UN Cyberdiplomcy I: PoC, Cybercrime and the Global Digital Compact

Despite global polarization, recent UN cyber diplomacy has achieved three significant agreements in 2024: a cyber attack reporting system, a convention against cybercrime, and a "Global Digital Compact." These successes show that consensus on global issues is possible, though the vague wording of agreements raises concerns about their long-term effectiveness in ensuring security and peace. more

Revisiting Apple and IPv6

A few weeks ago I wrote about Apple's IPv6 announcements at the Apple Developers Conference. While I thought that in IPv6 terms Apple gets it, the story was not complete and there were a number of aspects of Apple's systems that were not quite there with IPv6. So I gave them a 7/10 for their IPv6 efforts. Time to reassess that score in the light of a few recent posts from Apple. more

Affordable Starlink Prices Coming to Low and Middle-Income Countries

SpaceX first departed from its uniform Starlink pricing policy when it offered a reduced price for throttled service in France two years ago. Since then, many new, higher-capacity satellites have been launched, enabling SpaceX to reduce prices in low and middle-income countries like Kenya. Kenya had 405 geostationary satellite internet subscribers when Starlink became available in July 2023. more

The Slow Death of Satellite TV?

There have been rumors for years about merging Dish Networks and Direct TV to try to gain as much market synergy as possible for the two sinking businesses. It's hard to label these companies as failures just yet because between two companies collectively still had 21.8 million customers at the end of 2020 (DirectTV 13.0 million, Dish 8.8 million). This makes the two companies collectively the largest cable TV providers, with Comcast at 19.8 million and Charter at 16.2 million. more

Top 10 Biggest Domain Stories of 2012 and Predictions for 2013

So my prediction from last year that "ICANN will open the new gTLD application period without any glitches" could not have been more wrong. And yes - I actually used the word 'glitches'... Regardless of my crystal-ball gazing skills, it's been another incredibly eventful year, and below are the Top 10 Domain Stories from 2012. more

ICANN Cannot Expect the DPAs to Re-Design WHOIS, but Asking for a Reprieve Makes Sense

We are on the brink of the most serious threat to the open and public Internet for decades. ICANN, under pressure from domain name registrars and EU data protection authorities, has proposed an "interim" plan that will hide critical information in WHOIS. Security, threat intelligence, and anti-abuse professionals rely on WHOIS to track down bad guys and keep the Internet as safe and secure as possible. more

Internet.nl - A New Site to Easily Test Your Use of IPv6, DNSSEC, TLS and DKIM

"Is Your Internet Up-To-Date?" Does your existing Internet connection work with IPv6 and DNSSEC? Do your web sites support IPv6, DNSSEC and TLS? Is there a quick way to find out? Earlier this month a new site, Internet.nl, was launched to make this all easy for anyone to test. All you do is visit the site at en.internet.nl (also available in Dutch) and just follow the very easy links. more

Future of Internet Navigation and DNS: The NAS Study

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has been studying the issue of Internet navigation and the DNS. The study was undertaken at the request of Congress to "provide analysis and advice for consideration by agencies of the U.S. Government, interested international institutions, and other stakeholders." In addition to examining technological issues, the study is also considering "relevant legal, economic, political, and social issues...because technologies related to the DNS and Internet navigation do not operate in isolation, but must be deployed within a complex and challenging national and international context."  more

The Domain Aftermarket Redux: Are Domainers “Investors” Yet?

What better way to kick things off than to review the domain aftermarket, three years after my then infamous "Domain Aftermarket Overdue For An Asset Repricing" article which caused a bit of a stir at the time. I said then that there was a big recession coming, in it everything would suffer severe price declines, and that domain names would not be exempt. I went on to say that the low-hanging fruit in the domain industry had been picked: type-in activity would go into secular decline over time, and that domainers would face increasing competition from other avenues such as DNS resolvers, ISPs and web browsers. It didn't go over well. more

Online Freedoms: Safeguards Must Be Balanced With Free Expression

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a major contextual factor of global internet governance discussions over the past year, and it appears that discussions in ICANN are no exception. Threats to the integrity and security of the DNS have become a regular topic of debate within the ICANN community. In recent months, these discussions have increasingly focused on the idea of 'DNS abuse' and, more specifically, COVID-19-related DNS abuse. more

The Philosophical Case for Expanding the Domain Name Space

At the December 2004 ICANN meeting in Cape Town, Vint Cerf said this to the Public Forum: "I want to go on record as saying... that I am no longer sure that I have a strong understanding of why I would be motivated to create a new TLD..." Dr. Cerf posed a question that has yet to be answered or even discussed by the DNS stakeholder community. While the technical and business cases for the introduction of new TLDs have been successfully made, what is the philosophical case for adding new TLDs? What semantics are encoded in TLDs, and how could those semantics be expanded in a consistent way? more

Will US Government Directives Spur IPv6 Adoption?

Yesterday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. government hosted a workshop discussing the state of IPv6 in the United States and its impact on industry, government, and the Internet economy. I was asked to be a panelist, along with industry executives from ARIN, ISOC, ICANN, Comcast, Akamai, Verizon, Google, VeriSign, DOE, NIST, and DREN. Moderated by Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States, this was the first event in the past few years to truly shine a spotlight on IPv6 adoption (or lack thereof) and introduce key directives to move this issue forward. more

Understanding Broadband Oversubscription

It's common to hear that oversubscription is the cause of slow broadband -- but what does that mean? Oversubscription comes into play in any network when the aggregate subscribed customer demand is greater than the available bandwidth. The easiest way to understand the concept is with an example. Consider a passive optical fiber network where up to 32 homes share the same neighborhood fiber. more

Access Logs Reveal 12M Visits to .CM Typosquatted Sites Just in 2018 So Far

An anonymous tip has lead security experts Brian Krebs and Matthew Chambers to four years of access logs for the entire network of more than 1,000 dot-cm typosquatting domains. more

ICANN, VeriSign, and the Swamp

ICANN has initiated arbitration (before the ICC's International Court of Arbitration) against VeriSign under the .net Registry Agreement, seeking declaratory judgments that many things VeriSign has done or attempted to do over the years (Sitefinder, ConsoliDate, IDN, WLS, and stemming the abusive actions of shell registrars when they destructively query the registry for secondary market purposes) violate that agreement. more