Site Finder: The Technical, Legal & Privacy Concerns

It is openly admitted , in the same Implementation PDF file, that all accesses to the Site Finder service are monitored and archived. A further worry for users is the privacy policy and terms of service posted on the Site Finder service. Not only does the simple act of mistyping a URL implicitly cause you, the end user, to accept VeriSign's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy without the chance to review and accept or decline either, but critical information as described above is not disclosed in either policy (as of this writing). The Privacy Policy clearly states... more

Top 4 Lessons from CCTA 2014

Sun, surf, and ... service operators? It's a match made in heaven! The Caribbean cable and telecommunications industry may not be large, but it is an important and fast-growing region. The recent Caribbean Cable & Telecommunications Association (CCTA) Annual Meeting in Puerto Rico threw the spotlight on this slice of paradise and I was there to catch up on some of the trends emerging for the year ahead. more

ICANN Does Something Technical!

I've often said that ICANN regulates the business of buying and selling of domain names and that ICANN's claim that it coordinates technical matters to preserve the stability of DNS is a fantasy. Well I am proven wrong. ICANN has done something technical. ICANN has issued Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names, Draft Version 2 [PDF] (pending approval by the ICANN board.) It's only four pages long, but those few pages contain a lot of significant material. more

Massive AWS Outage Disrupts Global Internet, Services Restored After DNS Failure

A major Amazon Web Services outage briefly disrupted millions of websites, apps, and smart devices worldwide. The DNS-related failure exposed the internet's heavy dependence on a few cloud providers before full recovery was achieved. more

Breaking the Internet HOWTO: The Unintended Consequences of Governmental Actions

"Breaking the Internet" is really hard to do. The network of networks is decentralized, resilient and has no Single Point Of Failure. That was the paradigm of the first few decades of Internet history, and most people involved in Internet Governance still carry that model around in their heads. Unfortunately, that is changing and changing rapidly due to misguided government intervention. more

Our Vision for Advancing and Growing the Domain Industry

ICANN 54 is upon us, and to commemorate it, we've got www.dublin.pub loaded up with friendly places to network, take advantage of the city's comedy and music scene, and possibly even enjoy a pint. With so many issues to discuss and address this week, a .PUB address wouldn't be the appropriate destination for the entire conference, but for a microsite discussing the cultural and social opportunities that Dublin has to offer, we happen to think it's perfect, especially in the place that gave the world the Irish pub. more

IP Blocklists, Email, and IPv6

Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and elsewhere have been debating how to handle e-mail-server blocklists in an IPv6 network. Let's take a look at the problem here. We basically have three ways to address spam, in our goal of reducing the amount of spam in our inboxes... more

IETF Looking at Technical Changes to Raise the Bar for Monitoring

During a speech last week at the Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Jari Arkko, IETF's chair, re-emphasized it's efforts to ramp up online security in light of recent revelations of mass internet surveillance. "Perhaps the notion that internet is by default insecure needs to change," Arkko said. Significant technical fixes "just might be possible." more

If ICANN Won’t Stand Up to EU in WHOIS Dispute, Then the U.S. Congress Should

The early designers of the Internet quickly realized that as the number of domain names flourished, there was a need for tracking domain name owners to resolve questions and conflicts that might arise. To that end, they created WHOIS, a public database with the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses of registered domain owners and operators. more

New gTLDs Will Work Way Better Than Vanity Domains Did

There are updates in the domain name business that I have never been able to understand: one of them is called "vanity domain names". A vanity domain name is a domain that keeps on using the first and the second level domain, to form a keyword; the third level domain is sometimes used too. Good examples of these would be: webc.am or marmala.de, aud.it or del.icio.us. more

Internet Society Releases Paper on “What Really Matters About the Internet”

Internet Society has released a paper today highlighting the importance of understanding what is important and unchanging about the Internet. more

IPv4 Address Exhaustion and a Trading Market

There are discussions starting within the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) about the creation of trading market in IPv4 addresses as we approach the inevitable exhaustion of unallocated addresses. The view being put forward is basically "this is likely to happen anyway and by discussing it now, we can ensure it happens in an orderly way". When I first heard this idea I was a bit surprised. The RIRs are policy based bodies and so a shift to a trading market appears to be an abandonment of that policy base. However I have been partly corrected on that. more

Policies to Promote Broadband Access in Developing Countries

In the 2014 Istanbul-Turkey IGF workshop on policies to promote broadband access in developing countries organised by Rui ZHONG of ISOC China, we realized that while technological solutions are advancing rapidly, policy and regulations remain a significant barrier to affordable internet especially in the developing world. According to a report by Alliance for Affordable Internet ( A4AI), the key to affordability is the policy and regulatory environment that shapes the different actors in the market. 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

Chinese and Japanese IDN in .BIZ

I just got back this morning from attending the OASIS XRI TC face-to-face meeting with Bill Barnhill, Drummond Reed, Laurie Rae, Les Chasen, Markus Sabadello, Marty Schleiff. A number of good things came out of the meeting, which I'll leave for another blog because this post is about Internationalized Domain Names, not XRI. So we just opened the flood gates for Chinese and Japanese IDNs for .BIZ. This has been my brainchild for the past half a year or so, and represents a significant step forward for our registry in terms of internationalization. more