Will ICANN Drop Its Biggest Revolutionary New Idea? Five Reasons

ICANN, the Internet Authority is up against the wall, and here are the top five reasons for which it may simply drop its greatest revolutionary idea of offering a brand new type of a designer domain name to fit the next generation of widely expanded Internet and cyber realities of tomorrow. This new proposed platform will surely revolutionize the marketing and branding for big and small businesses around the world, offering highly affordable tools for global reach than ever before but the strong opposition would like to kill this idea. more

Exploring the Various Options of Private gTLD Auctions

Now that ICANN's Last Resort Auctions are becoming an imminent reality, more and more applicants with gTLDs in contention are coming to the conclusion that they would be better off in a private auction. As a result, there is a renewed discussion of the various approaches that have been proposed. Interesting new suggestions have also been made within the gTLD applicant community. more

A Politically Incorrect Guide to IPv6

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've doubtless seen reports that the supply of IPv4 addresses is running out. Earlier this month IANA, the master allocation authority, handed out the last so-called /8, a large chunk of 16 million addresses, to one of the regional address registries... Then what? The conventional wisdom is that everyone needs to support IPv6, a mostly compatible upgrade to IPv4 with much larger addresses, by the time the v4 space runs out. But I'm not so sure, particularly for e-mail. more

Is FttH Future-Proof Infrastructure?

Telecoms engineers from all of the major telecoms services and equipment companies around the world agree that FttH is the only future-proof telecommunications technology. So who should we trust - the technology experts or politicians with different agendas? If there had been a division of opinion among these experts it would have been necessary to investigate it; but if they are all in agreement it is safe to follow their advice. more

Charting the Balance between Trademark Owners and Domain Name Holders: A Jurisprudential Overview

Efforts to combat cybersquatting began in earnest in 1998 when the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) (at the request of the United States Government supported by all member states) began an extensive process of international consultations "to address cross-border trademark-abusive domain name registrations." ... The extensive process concluded in the Spring of 1999 with WIPO publishing a detailed report... more

Important Changes in the Proposed Final New gTLD Applicant Guidebook

The new guidebook represents an enormous step forward for the new Top-Level Domain program for a number of key reasons. As we have commented previously, the naming convention as the 'Final' guidebook is of significant importance and reinforces the ICANN Board's intention to get to the finish line with the program. Of equal importance however, is that the number of changes from the previous version of the guidebook is relatively small and focus on a few key issues which shows that the end is indeed near. more

China Clamps Down on VPNs, Carriers Told to Block Access by Feb. 1

State-run telecommunications firms in China are given until February 1 to block people from using VPNs, shuttering key ways both locals and foreigners still manage to access the global, unfiltered web on a daily basis. more

Driving DNSSEC: The Need for Integration of All the Functions Needed

DNSSEC continues to gain momentum as network operators and domain owners watch and learn from early adopters. The learning process is made easier by efforts such as the ongoing work conducted by researchers at Sandia labs to methodically identify and categorize the kinds of problems that are occurring. more

Greylisting Still Works - Part I

Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. more

Why OIRA Needs to Coordinate Federal Cyber Security Regulation

Two quick facts about American industry's resilience against cyber-attack, (1) our critical infrastructure is inadequately protected and (2) federal regulation will be required to fix the problem, reliance on market forces alone will not be sufficient irrespective of whether or not Sony Pictures survives. Although regulation is needed, it needs to be coordinated and, above all, cost-effective. Which agency is charge of regulating cybersecurity? Right now, it's a free for all with agencies staking out turf and claims of authority. more

Does Your House Need a Tail?

Thus far, the debate over broadband deployment has generally been between those who believe that private telecom incumbents should be in charge of planning, financing and building next-generation broadband infrastructure, and those who advocate a larger role for government in the deployment of broadband infrastructure... Tim Wu and Derek Slater have a great new paper out that approaches the problem from a different perspective: that broadband deployments could be planned and financed not by government or private industry, but by consumers themselves. more

.xom, BrandJacking and Error-Search

BusinessWeek is running a column called 'Brandjacking' on the Web. In summary, nobody likes deliberate cybersquatting or typosquatting. But if Typo domain-names did not exist, the traffic would continue to flow to Microsoft or Google via the browser's error search where those very large companies would make money in the same manner as the 'evil cybersquatters'... more

EU Authorities to Give Internet Companies 1 Hour to Take Down Extremist Content or Face Hefty Fines

European authorities proposed new laws today subjecting internet companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook to big fines if the extremist content is not taken down within one hour. more

ISPs to Enforce Copyright Law

A group of major ISPs and major content providers have agreed on a a mechanism to enforce copyright laws in the network. While full details have not yet been released, the basic scheme involves using previously designed IP flags to denote public domain content. That is, given general copyright principles, it is on average a shorter code path and hence more efficient to set the flag on exempt material. more

DOHA and ZIPPO Make Forty Five

Forty five what? Forty five abandoned top-level domains. On November 7, ICANN received a notice from the Communication Regulatory Authority of the State of Qatar that they are terminating the registration agreement for .DOHA. Two weeks before that, the Zadco company terminated .ZIPPO. In addition to the $180,000 application fee, applicants had to hire consultants, make arrangements with back-end operators, go through the certification process to get their TLD online. more