Results of ICANN’s Special Meeting

As a follow up to ICANN's Special Meeting of the Board on February 18, 2004, previously reported here on CircleID, the following resolution was reached on the WLS Negotiations with VeriSign: "During this Board Meeting, the Board authorized the public posting of the 26 January 2004 letter setting forth the results of the negotiations and asked that this matter be placed on the Board's agenda for the publicly-held Board Meeting for 6 March 2004 in Rome, Italy." more

New TLDs: Can You Say .Never?

ICANN continues at its snail's pace on introduction of new top-level domains. At the Montreal meeting, staff sprung this RFP for new sponsored TLDs. As if "a few" and "sponsored" weren't limitation enough, it further narrowed the applicant pool to those who had applied unsuccessfully as sponsored TLDs in November 2000. more

Here’s Looking at You…

Much has been said in recent weeks about various forms of cyber spying. The United States has accused the Chinese of cyber espionage and stealing industrial secrets. A former contractor to the United States' NSA, Edward Snowden, has accused various US intelligence agencies of systematic examination of activity on various popular social network services... These days cloud services may be all the vogue, but there is also an emerging understanding that once your data heads into one of these clouds, then it's no longer necessarily entirely your data; it may have become somebody else's data too... more

If the Stakeholders Already Control the Internet, Why NETmundial and the IANA Transition?

Last weekend C-Span, the public service network that broadcasts proceedings of the U.S. Congress and other U.S. government functions, aired a segment of its series "the Communicators" featuring ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade; C-Span describes the show as "Half-hour conversations with the leaders who shape our digital future". While the interview is actually just 28 minutes long, and appears to have been recorded on January 28th, it contains some surprising statements that raise some intriguing questions. more

Is It About to Get Much Harder to Own a Domain Name?

Question: why has air travel become so painful? Because the threat posed by bad actors requires making everyone jump through hoops before letting them board a plane. To the point that, despite obvious requirements to ensure air safety, some are now openly questioning if the cure is not worse than the disease. Registering a domain name could be about to go the same way. more

Time of Registration in Determining Cybersquatting

While Panels under the UDRP and judges under the ACPA draw upon a similar body of principles in determining infringement -- both mechanisms, after all, are crafted to combat cybersquatting -- and though arbitration panels and judges undoubtedly view alleged tortious wrongdoing by abusive registrations of domain names through similar lenses and apply laws that may be outwardly similar, each protective mechanism has developed its own distinct and separate jurisprudence. more

Key Findings from the 2021 Domain Security Report

With cybercrime on the rise, companies in 2021 have experienced increased ransomware attacks, business email compromise (BEC), phishing attacks, supply chain attacks, and online brand and trademark abuse. While domain cyber risk is rising, the level of action being taken by Forbes Global 2000 companies to improve their domain security posture has remained unchanged, leaving these companies exposed to even more risk. The risk of not addressing your domain security can be catastrophic. more

CircleID’s Top 10 Posts of 2013

Here we are with CircleID's annual roundup of top ten most popular posts featured during 2013 (based on overall readership). Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership and best wishes to the entire community for 2014. more

The 30th Birthday of DNS!

As Ond?ej Surý of CZ.NIC recently pointed out on the dns-operations list, it was 30 years ago this month, in November 1983, that two RFCs that defined what we now call the Domain Name System (DNS), RFC 882 and RFC 883, were published. They make for an interesting read today when you think about how far we've come in those 30 years -- and now how absolutely critical DNS is as part of the Internet's infrastructure. more

ICANN Board to Vote on Domain Tasting Measure

The ICANN Board will vote today on a new registry service put forward by PIR for .org which is its attempt to solve the domain tasting issue. It takes the form of an amendment [pdf] to the .org contract and enables PIR to charge five cents per domain "when the number of such deleted registrations is in excess of 90 per cent of the total number of initial registrations"... more

2014 Domain Name Year in Review

It's hard to believe that another year has come and gone and that I'm now publishing my 5th Annual Domain Name Year in Review. It's sort of fun to look back 5 years ago to see how much things have changed, especially as focus has shifted to issues related to the launch and use of new gTLDs. Of course, much has stayed the same too. Concerns related to domain name security and domain portfolio management are still important. more

ICANN Compliance Lends a Hand to a Violent Criminal While Trashing a Legitimate Business

Imagine a California non-profit corporation providing material assistance to a criminal wanting to do you physical and financial harm. Then, imagine that corporation is ICANN. Imagine no longer, because that is precisely what the ICANN Compliance department managed to pull off this week, in an all-too-common demonstration of the havoc they can cause by sheer ineptitude, without apology or concern. This is the situation which crossed my desk this week. more

As IPv6 Deploys, Will We Look Back on NAT as the Ugly Step Sister or Unsung Hero?

The debates are raging over whether or not we should migrate to IPv6. The strongest argument is the enormous address space that will allow for everyone and everything to have a unique public address, many addresses actually. It is often said that the shortage of public IPv4 addresses has limited our capabilities because it led to the pervasive use of private addressing, Network Address Translation (NAT) and Port Address Translation (PAT). Though these technologies remain critical, they are often regarded as stop-gap measures, and they sometimes create problems. In some circles, NAT has acquired a very bad name. But is that a fair perspective of the technology? Let's review the positives and negatives. more

The Trouble With 6to4

In the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, the preferred solution for network endpoints is to have both native IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity (also called dual-stack connectivity). If a site cannot get native IPv6 connectivity, however, the IPv4 network endpoints can choose from a number of conversion technologies to connect to the IPv6 Internet. The most commonly used conversion mechanisms are 6to4, Teredo and tunnel-brokers. At recent RIPE meetings there have been claims that 6to4 connectivity is quite often broken. We were interested to find out how broken it really is. more

ICANN DNS Resolver Symposium – the Session Had Several Interesting Presentations That I Would Like to Comment On

ICANN hosted a Resolver Operator Forum in mid-December, and the session had several interesting presentations that I would like to comment on here... The first presentation in this forum was from Paul Mockapetris. He pointed to the original academic published paper, Development of the Domain Name System, by Paul Mockapetris and Kevin Dunlap, published in the proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM’88. The paper noted that by 1983 it was obvious that the shared HOSTS.TXT file was not a scalable solution... more