Why ICANN TLD Policy Imposes Severe Constraint on Development of Internationalized Domain Names

In 2008, ICANN made it known to the community that it is finally ready to discuss Internationalized Domain Names regarding Top-Level Domains (TLDs) after several years of working groups, technical trials, studies and considerations. It was highly anticipated by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) community. It was also with great disappointment when the New gTLD Application Guidebook, published on 24th Oct 2008, included the following paragraph... more

First “Africa DNS Forum” To Be Streamed Live July 12 and 13 From Durban, South Africa

The first Africa DNS Forum will take place on Friday, July 12, and Saturday, July 13, 2013, in Durban, South Africa, in advance of next week's ICANN 47 meeting. Jointly organized by AfTLD, ICANN and the Internet Society, the Africa DNS Forum "aims to establish a platform for the DNS community across Africa and to advance the domain name industry and domain name registrations on the continent."  more

Hackers Hijack DNS Server for Cyrptocurrency Wallet BlackWallet, Over $400K Stolen From Users

Unknown hackers (or hacker) have hijacked the DNS server for BlackWallet.co, a web-based wallet application for the Stellar Lumen cryptocurrency (XLM). more

IPv6 Deployment Around the World: A New Digital Divide?

Alain Durand, Principal Technologist at ICANN, visited Georgia Institute of Technology last week for a talk on the global adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The Internet Governance Project organized the talk in cooperation with Atlanta's Technology Development Center (ATDC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy. Durand, who was involved in the IPv6 standardization efforts at IETF back in the early to mid-1990s, offered a clear eyed assessment of the protocol's critical flaw... more

Internet Economics

One year ago, in late 2017, much of the policy debate in the telecommunications sector was raised to a fever pitch over the vexed on-again off-again question of Net Neutrality in the United States. It seemed as it the process of determination of national communications policy had become a spectator sport, replete with commentators who lauded our champions and demonized their opponents. more

Spam-Friendly Registrar ‘Dynamic Dolphin’ Shuttered by ICANN

Neil Schwartzman writes: Brian Krebs is reporting in KrebsOnSecurity that ICANN last week revoked the charter of Dynamic Dolphin, a registrar that has long been closely associated with spam and cybercrime. "The move came almost five years after this reporter asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to investigate whether the man at the helm of this registrar was none other than Scottie Richter, an avowed spammer who has settled multi-million-dollar spam lawsuits with Facebook, Microsoft and MySpace over the past decade..." more

What Do Bitcoin, Cloud Computing and the New gTLDs All Have in Common?

I am a student of life, learning one hard lesson at a time. In fact, I actually dropped out of my last year of college to start a tech company in a new space called the internet. I was an entrepreneur running an online service prior to the advent of the world wide web in 1992, back when Pine, Usenet, and Gopher ruled the information superhighway. Over the last 25 years, I have learned a great deal about technology adoption cycles by launching six internet companies, each at the forefront of a new technology wave. more

Misunderstanding ICANN

Harvard Law School's distinguished Berkman Center for Internet & Society has published a preliminary study, "Public Participation In ICANN." ...The problem with the preliminary study is that it fundamentally misunderstands the role of ICANN in Internet governance. Specifically, ICANN's duty is not and should not be to simply carry out the will of the "Internet user community." Instead, ICANN's duty is to carry out the responsibilities the organization agreed to in its Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and contract with the Department of Commerce. This does not mean that ICANN should exclude stakeholder views. more

Verisign Doesn’t Think the Net Is Ready for a Thousand New TLDs

Yesterday Verisign sent ICANN a most interesting white paper called New gTLD Security and Stability Considerations. They also filed a copy with the SEC as an 8-K, a document that their stockholders should know about, It's worth reading the whole thing, but in short, their well-supported opinion is that the net isn't ready for all the new TLDs, and even if they were, ICANN's processes or lack thereof will cause other huge problems. more

Most Abused TLDs Put Under Spotlight by Spamhaus

TLDs such as .men and .loan are listed as some of the most abused domains in the world. Spamhaus says some domain name registrars and resellers knowingly sell high volumes of domains to bad actors for profit, and many registries do not do enough to stop or limit this endless supply of domains. more

Something’s Cooking at IETF with Email Authentication

A few months ago, Ted Hardie (AD of Applications for the IETF) informed the MARID WG in the closure announcement as follows: "Given the importance of the world-wide email and DNS systems, it is critical that IETF-sponsored experimental proposals likely to see broad deployment contain no mechanisms that would have deleterious effects on the overall system. The Area Directors intend, therefore, to request that the experimental proposals be reviewed by a focused technology directorate..." more

A Clear Case for ISP Regulation: IP Address Logging

Over on the Network Neutrality Squad yesterday, I noted, without comment, the following quote from the new Time Warner Cable privacy policy bill insert: "Operator's system, in delivering and routing the ISP Services, and the systems of Operator's Affiliated ISPs, may automatically log information concerning Internet addresses you contact, and the duration of your visits to such addresses." Today I will comment, and explain why such logging by ISPs creates a clear case for regulatory intervention, on both privacy and competition grounds. more

Policy Failure Enables Mass Malware: Part I (Rx-Partners/VIPMEDS)

This is the first in a series of releases that tie extensive code injection campaigns directly to policy failures within the Internet architecture. In this report we detail a PHP injection found on dozens of university and non-profit websites which redirected visitor's browsers to illicit pharmacies controlled by the VIPMEDS/Rx-Partners affiliate network. This is not a unique problem, however the pharmacy shop sites in question: HEALTHCUBE[DOT]US and GETPILLS[DOT]US should not even exist under the .US Nexus Policy. more

New gTLDs and the 1%

While Occupy Wall Street and other groups representing the so-called 99% are getting most of the press, the 1% is raising its profile as well, at least when it comes to gTLDs. They are complaining that introducing global choice and competition to the Internet will cost them money. The chief of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) now says that it has "spent the last few months" considering the new gTLD program, and has found it lacking. They want ICANN to shut the whole thing down. more

China Launches World’s First Underwater Data Center

China has achieved a world first by starting the assembly of an underwater commercial data center off the coast of Sanya, on Hainan Island, according to China Daily. more