Do Trade Names Qualify as Trade Marks for Purposes of the UDRP?

Naming is the first imperative. It precedes the launching of new lives as much as it does new businesses. Names secure a presence, and for businesses in the marketplace names can grow into trademarks, if they function like one. Are we not sometimes made aware that not all names are equally distinctive, and that some of them are distinctly commonplace? more

GoDaddy Laying Off 8% of Its Workforce Amid Uncertain Macroeconomic Environment

GoDaddy has announced a plan to reduce its global team size by 8%. The move will affect multiple levels in the company, as well as its three brands -- Media Temple, Main Street Hub, and 123 Reg. more

Unintended Benefits of Trump’s Twitter Tantrum

Four years ago, progressive intergovernmental organizations like the European Union became increasingly concerned about the proliferation of hate speech on social media. They adopted legal mechanisms for removing Twitter accounts like Donald Trump's. The provisions were directed at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In June of 2016, a "deconstruction" of these mechanisms was presented to one of the principal global industry standards bodies with a proposal to develop new protocols to rapidly remove such accounts. more

Global Patterns in IPv4 Allocation Statistics

In January 2007 we highlighted that the IPv4 allocation rate had increased significantly since early 2004. By 2006 it was clear that continued growth would see IPv4 exhaustion occur sometime between 2010 and 2015. In October 2010 we revisited the subject in the CircleID articled 'Graph Shows Decline of IPv4 Almost Linear'. ... Now, in January 2011, we are very close to the exhaustion of the IANA pool of IPv4 address space. more

BT and Ofcom

About 16 months ago, I heard Ed Richards of Ofcom speak at a CITI conference at Columbia, and blogged about it here. I remember thinking that Richards didn't seem to think that highspeed access to the internet was all that important. The market had to demand it, and the market wasn't being demanding. Also, he wasn't interested in government intervention to support highspeed access... more

Hyper-Volumetric DDoS Attack Sets New Benchmark at 22.2 Tbps

A record-shattering DDoS attack peaking at 22.2 Tbps signals a new era of cyber aggression, driven by weaponized IoT botnets and raising urgent questions about global internet resilience. more

Rodney Joffe Wins a Well-Deserved Mary Litynski Award

Every year M3AAWG gives an award for lifetime work in fighting abuse and making the Internet a better place. Yesterday at its Dublin meeting they awarded it to Rodney Joffe, who has been quietly working for over 20 years. I can't imagine anyone who deserves it more. more

Bulk Sunrise Period for Special Collision List Starts Next Week

The first 12 domain registries have been scheduled for the first special Sunrise Period mandated by ICANN for trademarks on the blocked collision lists. A total of 328 new domain extensions have launched so far in 2014. Each one of these has its own unique collision list of names that were found to be already in use on private computer networks. Some of these lists have over 100,000 names. All of these registries were required to block these names from being allocated until a policy for their allocation could be developed by ICANN. more

Nov 25th Deadline To Nominate Technical Community Reps for IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG)

Would you (or someone you know) be interested in representing the "technical community" on the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)? If so, the deadline to nominate someone (including yourself) is Monday, November 25, 2013. Under-Secretary-General Wu Hongbo of UNDESA has issued a statement on the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) renewal process for 2014 with the stated aim of rotating one third of the MAG members. more

WHOIS Policy at ICANN Continues to Fail

ICANN has once again acceded to the wants of contracted parties and is at risk of abdicating its duty to act in the global public interest when it comes to WHOIS policy. Its inability or unwillingness to date to reign in bad WHOIS policy, driven by contracted party interests, flies in the face of its previously-expressed policy goal “to ensure the continued availability of WHOIS to the greatest extent possible while maintaining the security and stability of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers.” more

OpenFlow - The Programmable Network Revolution

Over the past few months I have made regular references to OpenFlow. This is an exciting new development that fits in very well with several of the next generation technology developments that we have discussed in some detail over the past few years -- new developments such smart cities and smart societies, the internet of things. Such networks need to operate more on a horizontal level, rather than the usual vertical connection between a computing device and the users. more

BYOD Woes and Worries

Like the scene of a movie in which a biblical character holds back the mighty sea and is about to release the tide against his foes, BYOD has become a force of nature poised to flood those charged with keeping corporate systems secure. Despite years of practice hardening systems and enforcing policies that restrict what can and can't be done within the corporate network, businesses are under increasing (if not insurmountable) pressure to allow a diversifying number of personal devices to connect to their networks and be used for business operations. more

Don’t Make the Internet Safe for Monopolies

This week I'm going to Washington to argue against regulating Internet access as if it were phone service. Twenty years ago I was there for the same reason. My concern now as it was then is that such regulation will damage the economy and reduce opportunity by stifling innovation and protecting the current dominant players from the startups which would otherwise threaten them. more

Helping Haiti: The Email Community Response

It is inconceivable that anyone within viewing distance of a television or computer screen this week doesn't know about the disaster in Haiti. As of this writing, 50,000 bodies have been collected from the streets of Port-au-Prince. Millions of people, a number our brains simply aren't equipped to deal with, are now homeless. Help is needed now, and will be, for a very long time. more

New German Legislation Provides Copyright-Related Internet Platform Obligations

Recently, there has been an interesting development in the liability of Internet intermediaries in Germany, and I will comment here in this text. The "Act on Copyright Liability Online Content Sharing Service Providers" began to apply on August 1, 2021 in the country. This act is a German attempt to deal with the controversy generated by the approval in 2019 of the new European directive on copyright, specifically with article 17. more