Is Your Company on the Sidelines for Getting Its Own TLD? Here are 6 Questions Worth Considering

By now, I've probably spoken with close to a hundred brand owners who are all trying to make some very important decisions about whether or not to apply for a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD). Everyone wants to know what "the other guy" is doing. But for the most part (with the exceptions of Canon and Hitachi), brand owners have been tight-lipped about their intentions. Even in a recent New gTLD webinar hosted by MarkMonitor (primarily attended by brand owners), when asked in an anonymous poll whether they intended to apply... more

Holomaxx v. Yahoo and MS: The Hearing

I visited Judge Fogel's courtroom this morning to listen to the oral motions in the Holomaxx cases. This is a general impression, based on my notes. Nothing here is to be taken as direct quotes from any participant. Any errors are solely my own. With that disclaimer in mind, let's go. more

Pentagon Reveals Largest Ever Loss of Defense Data in Cyberattack

The Associated Press published an article today that the Pentagon revealed that earlier this year, they suffered one of its largest ever loss of sensitive data to a foreign government by a cyberattack. ... It's hard to say what's right and what's wrong. On the one hand, the Secretary of Defense says that the cyberwar is very real. On the other hand, the cyberczar Howard Schmidt said that there is no cyberwar and instead government needs to focus its efforts to fight online crime and espionage... more

The Next Network Policy Battle

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The biggest threat to the Internet innovation ecosystem from network operators is not discrimination but terms of interconnection. Metered billing, bandwidth caps, and wholesale transit fees can all be implemented consistently with net neutrality rules. And in practice, net neutrality will be limited to "legal" content... more

An ITU Cut and Paste Job for New TLDs Could Cost $150k

It was with great interest that I read a recent announcement about a plan by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to publish template answers on a wiki for the 22 questions relating to registry technical operations contained within ICANN's new Top-Level Domain Applicant Guidebook. As someone who has spent the best part of six years following the development of the program (witnessing first-hand each evolution of the Applicant Guidebook) my first thought was one of bemusement... more

The ICANN New gTLD Program is Approved: Now What? How to Submit a Quality Application in 6 Months

On January 12, 2012, the application window opens. Any corporation or organization can submit a request to own a piece of the Internet -- their own top-level domain (TLD). Many reporters are confusing a TLD with a domain name... But with less than six months between now and when an application can first be submitted, many are wondering if there's enough time to do it right. more

Synacor Provides a New Complaint Feedback Loop Service to the Internet Community

Last week, Synacor joined other major mailbox providers by introducing a complaint feedback loop service -- powered by ReturnPath. This increases the number of public complaint feedback loops available today across the internet. more

Email in the World’s Languages - Part II

In our last installment we discussed MIME, Unicode and UTF-8, and IDNA, three things that have brought the Internet and e-mail out of the ASCII and English only era and closer to fully handling all languages. Today we'll look at the surprisingly difficult problems involved in fixing the last bit, internationalized e-mail addresses. more

The Future of the Internet Economy: Chapter 2

The OECD held a "high-level" meeting in June 2011 that was intended to build upon the OECD Ministerial on The Future of the Internet Economy held in Seoul, Korea in June 2008. I was invited to attend this meeting as part of the delegation from the Internet Technical Advisory Committee (ITAC), and here I'd like to share my impressions of this meeting. This 2 day meeting, "The Internet Economy: Generating Innovation and Growth", had the objective of exploring a number of current issues in the public policy space... more

“Can IP Be Protected in the Internet Age?” Panel Recap from Russian Economic Development Conference

In June, I attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum ("SPIEF"), organized by the Russian government's Ministry of Economic Development. This was a major event drawing thousands of participants to St. Petersburg... I participated on a panel entitled "Can IP Be Protected in the Internet Age?" Right away, I trust many of you find the titling odd... more

IPv6 Enabled Networks Before and After World IPv6 Day

In our last post on CircleID, Measuring World IPv6 Day - First Impressions, we showed exactly when World IPv6 Day participants switched on IPv6 on their networks (by way of announcing DNS AAAA records). Now, a few weeks after World IPv6 Day, it's interesting to see what the longer-term effects have been. more

Email in the World’s Languages - Part I

Back when the Internet was young end servers came with shovels (for the coal), everyone on the net spoke English, and all the e-mail was in English. To represent text in a computer, each character needs to have a numeric code. The most common code set was (and is) ASCII, which is basically the codes used by the cheap, reliable Teletype printing terminals everyone used as their computer consoles. ASCII is a seven bit character code, code values 0 through 127, and it includes upper and lower case letters and a reasonable selection of punctuation adequate for written English. more

ICM Registry to Provide Free Malware Scanning for .XXX Domains

ICM Registry announced this week it has struck a deal with McAfee for a free malware scan for every .XXX domain. The deal would include McAfee's "trustmark" and date stamp, ICM said. Every .XXX domain will be scanned for vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, browser exploits and phishing sites, reputational analysis and malware, Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry, said in a statement. more

Catching Spam Email with Project Honey Pot

Since its launch in October, 2004 Project Honey Pot has made some interesting progress in their war against spam email. The project is a distributed system used to identify spammers and spambots operating across the Internet. To put it simply, Project Honey Pot lays millions of traps around the Internet (66,393,293 as of this writing) baited with specific email addresses that are configured to forward received emails to the Project Honey Pot system. Since these are not email addresses used by real individuals virtually every email received is positively identified as spam. more

New gTLDs: Floodgates for Spammers?

Ever since I heard of the new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), I wondered whether they would be prone to abuse. For example, Microsoft might want to register www.microsoft.microsoft, or Sony might want to register www.sony. But isn't this opening up the floodgates for spammers to register their own domains and squat on them? Why couldn't a spammer register www.cit.ibank? They could then send phishing messages and fool people into clicking very legitimate looking domains. But I don't think this will be a problem. more