Introducing Internet Society’s Intellectual Property Issues Paper

What made an organization like the Internet Society draft an issues paper on Intellectual Property? What is the aim of this paper? How does the paper relate to overall Internet governance discussions? And, what - if any - impact does it aim to have on the discussions regarding Intellectual Property? At a time when there is a desire to resolve policy considerations by employing technological measures, the Internet Society, through an issues paper, amongst other things, seeks to chart a path forward... more

A Fairness ‘Scorecard’ for Trademark Protection Under the New gTLDs

In the last few years, ICANN has made huge strides in Protecting Trademarks within new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). Now much more is being asked. Is it right? Is it appropriate? Will these changes make the new gTLDs unusable for the very communities we most hope will want them: developing countries, developing communities, new businesses, growing organizations and all the people born in the future? more

Putting Multiple Root Nameserver Issue to Rest

I am often asked what I think of multiple root nameserver systems -- sort of like the Public-Root or the Open Root Server Confederation (ORSC) pushed by others in the past years. Whenever some well meaning person asks me for multiple roots in DNS, I answer: "DNS is a distributed, coherent, autonomous, hierarchical database. It is defined to have a single root, and every one of the hundreds of millions of DNS-speaking devices worldwide has the single-root design assumptions built into it. It would theoretically be possible to design a new system that looked superficially..." more

Squeegee Domains

When I was growing up, one of the annoyances of life in New York City was squeegee men. When your car was stopped at a light, these guys would run up, make a few swipes at your windshield with a squeegee, then look menacing until you gave them a tip. It occurs to me that domain "monetizers'' are the Internet's squeegee men. If I make a minor typing error entering a domain name, they run up and offer to sell a link to the place I wanted to go (well, they sell the place I wanted to go a click from me, but close enough.) more

The Spurious Justifications for Eliminating Price Caps on .org and Other Legacy Domains

ICANN is about to do serious damage to its reputation by making a precipitous, ill-considered leap into the unknown should it follow through on removing price constraints on several legacy extensions, most notably .org. Doing so would expose a global community of non-profits to the risk of quickly-escalating exploitative pricing. The rationale for eliminating price caps relies on three points, all of which are incorrect. more

ICANN Blows $4.6 Million In Stock Market

If you visit the new dashboard on ICANN's web site, you see some nice bar charts, including one rather large negative number of $4,462,000. If you click the little arrow at the top of the Financial Performance chart, a footnote window pops open where the last sentence is: "The large variance to budget is due to investment losses of $4.6 mil." Investment losses? Yup, ICANN's been speculating in the stock market... more

An Attack on DNS is an Attack on the Internet

On Saturday Aug 7th, DNS provider DNS Made Easy was the target of a very large denial of service attack. As far as can be determined the total traffic volume exceeded 40 Gigabit/second, enough to saturate 1 million dialup Internet lines. Several of DNS Made Easy's upstream providers had saturated backbone links themselves. There are indications that not only DNS Made Easy suffered from this attack, but the Internet as a whole. more

Experts Urge Congress to Reject DNS Filtering from PROTECT IP Act, Serious Technical Concerns Raised

A group of leading DNS experts have released a paper detailing serious concerns over the proposed DNS filtering requirements included as part of the bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate named Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 ("PROTECT IP Act"). The group who is urging lawmakers to reconsider enacting such a mandate into law, includes leading DNS designers, operators, and researchers, responsible for numerous RFCs for DNS, publication of many peer-reviewed academic studies related to architecture and security of the DNS, and responsible for the operation of important DNS infrastructure on the Internet. more

A Closer Look At The Controversy Over The Internet’s Birthday! You Decide

Internet users welcomed the New Year this year with a controversy that reaches to the roots of the Internet itself. January 1, 1983 was the day computer systems on the ARPANET were required to switch over to the TCP/IP protocol. This year marks the 20th anniversary of that event.

Several news stories appeared on the Internet before or on January 1, 2003 heralding January 1, 2003 as the twentieth birthday of the Internet. Other news stories questioned calling this date the birthday of the Internet. To have the date of the Internet's birthday be the subject of a controversy is appropriate, given the nature and history of the Internet. In its early development, the Internet grew and flourished because researchers were encouraged to debate their differences. In this environment, collaborative work thrived. more

Firefox Starts the Roll Out of DNS Over HTTPS (DoH) by Default for US-Based Users

According to the company, the rollout will continue over the next few weeks to confirm that no major issues are discovered as this new protocol is enabled. more

Convergence: ENUM is a Big Deal

Convergence as a technology concept has been around for decades. Many have predicted the convergence of electronics and entertainment, of PC's and TV's, and more recently of WiFi and cellular. All of these areas are in fact undergoing various degrees of convergence but there is another area that many are not as familiar with. It is called ENUM...The idea can be extremely useful when you consider that most telephones are limited to twelve keys on a keypad. Ever tried to enter your alphanumeric login ID and password to a web site on a cell phone or Personal Digital Assistant? It is next to impossible! The biggest impact of ENUM will probably be for Voice Over IP (VoIP). In fact, it could be the tipping point. ENUM is a really big deal. more

Domain Industry 2025: Current Landscape and Key Market Data

As we navigate through 2025, the domain industry remains a critical focal point amid persistent geopolitical instabilities, inflation, and an ongoing energy crisis. These pressures have reshaped the landscape of domain registrations and the domain aftermarket. Despite these challenges, digitalization continues to drive innovation and efficiency across sectors. more

European ccTLDs Saw a Slow Down in Domain Name Sales, Deletions and Transfers, According to CENTR’s Latest Report

The latest CENTRstats Global TLD Report has been released, covering the global status and registration trends in all top-level domains (legacy gTLDs, new gTLDs and ccTLDs), with a specific focus on the European ccTLD market. According to the report, domain name sales, deletions and registrar transfers slowed down for European ccTLDs over 2021; however, demand for new domains is still outpacing deletes, keeping growth in the positive. more

Shedding Light on How Much Energy the Internet and ICTs Consume

Ever since I published an essay exploring the relationship between climate change and the Internet, I have endeavored to bring this subject to the fore as often as possible (and in relevant fora and discussions) since the responsibility of creating a more sustainable world falls on all communities and stakeholder groups. It is particularly pressing now -- at a time when international interest in curbing climate change is strengthening, while it is juxtaposed with the receding commitments of the United States government... more

SPF Loses Mindshare

MAAWG is the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working group. It was started by Openwave, a vendor that sells e-mail hardware and software to large ISPs and originally consisted only of Openwave customers, but has evolved into an active forum in which large ISPs and software vendors exchange notes on anti-spam and other anti-abuse activities. Members now include nearly every large ISP including AOL, Earthlink, Yahoo, Comcast and Verizon is a member, along with ESPs like Doubleclick, Bigfoot, and Checkfree, and vendors like Ciscom, Ironport, Messagelabs, Kelkea/Trend, and Habeas. They've also been quietly active in codifying best practices and working on some small but useful standards like a common abuse reporting format. more