CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners

Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the new CIRA whois policy, which took effect today and which I described as striking the right balance between access and privacy. The policy was to have provided new privacy protection to individual registrants - hundreds of thousands of Canadians - by removing the public disclosure of their personal contact information... Apparently I spoke too soon. more

Do We Need Two Internets?

Jonathan Zittrain's recent book, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, has spurred a lot of discussion both online and offline, with blog posts lauding his insights or criticising his over-apocalyptic imagination. The book itself makes fascinating reading for those who have watched the network grow from its roots in the research community into today's global channel for communications, commerce and cultural expression... One of the reasons that Zittrain puts forward for the growing popularity of closed or, as he prefers 'tethered', devices, is that they are less vulnerable to hacking, security flaws, malware and all the other perils that face any internet-enabled system. more

Are Domain Name Registrars Ready for IPv6?

Now that ICANN has added IPv6 name servers for the root zone, and that many registries have enabled IPv6 on their DNS servers, I thought it would have been easy to update the DNS records pointing to my domain to mention a IPv6-only DNS server. This way, we could have native name resolution end-to-end in IPv6. We are not there yet, it seems. more

On Comcast and Net Neutrality: Shouting Fire in a Theater

The Comcast traffic shaping case has stirred up passionate debate. Net neutrality proponents are calling for Comcast's head on a platter. The common argument is that Comcast's policy may stifle innovation and competition. If a service provider is allowed to exercise unregulated discretion in how it treats subscriber traffic, it is a slippery slope toward anti-competitive practices. Net neutrality says keep your hands off. Some are preaching net neutrality as if it were an inalienable human right like freedom of speech... more

If the Number ‘5’ License Plate is Worth $6.8 Million, What is Your Domain Name Worth?

The number "5" license plate sold for $6.8 million dollars in Saudi Arabia and another 300 vanity plates sold for another $56 million at last week's auction. It is estimated that the number "1" will be auctioned next month for up to $20 million dollars. Domain names and license plates share some common characteristics. Both allow only one person to own a particular word or number. Of course, the exact same license plate 'word' or 'number' can be registered in every country and, in the USA, every state... more

More on Dell’s Anti-Tasting Suit

Dell filed a suit in Florida in early October against a nest of domain tasters in Miami, widely reported in the press last week... The primary defendant is a Miami resident named Juan Vasquez, doing business as several registrars called BelgiumDomains, CapitolDomains, and DomainDoorman, as well as a whole bunch of tiny companies of unknown authenticity... Those registrars have an egregious history of domain churning. I gave a talk on domain tasting at MAAWG in October in which I picked out the registrars who churned the most domains from the May registrar reports, and those three were the worst, each having registered about 500,000 domains, refunded over 10 million... more

Domain Tasting: Big Multifaceted Action on Bad Actors

Reported in the Washington Post no less: "Dell Takes Cybersquatters to Court". As reported a few weeks ago, this is a very thorough action targeting certain practices and practitioners... I'm surprised a suit this thorough didn't name Google as a co-defendant. Then again, maybe it's not that surprising because Google offers a well liked product, has a lot more money; and a search partnership with Dell that allows Dell to share in the profit when its users engage in "right of the dot" typosquatting on Dell keyboards. It's funny, because one day, Dell could find itself on the defendant's side of the courtroom... more

Domain Management White Paper

Businesses may rely on domain names to conduct their day to day work, but that does not mean that they really understand what they are using or how important they are. Of course those of us in industry may feel tempted to either scoff at people's naivety or feel terribly frustrated with their ignorance, however neither action is particularly productive. Loic Damilaville, however, has tried to take a more practical and positive approach by publishing a white paper on domain name management. The document was published a few months ago in French and has since been made available in English. more

A Consociational Bureau for the Internet Governance Forum

The principle that Internet governance "is a joint effort which requires cooperation and partnership among all stakeholders" (Geneva Declaration of Principles, para 20) has become axiomatic since it was first agreed at WSIS, and is fundamental to the IGF as a "new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue" (Tunis Agenda, para 72). However at the same time as this principle has been universally embraced, some of its implications, that would require the four stakeholder groups identified in the Tunis Agenda to collaborate on the development of joint policy recommendations (Tunis Agenda para 72(g)) have met with resistance. That the strongest resistance has come from those stakeholders with the greatest investment in the existing Internet governance regime... more

Spamhaus Appeal: They Win on Substance

The Seventh Circuit has issued its opinion in the continuing saga of E360 Insight vs. the Spamhaus Project. While it is not a complete victory for Spamhaus, they did about as well as anyone could have hoped for under the circumstances. E360 won on the procedural issue, while Spamhaus won on the substance. The procedural issue was whether the default judgement against Spamhaus was properly granted last September. The court session was so odd that the appeals decision quotes several pages of the transcript. more

ICANN Tests IDN TLD (Live!)

At ICANN San Juan, I found out from Tina Dam, ICANN's IDN Program Director, that she was putting together a live IDN TLD test bed plan which includes translations of the string .test into eleven written languages (Arabic, Chinese-simplified, Chinese-traditional, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish) and ten scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, Tamil)... Two days ago, ICANN provided an update on this project... more

EU NameSpace is Dead?

The European Union's .eu Top-Level Domain (TLD) sunrise and landrush has probably been discussed to death, but what is the landscape like over a year later? A lot of industry insiders were right to express their doubts about the stability of .eu following on from the high profile squats that have been discussed here at length. Of course any discussion on a new TLD would have to wait until after the first wave of renewals. That happened in April, so now, in July, it's a good as time to take stock of the situation... more

Commentary on the FTC Spam Summit

The following speech was prepared with the intention of using portions of it during the FTC Spam Summit, but CAUCE was not given the opportunity to participate due to time constraints... "I am here today to question. Yesterday we heard how the tenor of the discussion about spam became more mature. How, in the period of time that has elapsed since the last summit, things have developed as an industry. That may be true, but I question if the discussion at hand here this week is truly a big tent effort. I see few anti-spammers here..." more

Google Buys VeriSign (not really)

No that's not really happening, Google is not buying VeriSign. But given Google's ravenous appetite for data, it might find VeriSign quite attractive. VeriSign has both root domain name servers and servers for the .com and .net top level domains (TLDs). VeriSign could data mine the queries coming into those servers and produce a very valuable real-time stream of what users on the net are doing... Google just bought Postini -- and one would have to be fairly naive to believe that Google does not intend to dredge through all... more

The Cold-War Fight Against Domaining Continues

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win!" quote by Gandhi pretty much summarizes the evolution of the domain name monetization and development business. I have watched this business come of age for more than half a decade... In the beginning nobody cared... then when people started talking about how great it was, 'smart people' and the "legitimate web" laughed. Then the trucks with money showed up... A significant double-digit percentage of global Internet traffic is now owned by domain holders with generic names. So the fight is on.  more