Some Thoughts on ICANN’s Next CEO

Now that the search has officially commenced, I thought it might be useful to make some public statements as to what I would like to see from the next ICANN CEO. My comments are driven by what I see as the deficiencies over the last number of years and, most importantly, by a deep desire to see the ICANN experiment in global governance succeed. The Internet is the greatest agent for positive change the world has ever seen and a healthy ICANN strengthens its ability to foster positive change. more

ICANN to IP Experts: Come Back With a Solution for Internet Trademark Protection

Trademark issues are emerging with the upcoming introduction of new generic top-level domains on the internet, and the board members of the body introducing the names has passed the ball back to intellectual property experts to find answers. The Intellectual Property Constituency of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been asked to work out a viable solution "no later than 24 May 2009." Trademark issues have been defined as one of four overarching issues still to be solved before ICANN can finalise the application procedure for the next hundreds or thousands of top-level domains from .eco to .music. more

Google AdSense Asks Publishers to Change Their Websites’ Privacy Policy

I received an e-mail from Google Adsense about its new interest-based advertising feature. The latest feature of Google AdSense allows Google to track the behavior of users who click on ads on their AdSense network. It also allows Google users to ‘select’ their interests—this way they would view advertisements based on their category of interest…

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Facebook’s TOS Fumble

One big story of the day was Facebook's new and improved terms of service which this Consumerist post flagged and which set off a firestorm of controversy... What Was Facebook's Mistake? Facebook could have avoided much of the controversy by providing its users some advance notice of the upcoming changes. more

Top 10 Spam Stories of 2008

Well, it's a yearly tradition in the western hemisphere that at the end of the year, we compose a top 10 list of the 10 most . Since it is now 2009, I thought that I would create my own list of the top 10 spam stories of 2008. Now, not all of these will be universally applicable to everyone, they are the top 10 stories as seen by me. more

2008: The Year That VoIP Died

It seems highly likely to me that at some point in the future we'll all look back and say that 2008 was the year that the VoIP industry finally died... Voice over IP is just a transport and signalling technology. It's plumbing. It may come as a surprise to some of you to know that in the late 1980's and early 1990's there was a TCP/IP industry as well. TCP/IP is inarguably plumbing. As the IP stack became common on all computing devices, TCP/IP went from being a differentiator to a commodity. more

What If I Were Wrong About Edge-Caching?

Nicholas Thompson at Wired Blog sums up yesterday's Wall Street Journal piece on Google. To summarize his summary: Google's edge caching isn't new or evil; Lessig didn't shift gears on NN; Microsoft and Yahoo have been off the NN bandwagon since 2006; The Obama team still supports NN; Amazon's Kindle support is consistent with its NN support. Yet... yet... 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

Whois Masking Considered Harmful

Whenever you register a domain name, your contact details are published in a publicly visible database called "Whois", where your contact details are instantly harvested by spambots and marketers who proceed to email and postal mail you marketing offers, deceptive "domain slamming" attempts, ads for dubious products, and perhaps even telemarketing calls. Nobody likes that, so over the years people started resorting to various tactics to protect themselves from the deluge of crap that inevitably comes with simply registering a domain name... more

Overture to Take Over Internet Governance: ITU at ICANN Meeting, Cairo

ITU is 143 years old and it has done a lot of good work. But it is so huge and powerful that it has been monopolizing (or mono-unionizing) Telecommunications for the last 143 years. ITU's hold over communications has been sweeping. But during the last ten years, ITU's member Telcos have seen several challenges from the open Internet architecture... ITU and the Internet organizations did not quite get along for this and several other reasons Especially the ITU has had its share of differences with the ICANN. Dr. Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the ITU addressed the ICANN Annual Meeting at Cairo on 6 November 2008. Here are some excerpts from the Secretary General's speech with my comments. more

Japan Domain Market Demystified

Ever sat at one of the VeriSign "State of the domain" meetings at any of the ICANN meetings? Or read their reports about countries with the greatest opportunity in domains? Almost without question you will learn that Japan is earmarked as the country with the greatest opportunity for growth in the domain market. They take into consideration important factors such as GDP of a country, internet population, and current domain registration levels... more

Soon in a Mail Box Near You: Internationalized Email Addresses

The EAI working group of the IETF has finished (part of) its work on the interationalization of email addresses. This, together with Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) will make it possible to send email messages to non-7 bit ASCII addresses... There are 3 RFCs, covering changes to the SMTP protocol, e-mail message format and delivery Status Notifications. more

Day 30: Kaminsky DNS Bug Disclosure

In a highly anticipated presentation, Internet security researcher Dan Kaminsky today gave details of the much talked about Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerability issue which has been intensely covered since it was publicly announced a month ago on Jul 8th. Although original plans entailed keeping the bug details undisclosed for 30 days in order to allow for necessary security patches to be implemented around the world, details of the bug were eventually leaked-and-confirmed 13 days after its public announcement. Even so, just hours ago in jam-packed ballroom during the Black Hat conference, Kaminsky delivered his 100-plus-slide presentation detailing the DNS flaw that, if exploited, could potentially "destroy the Web". more

Customer Owned Fiber in Ottawa

Arstechnica had a nice article yesterday by Timothy Lee entitled 'The really long tail' following up on Derek Slater's article last week on the Google Public Policy Blog entitled 'What if you could own your Internet connection?' Both articles are about a pilot project in Ottawa.The "tail" in Timothy's article is the "last mile" (or as I prefer, "first mile") fiber connection from individual homes to a network peering point or other aggregation point where individuals can then choose from among multiple competing ISPs. The importance is, as Timothy Lee puts it... more

FCC and Comcast: Reasonably Vague

So, the FCC will recommend that Comcast be "punished" or receive "sanctions" for its peer-to-peer throttling practice. And the network neutrality debate goes on, as does its ambiguities and vagueness. Even if you hate Comcast and agree with the net neutrality argument and the FCC's decision, one thing Comcast is correct in saying is that "reasonable network management" specified by the FCC in network neutrality policy set in 2005 is vague. Actually, the term "network management" by itself is broad before you even try to interpret what is meant by "reasonable", and it is not exactly correct in its application here... more