNIC, the domain name registry for .rf (France), recently conducted a study of major trends for "Legacy gTLDs" or traditional TLDs such as .biz, .com, info, etc., as well as country code TLDs corresponding to territories such as .de (Germany), .fr (France), and .uk (United Kingdom). The new TLDs have note been included in this study since they are still something of a "new development", but will be included in the future, AFNIC says. more

An Anti-Competitive .com Fait Accompli?

In a recent article, Is ICANN Staff Misleading the Board Into Violating Obligations to the U.S. Government, I wrote: The referenced Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is the vehicle by which the U.S. government delegates to ICANN the responsibilities for overseeing the technical management of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS)... This is important for many reasons, and much remains to be analyzed for additional context that can help expose the rot at the Internet's root. more

Biden’s National Cybersecurity Strategy Suggests Increased Website Security, Customer Protection

Phishing attacks have been rising over the past couple of years. Reports show that there was a 345 percent increase in phishing attacks between 2020 and 2021. In 2022, the number of advanced phishing attacks rose by 356 percent. Behind these alarming numbers, however, is an even uglier picture of digital fraud: a difficult-to-quantify prevalence of fake or spoof websites. more

Forget TLDs, Keep Dot Suffix and Move On

I have been working on URL, Web address, ID's and Namespace since quite a long time and I have my reservations about the present set up being a complete network. generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), country codes (cc), .co are all complicating the network, add to that the problem of address shortage plus other problem mentioned in comments and blogs at CircleID. It's time for out of the box thinking. more

DNS Amplification Attacks: Out of Sight, Out of Mind? (Part 2)

This post follows an earlier post about DNS amplification attacks being observed around the world. DNS Amplification Attacks are occurring regularly and even though they aren't generating headlines targets have to deal with floods of traffic and ISP infrastructure is needlessly stressed -- load balancers fail, network links get saturated, and servers get overloaded. And far more intense attacks can be launched at any time. more

ICANN’s Governance Conundrum

After reading Steve Delbianco's recent CircleID article entitled The Tale of Two Governance Models I was torn. On one hand I agreed and supported Steve's comments about the strength of the bottom-up consensus driven model upon which ICANN was originally founded. As I am about to begin my thirty fifth ICANN regional meeting over the last eleven years, it is a model which I still believe in and fiercely fight to defend. However, on the other hand I look back over the last eleven years... more

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade is Misleading the US Senate, Says Sen. Cruz

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has released a statement today regarding a letter that Cruz, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) received from Fadi Chehade, CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Friday. more

Take That Down Right Now - and Give Me That Too

Google has released a government requests tool. It's highly illuminating and may end up being quite disruptive. That's what surprising data visualizations can do for us. ... The tool allows us to see the number of requests from different countries that Google received during the last six months of 2009. More than 3600 data requests from Brazil during those six months and more than 3500 from the US. But just 40 or so from Canada and 30 from Israel. more

Deja Vu All Over Again: Cables Cut in the Mediterranean

The end of the year is approaching which seems to be a harbinger of Internet disasters. Four years ago (on 24 Dec. 2004), TTNet significantly disrupted Internet traffic by leaking over 100,000 networks that were globally routed for about an hour. Two years ago (on 26 Dec. 2006), large earthquakes hit the Luzon Strait, south of Taiwan, severing several underwater cables and wreaking havoc on communications in the region. Last year there was a small delay. On 30 Jan. 2008, more underwater cables were severed in the Mediterranean, severely disrupting communications in the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. Calamity returned to its customary end-of-year schedule this year, when early today (19 Dec. 2008) several communications cables were severed, affecting traffic in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. more

Reasons Why You Should NOT Apply for a .BRAND New gTLD

There are two kinds of new domain name extensions: those dedicated to selling domain names through the network of accredited Registrars and those dedicated to a personnel use. I call these "dotBRANDs" or ".brand" new gTLDs since they are used - most of the time - by Trademarks for their own benefit. This article focuses on .BRAND new generic Top-Level Domains. In the ICANN vocabulary, these are "Registry Agreements with Specification 13". more

Crawford Likes Aussie Utility Network

Susan Crawford, special assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy and a member of the National Economic Council, is reported to be favorably inclined towards a U.S. network much like Australia's recently announced $33B broadband plan. Of course, the U.S. is some 15 times bigger than Australia, and that'd make the price tag closer to $500B by straight multiplication. But the U.S. would get a fiber network done right... more

Do Spammers Change Their Tactics Based on Recipient Verification? Yes, They Do

Or, to be more precise, it sure looks like they do. I wrote on another post on a publicly available spam tool, and I mentioned that I came across a page that allowed people to verify whether or not an email address is actually live. The question naturally arises: do spammers clean up their email contact lists based upon whether or not the address is legitimate? Spammers would have an incentive to do this... Do we actually observe spammers changing their sending patterns? I believe that we have evidence that they do. more

Let’s Talk About “Internet Responsibility”

We need to talk about Internet responsibility, and we need to talk about it now. By "Internet responsibility," I am not referring to some abstract subjective connotation of it, but rather to an attempt to identify objective criteria that could be used as a benchmark for determining responsibility. For the past 20 something years we all have been using the Internet in different ways and for different reasons; but, have we ever contemplated what our levels of responsibility are? more