Russia’s Cyrillic IDN ccTLD Blasts Off, Through the 500K Mark in Under a Week

Since last Thursday's launch of Russia's Cyrillic script IDN ccTLD, registration volumes have smashed all expectations, much like a Soyuz rocket blasting off into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. At the time of writing (14:00 17/11/2010 UTC), .??, which is Cyrillic for RF (short for ?????????? ????????? - Russian Federation) has just exceeded 500,000 registrations, having passed the 100,000 mark in the first three hours. It is already among the top 30 ccTLDs worldwide and heading towards the top 20 at high speed. more

Carlton and Kende’s Narrow Understanding of Corporate Domain Registrations

Professor Denis Carlton was asked by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to submit a report on (or justify!) the impact of new top-level domains (TLDs) on industry competition. After he did so, Dr. Michael Kende posted an elaborate comment on the report on behalf of AT&T, to which Professor Carlton published a rebuttal. This essay outlines some of the errors in Professor Carlton's rebuttal and Dr. Kende's comments. more

5G Leadership Reality Check: January 2020

As we embark on a new year and decade, it seemed worthwhile to take a peek at the principal forums for global 5G industry technical collaboration and do a quick assessment of what is occurring and who are the "leaders." The leadership dimension is especially relevant in Washington these days – which is suffering from a peculiar 5G dementia. As the year ended, there were no less than 35 current 5G related Congressional legislative actions, several of which actually passed one of the chambers. more

ARIN Recognizes Interop for Returning IPv4 Address Space

ARIN today recognizes Interop, an organization with a long-standing presence in the Internet industry, for returning its unneeded Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address space. Interop was originally allocated a /8 before ARIN's existence and the availability of smaller-sized address blocks. The organization recently realized it was only using a small portion of its address block and that returning the remainder to ARIN would be for the greater good of the Internet community. more

Digital Sovereignty and Internet Standards

There have been a number of occasions when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has made a principled decision upholding users' expectations of privacy in their use of IETF-standardised technologies. (Either that, or they were applying their own somewhat liberal collective bias to the technologies they were working on!) The first major such incident that I can recall is the IETF's response to the US CALEA measures. more

Zero Rating: Something Is Better Than Nothing! Or Is It?

One of the primary purposes of global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is to introduce a wide range of topics to newcomers and provide them with the opportunity to take back what they have learned in the hopes of establishing an understanding of the Internet Governance philosophy at the community or national level. As a first time participant at the 10th Global Internet Governance Forum (IGF 2015) that took place in Joao Pessoa Brazil, in early November of 2015, I felt the burden of being a representative from a developing country, a place where discussion of important issues is limited to a small group of individuals, often in informal settings, over coffee or in my case, green tea. more

Google Announces Major Data Center Expansions, Finland Investment Tops $1 Billion USD

Jason Verge reporting in Data Center Knowledge: "Google's data center spending and investment continues to soar. The Internet giant announced a EUR450 million (which is about 608 million U.S. dollars) expansion at its Hamina data center in Finland. This comes in addition to an already announced EUR350 million (or about 473 million U.S. dollars) investment. Worldwide, the company recorded a whopping $2.29 billion (in U.S. dollars) in capital expenditures in the third quarter of 2013 alone, driven primarily by massive expansion projects." more

Malware and Search Warrant

A recent decision from a federal district court addresses an issue I hadn't seen before: whether searching malware on the suspect's computer was outside the scope of the search warrant issued for that computer. It seems a narrow issue, and unfortunately the opinion issued in the case doesn't tell us a whole lot about what happened; but I thought the issue was worth writing about, if only to note that it arose. more

Advantages of Crowdinvesting in Financing New gTLDs

The second-round new gTLD applicants have a tool they don't even know about: "crowdinvesting." That's when a venture sidesteps banks and venture capitalists and instead raises money by selling shares directly to the public. Usually this is done over the Internet, and often enough the investors can hope for a financial return that's far better than what banks and stocks offer. more

Russia Restricts U.S. Fiscal Sovereignty Using an ITU Treaty?

It seems outlandish. However, as incredible as it may seem - especially in these times of sequestration and dire Federal budget cuts - the U.S. has potentially fallen prey to a ploy hatched by Russia and allies artfully carried out at a 2010 ITU treaty conference to relinquish the nation's sovereign right to choose its own ITU membership contributions. Here is how it happened and what can be done about it. more

ICANN Turning 20 - Your Thoughts?

As most you might know, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The organization was officially incorporated as a California non-profit corporation on September 30, 1998. ICANN plans to mark its 20th anniversary during ICANN63 in Barcelona, 20-25 October 2018. In response to a request from the organization, leading up to ICANN63, CircleID will host a series of blogs written by community members... more

What if France Had Applied for a .WINE New gTLD?

Would the French Government or any other French Private company -- such as a French Vineyard -- had applied to the .WINE Top-Level Domain, one could wonder what would the situation be today. Well... the situation would be the exact same -- the applicant would be in front of three other .WINE applicants with this exact same question: how do I win the auction? more

Google Applies for New TLDs Including .google, .docs, .youtube, .lol

In a blog post today, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, has revealed various new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) which the company has submitted applications to ICANN for. Vint Cerf writes: "Given this [TLD] expansion process, we decided to submit applications for new TLDs, which generally fall into four categories..." more

HTTPS Interceptions Are Much More Frequent Than Previously Thought

I have written about the problems with the "little green lock" shown by browsers to indicate a web page (or site) is secure. In that article, I consider the problem of freely available certificates, and a hole in the way browsers load pages. In March of 2017, another paper was published documenting another problem with the "green lock" paradigm - the impact of HTTPS interception. more

Filtering Spam at the Transport Level

An interesting new paper from the Naval Postgraduate School describes what appears to be an interesting new twist on spam filtering, looking at the characteristics of the TCP session through which the mail is delivered. They observe that bots typically live on cable or DSL connections with slow congested upstreams. ... This paper tries to see whether it would be practical to use that info to manage spam in real time. more