Deloitte: DDoS Attacks to Enter Terabit Era in 2017

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks will become larger in scale, harder to mitigate and more frequent, says Deloitte in its annual Global Predictions report. more

Is It Time for a Registration Operations Industry Association? (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series of blog posts I described the need for an industry association of operators to discuss the technical tasks, such as the development, deployment, and ongoing systems administration of the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), performed by registries and registrars to ensure interoperability and share best practices when providing registration services. In this blog post I'll describe a way to make that happen. more

The IPv4 Market - 2018 Mid-Year Report

The number of IPv4 transactions and volume of IP addresses flowing to and from organizations in the ARIN region in the last 6 months put 2018 on track to be the most active year in the history of the IPv4 market. Nearly 25 million numbers were transferred in the first half of this year, more than doubling the volume of numbers transferred by this time last year and continuing the level of market activity in the last half of 2017 when just over 28 million numbers were transferred. more

Thailand’s Blacklist of Newly Banned Websites Leaked

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has released the list of newly blacklisted websites by Thailand's Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT). The list was leaked by advisory board member CJ Hinke, director of Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, according the WikiLeaks website. From WikiLeaks' announcement: "The 1,203 blocked websites are located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Vietnam..." 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

The Myth of the Unintended Infringer in SOPA and PIPA

In a recent op-ed piece in TheHill.COM, some friends and I described the futility of mandated DNS blocking as contemplated by the SOPA (H.R. 3261) and PIPA (S. 968) bills now working their way through the U.S. Congress: No Internet user is required to use the Domain Name servers provided by their ISP. And if millions of American citizens who for whatever reason want to engage in online piracy can no longer do so because Congress has passed this law and their ISP is now filtering the citizen's DNS lookups... more

Project dotVinum for .WINE Domain Names

This article is a feedback on the sensitive .WINE dotVinum project which aims to create an extension for the wine community on Internet. Questions to Be Answered: Protection of rights at an international level: how to protect trademarks? Funding: who has the financial capacity to invest in such a project?... more

The Blurr-Cade Proposal on Root Zone Oversight

Becky Burr (former NTIA official) and lobbyist Marilyn Cade has made a proposal to create a multilateral working group to oversee the root zone file updates. I would characterize the Burr-Cade proposal as a "small step for mankind and a giant step for the US" to paraphrase Neil Armstrong. The main merit of the proposal is that it looks like something the USG might want to follow. Sevaral people suggested there should be no governmental oversight at all but that does not look realistic, in the sense that there can be huge economic and political interests behind ICANN decisions. more

Reforming Whois

Now that we're into the New Year and deadline for public comment on the proposed new .CA whois policy nears and now that my term as a CIRA Director enters its home stretch, I wanted to take some time to elaborate further on my Unsanctioned Whois Concepts post from long ago and revise it somewhat. more

Bandwidth Demands Exceeding Internet Infrastructure Investment

Nemertes Research has released a report on the future of the Internet infrastructure. The key finding from the report is that bandwidth demands are exceeding infrastructure investment, especially at the access layer. We noted in the project that users may begin to see the impact of degraded application performance as early as 2010. We also noted that the planned investments in Internet infrastructure are insufficient to meet growing demand. more

ICANN CEO’s Admissions That ICANN Is Not Ready For New gTLDs Should Concern Everyone

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade gave an alarming assessment of the state of the New gTLD program... It was admirable for Mr. Chehade to stand up and talk frankly about the state of the New gTLD program. It is important for everyone going through the process of applying for a New gTLD to understand the constraints and limitations that ICANN is dealing with as it tries to implement the program, as well as the wider Internet community that will be affected by the new extensions. 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

How the Pandemic Changed Broadband

The Washington Post recently published an article with a series of graphs showing the impact of the pandemic on various economic indicators, including unemployment, wages, air travel, grocery prices, home prices, and consumer sentiment. The article got me thinking about the impact of the pandemic on the broadband industry, and several important changes emerged from our collective pandemic experience. more

Apple Under Fire for Removing VPN Apps from Russia’s App Store

Apple has reportedly removed nearly 60 VPN apps from its Russia App Store, significantly higher than the 25 VPNs acknowledged by Russian authorities, according to a recent report by the App Censorship Project. more

Confusing New gTLDs

Choosing the right domain name is like choosing a Trademark, it has to be taken seriously because it is a long time image investment. If new gTLDs have brought new options to those in charge of creating a name (precision, availability, novelty) and registering its (their) domain name(s), they also brought the possibility to make a terrible mistake when choosing the right extension for a domain name. more