Measurement Results from World IPv6 Launch

As announced on RIPE Labs we monitored the behaviour of a number of networks that participated in the World IPv6 Launch on 6 June 2012. For that, we looked at the full list of participating organisations as shown on the ISOC website and chose 50 websites from that list. We looked at 'interesting' sites and at geographic distribution. We also tried to find a good mix of networks that had IPv6 switched on already and those that didn't have IPv6 deployed at the time they registered on the ISOC web site. more

Centralizing the Net, Monetizing DNS, Getting Trendy?

In a Red Herring Conference held last week in California, Mitch Ratcliffe's offers an analytical overview of an interview held with Stratton Scalovs, VerisSign's CEO..."He then goes on to say that we need to move the complexity back into the center of the Net! He says the edge can't be so complex. Get David Isenberg in here! Ross Mayfield, sitting in front of me, laughs out loud. I am dumbfounded. According to VeriSign, the Net should not be open to any type of application, only applications that rely on single providers of services, like VeriSign. This is troglodyte talk." more

The Last Domain Name You’ll Ever Register

We read with interest the 20 Sept., 2011 article in The Hollywood Reporter. This confirmed that there is a lot of misinformation about the expansion of the domain name space circulating. Sadly, a creative opportunity is being seen as a threat by the most creative of industries. The arrival of an open playing field for .ANYTHING is not a threat, it is unquestionably a long awaited opportunity and solution to the murky waters of the .COM namespace.
The opportunity is the restoration of trust and authenticity. Trust and reputations have been eroded by cybersquatting, phishing and fraud that are endemic to the current naming system. more

China’s New Law Could Severely Damper Domain Name Registrations

Trevor Little reporting in the World Trademark Review writes: "The Chinese government has announced that registries and registrars will have to meet a number of conditions and obtain the approval of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) before being allowed to engage in commercial and operational activities in China." more

Microsoft Disrupts the Zeus Infrastructure

Over the weekend and this morning, Microsoft, working in conjunction with others, issued civil lawsuits to sinkhole numerous domains associated with the Zeus botnet. When I say "botnet", I use the term loosely because Zeus is not a botnet in the sense that Rustock or Waledac is (or was). Rather, Zeus is a tool kit that online criminals can buy that lets them create phishing pages, perform fast fluxing, host drive-by downloads in addition to spamming. It's more like infrastructure than a botnet, although it does have a large botnet under its control. more

Cable Trounces the Telcos

Yesterday, Netflix posted graphs of how well various ISPs deal with Netflix video streams. The results are striking. All the cable companies easily beat all the phone companies with the exception of Verizon where we're seeing a mix of DSL and FiOS results. more

BMW Goes After BMW.cat

In one of the first (if not the first) UDRP cases for .cat, the auto giant BMW appears to have filed a WIPO case over the BMW.cat domain name. Other prospective new TLD operators have tried to suggest in ICANN meetings that these new TLDs do not cause problems with cybersquatting or defensive registrations... Obviously, given the above WIPO case, that statement is false. more

ICANN Meeting: The Road to Wellington

What would it take for this upcoming meeting to be a success? I am a big believer in ICANN's core principles, and in the forum it provides for private self-governance of domain names and numbers. I think the ICANN model continues to have great potential as a form of governance. For this meeting to be a success for me, personally, I'd like to see those core principles made more visibly operational -- or at least see a start made on this effort. I'm putting a stake in the ground with these posts, and we'll see whether progress happens or not. more

Cryptographic Tools for Non-Existence in the Domain Name System: NSEC and NSEC3

In my previous post, I described the first broad scale deployment of cryptography in the DNS, known as the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). I described how a name server can enable a requester to validate the correctness of a "positive" response to a query -- when a queried domain name exists -- by adding a digital signature to the DNS response returned. more

IoT in Africa: Urgent Regulation Required

Globally, people are connecting more and more "things" to the Internet. Devices that were traditionally offline or dumb like refrigerators, cars, watches, home cameras, air condition, door locks, agriculture monitoring devices, etcetera, are now being connected to the Internet. This is referred to as the "Internet of Things" (IoT). Using sensors, IoT devices collect data of some sort, which is then most likely shared over a network connection to a service provider, where some analysis is performed on the data. more

Panels Rule No Confusion Exists Between Singular and Plural New gTLD Strings

If early International Centre for Dispute Resolution decisions are anything to go by, as far as dispute resolution panellists are concerned, singular and plural versions of the same string do not risk causing user confusion. Tasked with handling string confusion objections under the new gTLD program, the ICDR has just rejected an objection by Google against Donuts' application for .CARS. Google has applied for .CAR. more

10 Years Since the Internet Was Changed Forever

On Saturday, you were probably enjoying a quiet morning, sipping your coffee as you consumed headlines about news from New York to New Delhi. The headlines related to Internet business were probably much different than what you would have seen 10 years ago. Then, there were just 20 million domain names in use, ten percent of what is now our domain universe. But ten years ago, many of us in the industry weren't enjoying an easy morning with our coffee; we were harried from a sleepless night of poring over hundreds of pages that would constitute the first new Top-Level Domain (TLD) bids submitted to ICANN, ever. more

Adopting IDN to Reach New Untapped Markets

An IDN is a domain name which uses a particular encoding and format to allow a wider range of scripts to represent domain names such as Gujarati, Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari and many more scripts. In simple words, a domain name with non-English characters will be called an Internationalized Domain Name. Humans have a variety of languages and alphabets that are familiar to them, and domain names do too. IDN unlocks an increased familiarity and affinity for humans. more

ICANN: The Stakes in Registrar Accreditation

Law enforcement demands to domain name registrars were a recurring theme of the 42d ICANN public meeting, concluded last week in Dakar. The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) took every opportunity at its public meetings with GNSO and Board, and in its Communique to express dismay, disappointment, and demands for urgent action to "reduce the risk of criminal abuse of the domain name system." more

Google Finds Nothing is Shovel Ready, Not Even for Free Fiber Build

Google is deploying fiber at its own expense in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri to demonstrate the value of one gigabit (a gigabit is a billion bits -- a lot) per second residential Internet connections and perhaps to show at&t and Verizon and the cable companies how the search giant might fight back if its growth is restricted by their restrictions or limitations. ... Whoops. Google just learned the same lesson that President Obama learned in Stimulus 1 more