International Law and Cyberspace: It’s the “How”, Stupid

The Internet has enhanced freedom of communication, ignored national borders, and removed time and space barriers. But the Internet sphere was never a law-free zone. Already ICANN's "Articles of Incorporation" (1998) constituted that the management of critical Internet resources has to take place within the frameworks of "applicable national and international law". more

Google Launch of DNS Service and OpenDNS Reply

Earlier today Google announced the launch of their new DNS service. They're pushing it as part of their "better experience" and "speed" drive that Matt Cutts and Co have been harping on about for the last while. OpenDNS, however, has been offering a similar service for quite some time... So it was quite interesting to read OpenDNS' response to the Google service. more

ICANN Introduces Pandemic Internet Access Reimbursement Program

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Monday announced its Pandemic Internet Access Program Pilot for the upcoming ICANN69 meetings. more

A Tale of Two Governance Models

As many of us in the Internet community gear up for the ICANN meeting in Colombia next week, it's important to remember that not everybody embraces the multi-stakeholder approach that we've gradually learned to love. Just a month ago, a group with a very different vision of how to run things wrapped up their own Internet governance meeting in Latin America. Their meeting was three times as long and accomplished about a third as much, but they'd still like to see their model replace the ICANN model. more

Glaring Weaknesses in Prosecuting International Cyber Crime

I have to tell you -- I'm not really happy about the fact that the majority of serious cyber crime on the Internet happens without any legal prosecution. I spend an enormous amount of time -- far beyond my "day job" and exceeding what some might consider my professional capacity -- tracking cyber crime. I also work closely with law enforcement (both in the U.S. and abroad) to assist in the intelligence gathering process, putting the pieces of the puzzles together, connecting the dots, and so forth. And most of the major criminal organizations are still operating (pretty much) in the open, with fear of retribution or criminal prosecution, for a number of reasons. more

IPv6 RIPEness: One Year Later

A year ago, the RIPE NCC introduced IPv6 RIPEness -- a system that rates IPv6 deployment of Local Internet Registries (LIRs)... Now, one year later, the numbers have gone up... In absolute numbers: more than 3,000 LIRs have IPv6 address space. This means that the RIPE NCC has made more than 1,100 IPv6 allocations within 12 months. more

VeriSign Supports New gTLDs with Appropriate Safeguards

The introduction of new Internet domains to the global marketplace has the potential to dramatically grow the domain name marketplace, increasing the value of domain names, driving new demand for registry services and opening new markets for registrars and registries alike. Because VeriSign operates .com -- the legacy generic top-level domain (gTLD) -- many in the Internet community have assumed that we would oppose the introduction of new gTLDs. The truth is quite the opposite. more

UK’s DNS Open to Prying Eyes

Network Penetration conducted a survey at the start of 2003 to check the status of the UK's DNS infrastructure. The second scan of the year has just been completed and the results are much more positive. There are however still some serious holes in major areas...Here is a look at what was tested, the results, some sample zone transfers and recommendations.  more

Soon in a Mail Box Near You: Internationalized Email Addresses

The EAI working group of the IETF has finished (part of) its work on the interationalization of email addresses. This, together with Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) will make it possible to send email messages to non-7 bit ASCII addresses... There are 3 RFCs, covering changes to the SMTP protocol, e-mail message format and delivery Status Notifications. more

ICANN: Our Top 3 Policy Priorities for 2015

2014 was a big year for us and for our clients. The new gTLD program forced us to rethink, reprioritize and implement new and different strategies to protect our brands online. The uncertainty largely behind us, and with more information at our fingertips about just how well (or not) brands are faring in the new environment, it's time to look forward to what we can do in 2015 to fix what's broken, throw away what's useless, fight for what's important... more

The Risk Factors of CDNs and Centrality

On the afternoon of June 17 of this year, there was a widespread outage of online services. In Australia, it impacted three of the country's largest banks, the national postal service, the country's reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia, the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and some US airlines. The roll call of affected services appeared to reach some 500 serv more

CENTR Statement on IDN Homograph Attacks

Recently a proof of concept attack was announced on the Internet that demonstrated how a web address could be constructed that looked in some web browsers identical to that of a well known website. This technique could be used to trick a user into going to a website that they did not plan on visiting, and possibly provide sensitive information to a third party. As a result of this demonstration, there has been a number of voices calling for web browsers to disable or remove support for IDNs by default. ...CENTR, a group of many of the world's domain registries - representing over 98% of domain registrations worldwide - believes such strong reactions are heavily detrimental... more

European Countries Continue to Lead IPv6 Adoption, Reports Akamai

Akamai Technologies released its First Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet Report last week based on data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform. more

Global Re-Distribution of IPv4 Addresses Requires Greater Trading Transparency and Security

He warns millions of IPv4 numbers are impacted by inaccurate records, and as a consequence, ARIN’s registry cannot, in many cases, be relied upon as the definitive single source for establishing the rightful holders of IPv4 address space. more

Plutocrats and the Internet

The new month visits on us a new attempt to control the Internet; the UN's specialized agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is holding its quadrennial plenipotentiary meeting in Guadalajara, Jalisco this week. The governments assembled there are considering a few proposals that can best be described as piquant. more