More Privacy for Domain Registrants – Heightened Risk for Internet Users

A recent exchange on CircleID highlighted a critical need for data to inform the debate on the impact of ICANN's post-GDPR WHOIS policy that resulted in the redaction of domain name registrant contact data. A bit of background: in my original post, I made the point that domain name abuse had increased post-GDPR. A reader who works with a registrar (according to his bio) commented: "Can you back up that statement with data? Our abuse desk has actually seen a reduction in abuse complaints." more

Who Will Crack Cloud Application Access SLAs?

The broadband industry doesn't have an agreed-upon unit of supply and demand that meaningfully "adds up". This is rather odd for a service that aspires to be a utility. It is also a barrier to a much-needed transformation from "bit pipes" to "digital supply chain management". The chart here ought to be in every basic undergraduate textbook on packet networking and distributed computing. That it is absent says much about our technical maturity level as an industry. more

Ten Years of UDRP

In 1999, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) developed a policy to resolve disputes between trademark owners and registrants of domain names. This policy, the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) was made available for disputes concerning an alleged abusive registration of a domain name. In the past 10 years alone, more than 16,000 disputes have been filed resulting in more than 10,000 domain name transfers. more

Who Is Sending Email As Your Company?

You might expect that the IT department or security team knows who's sending email using your company's domains. But for a variety of reasons these groups are often unaware of many legitimate senders -- not to mention all the bad actors. Fortunately you can get a more complete view by using DMARC's reporting features. How does it happen? Product teams managing a new product launch or customer survey hire marketing consultants and Email Service Providers (ESP)... more

The ITU Busan Plenipotentiary

The ongoing ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan South Korea is the quadrennial gathering where its Nation State Members gather to elect new leadership of its four permanent secretariats and populate a few other of its assorted bodies. The next two weeks are spent in endless sessions where several regional blocs of Members still enamored with pre-liberalization telecom models complain about the new world of telecommunications that they did not invent -- while engaging in copious use of their new smart phones and online services. more

Bypassing Geo-Locked BYOD Applications

In the wake of increasingly lenient bring your own device (BYOD) policies within large corporations, there's been a growing emphasis upon restricting access to business applications (and data) to specific geographic locations. Over the last 18 months more than a dozen start-ups in North America alone have sprung up seeking to offer novel security solutions in this space - essentially looking to provide mechanisms for locking application usage to a specific location or distance from an office, and ensuring that key data or functionality becomes inaccessible outside these prescribed zones. more

Worming Our Way Out of Trouble

The Conficker worm will be active again on April 1st, according to an analysis of its most recent variant, Conficker.C, by the net security firm CA. This malicious piece of software, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, spreads among computers running most variants of the Windows operating system and turns them into nodes on a multi-million member ‘botnet’ of zombie computers that can be controlled remotely by the worm’s as yet unidentified authors. more

The Start of Something Big: ICANN Announces Planning for Round Two of New gTLDs

ICANN has published a short paper in advance of its 65th meeting in Marrakech which starts on 23 June 2019. Entitled, "ICANN Org's Readiness to Support Future Rounds of New gTLDs," it describes ICANN's working assumptions for "policy implementation and operational readiness for a subsequent round of new gTLDs". The document is necessary for ICANN to move forward with essential preparations for the next round. more

Who Cares About 50,000 .CAT’s?

This past May 19th, 5 years after its sunrise, puntCAT arrived at the 50,000 domain names landmark. We know that, nowadays, 50,000 domain names may hardly be described as shocking news, and, certainly, this is not our limit, and we believe there's still plenty of room for .cat to grow. Then, who and why should care about this number? more

GAC Empowerment in Post-Transition ICANN

On March 20th, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Op-ed writer L. Gordon Crovitz published an article titled "Stop Obama's Internet Giveaway". In his opinion piece Mr. Crovitz opposed any near-term transition of the IANA functions... In the course of his article Mr. Crovitz also stated, "Icann already has been kowtowing to authoritarian regimes," alluding to former CEO Fadi Chehade's December 2015 decision to become a Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee to China's World Internet Conference... more

Making Multi-Language Mail Work (Part 2)

In the previous instalment we looked at the software changes needed for mail servers to handle internationalized mail, generally abbreviated as EAI. When a message arrives, whether ASCII or EAI, mail servers generally drop it into a mailbox and let the user pick it up. The usual ways for mail programs to pick up mail are POP3 and IMAP4. more

The .Corp, .Home & .Mail Quandary

On 24 August, fifteen applicants for the .corp, .home, or .mail (CHM) new gTLDs sent a letter to the ICANN Board asking for action on the stalled process of the their applications. This points to the answer for the question I asked in march of this year: Whatever happened with namespace collision issues and the gTLD Round of 2012. As the letter from the applicants indicates, ICANN has done little to deal with issues concerned with namespace collisions in the last 2 years. Is it now time for action? more

Registrar Stakeholder Group in GNSO Works Against the ICANN Multistakeholder Social Compact

One of the essential features of the social compact that makes ICANN viable in its stewardship of the Domain Name system is that the operations of the Contracted Parties, i.e. Registrars and Registries, are governed by the cooperation of the contracted parties and the non-contracted parties, i.e. the stakeholders, in the creation of policy. In ICANN, contracts and other agreements are the method by which this policy is instantiated. more

UDRP and the ACPA Differences, Advantages and Their Inconveniences

The ACPA and the UDRP provide two separate and distinct methods for resolving domain name disputes. Both alternatives have many critics and proponents, but the true value of each will ultimately be determined by how well each combats cyber-squatting. Separately, the UDRP and the ACPA will probably work well to defuse most of the cyber-squatting that is currently invading the Internet. If combined together the UDRP and the ACPA can be a cost saving and effective way to prevent cybersquatting... more

Leading a Horse to Water

It is one thing to bring broadband internet to the masses, but how do we make them drink from the fountain of knowledge? One of the challenges, of course, is that the industry has not yet sold turn-key applications that capture the imaginations of the unconnected. Surprising as it seems, email, Facebook, file swapping and web surfing have not yet attracted 100% of the population. Are there some applications that might lend themselves to a toll-free model in order to reach the rest of the market? more