Netflix Has Buyer’s Remorse Over Its Paid Peering Deal With Comcast

Soon after capitulating to Comcast's surcharge demand for improved treatment of its traffic, Netflix got better downstream delivery speeds. Apparently Comcast did not have to undertake a major bandwidth expansion program. Much to the immediate relief of Netflix, Comcast merely needed to allocate more ports for Netflix traffic. So with a reallocation of available bandwidth, Comcast solved Netflix's quality of service dilemma apparently without degrading service to anyone else, upstream or downstream. more

Is NTIA’s Transition Decision the Right Dose of Chemotherapy to Repair Trust in Multistakeholderism

Proper, transparent, accountable U.S. NTIA's Transition of its oversight of the Internet to something other than a single country oversight is something I have always believed in and spoke and written about repeatedly for years and is long overdue. But NTIA's March 14th declared intent to transfer "Key" Internet roles is not only very ambiguous but leads to new questions and concerns that must be answered before anything starts taking place. more

U.S. Government Announces Intent to Transition DNS Functions to Global Community

U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) took a historic step today announcing "its intent to transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multistakeholder community." more

Celebrating the 25Th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Today the full original name of the World Wide Web is being seen everywhere as people all around the world join together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the proposal that Tim Berners-Lee submitted at CERN that led to the creation of the "Web" we have today. While many of our articles here on CircleID focus more on the underlying Internet infrastructure that makes the Web possible, it's good to take a moment to reflect on - and celebrate - the amazing evolution of the Web from those very early days!  more

Google Launches First Japanese IDN

John Yunker reporting in Global by Design: "Google has gone live with one if its many Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs): ???. I want to emphasize here that this is a top-level IDN - that is, the equivalent of a .com or .org. This TLD, according to Google, stands for 'everyone.' So you could in effect register 'someword.everyone,' which sounds a bit odd to me but I'm not Japanese. And, frankly, the Japanese have not been blessed with much in the way of IDN options up to this point." more

Et Tu, ICANN? ICANN Board’s Recent Decision on the .Islam and .Halal TLD Applications Is Wrong

On Feb. 7, 2014 Dr. Stephen Crocker, the Chair of the ICANN Board of Directors, wrote to Asia Green IT System (AGIT), a Turkish company which applied for .Islam and .Halal, conveying ICANN's latest position on these two applications. The letter is deeply flawed, and shows how ICANN's handling of the .Islam and .Halal applications is at once an egregious assault on the new gTLD program rules, and a betrayal of whatever trust Muslims around the world might have had in ICANN. more

Touching Enhanced Cooperation

A concrete plinth was lain at the foundation of durable Enhanced Cooperation this week when ISOC unveiled its IXP toolkit and portal. In simple English (which no doubt will be expanded to other languages) the soft launch modestly seeks feedback, corrections, and further input to the already pithy and instructive content. More to the point, this resource responds to one of the principle demands of those who do not recognize themselves in the multistakeholder model: how do we get our own IXP? more

Who Are the Major New gTLD Applicants and… (Part Four: Donuts)

Donuts is an applicant that threw the entire domain name industry into uproar due to the number of applications it submitted: 307 in total. It is hardly surprising that whenever new gTLDs are mentioned in the media that Donuts are mentioned alongside due to shear number of applications that they have submitted. There are dozens of articles in the media mixing information and opinions about Donuts. Often, they address the benefits to those registrants who are excited about the possibility of acquiring a new domain name and the threats to those who have an existing .COM domain name portfolio. more

Would It Be Selfish to Register Calzone.Pizza?

I was told recently that I should register the domain "calzone.pizza" as soon as it becomes available, even though our start-up has nothing to do with food. This is a question that a lot of businesses may be facing as they become aware of the new dots that are becoming available, like .club, .nyc and .guru. Should businesses spend money and grab their brand in all of the new domain extensions to prevent potential customer confusion, or worse - cybersquatting or phishing of their brand on the internet? What if your brand can have multiple meanings?  more

ICANN’s Uncertain State: 2014

In a recent video interview conducted while he attended the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade stated "legitimacy comes from accountability". That statement is correct. It is also troubling, in that many of ICANN's recent policies and activities raise serious questions regarding whether it is sufficiently accountable and therefore perceived as acting in a legitimate manner - as well as whether it is continuing to faithfully abide by the Affirmation of Commitments (AOC) it entered into when the US government terminated direct oversight of ICANN in 2009. more

Keynote Speaker for Name Collisions Workshop: Bruce Schneier

There may still be a few security practitioners working in the field who didn't have a copy of Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography on their bookshelf the day they started their careers. Bruce's practical guide to cryptographic algorithms, key management techniques and security protocols, first published in 1993, was a landmark volume for the newly emerging field, and has been a reference to developers ever since. more

IPv6 and the Browser Wars

IPv6 adoption continues to gain ground at a slow pace. This is to be expected. The complications associated with hardware and software upgrades, as well as the lack of reachable content, means that IPv4 is still king of the hill. To me, this situation seems to mirror one a few years back with web browsers. Sometime around the turn of the century, Internet Explorer became the dominant browser. Riding on a 90% market share for Windows, the incumbent - Netscape Navigator - did not stand a chance. However, with it came a dark age for web developers. more

Extreme Vulnerability at the Edge of the Internet - A Fresh New Universal Human-Rights Problem

By design, the Internet core is stupid, and the edge is smart. This design decision has enabled the Internet's wildcat growth, since without complexity the core can grow at the speed of demand. On the downside, the decision to put all smartness at the edge means we're at the mercy of scale when it comes to the quality of the Internet's aggregate traffic load. Not all device and software builders have the skills - and the quality assurance budgets - that something the size of the Internet deserves. more

Colloquium on Collisions: Expert Panelists to Select Papers, Award $50K First Prize

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the verb collide is derived from the Latin verb collidere, which means, literally, "to strike together": com- "together" + lædere "to strike, injure by striking." Combined instead with loquium, or "speaking," the com- prefix produces the Latin-derived noun colloquy: "a speaking together." So consider WPNC 14 - the upcoming namecollisions.net workshop - a colloquium on collisions: speaking together to keep name spaces from striking together. more

NTAG Chair Blog: What Is the Next GAC Advice?

Last week, New gTLD Applicant Group (NTAG) members - who account for over half of the applications submitted to ICANN in this round - issued a unanimous letter to ICANN's New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) urging decisive action on Government Advisory Committee (GAC) Category 1 Advice at their upcoming February 5th meeting. The NGPC has been committing to address outstanding items of the GAC Advice in a manner that allows the largest possible number of applicants to proceed since last September. more