IETF and Crypto Zealots

I've been prompted to write this brief opinion piece in response to a recent article posted on CircleID by Tony Rutkowski, where he characterises the IETF as a collection of "crypto zealots." He offers the view that the IETF is behaving irresponsibly in attempting to place as much of the Internet's protocols behind session level encryption as it possibly can. ... Has the IETF got it wrong? Is there a core of crypto zealots in the IETF that are pushing an extreme agenda about encryption? more

Universal Acceptance Issues with .TUBE, ASCII and IDN Domains

This open letter, penned by Rami Schwartz, the CEO of Latin American Telecom LLC, addresses Universal Acceptance issues related to the .TUBE top-level domain (TLD). Published to the ICANN Board, it highlights challenges faced in making .TUBE domains function correctly in popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. more

Canadians Aren’t Buying Into Net Neutrality

The Tyee, an independent on-line magazine based in BC wrote a story about net neutrality more than a year ago, noting that most Canadians are sleeping through the debate. They followed up again last week. Despite what is called a "perfect storm of events that may crystallize the issue for consumers, businesses, politicians, and regulators," there hasn't been an overwhelming outcry, despite extensive press coverage of the most recent network activities. There are a number of voices who present a conspiracy theory on traffic shaping in Canada... more

Spam Arrest’s Sender Agreement Fails Because Email Marketer’s Employees Lacked Authority

People hate receiving spam, but most people stopped obsessing about spam a decade ago or more. In the interim, anti-spam filters have improved dramatically. Still, some anti-spammers hate spam so passionately -- or, perhaps, hope to put a little coin in their pockets -- that we still see a steady stream of lawsuits against email marketers. For the most part, those lawsuits don't win; in the past half-decade, repeat anti-spam plaintiffs have rarely won in court. more

New Domain Name Registrar Accreditation Agreement Approved by ICANN Board

ICANN Board of Directors today approved a new Domain Name Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) following over a year of negotiations between ICANN and its Registrar Stakeholders Group - last RAA was approved in 2009. more

Alphabet to Shut down Loon, its Balloon Based Internet Access Project

Despite several groundbreaking technical achievements over the past nine years, Google's parent company Alphabet has decided to end the Loon project. The company said the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.  more

RIP Network Neutrality

It's been an interesting couple of months in the ongoing tensions between Internet carriage and content service providers, particularly in the United States. The previous confident assertion was that the network neutrality regulatory measures in that country had capably addressed these tensions. While the demands of the content industry continue to escalate as the Internet rapidly expands into video content streaming models, we are seeing a certain level of reluctance from the carriage providers to continually accommodate these expanding demands... more

Networks Announcing IPv6 - One Year Later

About a year ago, we shared some graphs that showed the percentage of IPv6 enabled networks over time. More precisely, it showed the percentage of Autonomous Systems (ASes) that announced one or more IPv6 prefixes in the global routing table. The results for the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) were described in an earlier CircleID post... We looked at the progress since then. more

Brownian Motion And ICANN’s Latest Status Report To The United States

Brownian motion is the ceaseless random movement of particles suspended in a warm fluid. The particles move because they are buffeted by random collisions with molecules and atoms speeding this way and that under the impetus of heat. The greater the heat, the greater the motion. But no matter how much motion and how much heat, Brownian motion brings no progress.

Today I learned from Bret Fausett's ICANN Blog that ICANN has just published its Sixth Status Report Under ICANN/US Government Memorandum of Understanding, dated March 31, 2003. This report is subtitled "Report by ICANN to United States Department of Commerce Re: Progress Toward Objectives of Memorandum of Understanding" (emphasis added.) more

The Two Sides of Net Neutrality

Over the last decade or so the telecoms industry has been at loggerheads with the content providers and distributors (OTT companies) regarding the use of the infrastructure by the OTT players. On one side we have the people arguing for net neutrality (leave the OTT players alone), and on the other we have the telcos wanting to charge certain players for using their network. The whole issue came to a head, when in mid April the FCC decided to allow telecom operators (or ISPs as they are called in the USA) to charge content providers for higher quality services. more

Interview: Antony Van Couvering on the New TLD Opportunity

I recently caught up with a former colleague Antony Van Couvering. Many here on CircleID probably know him, he's been active in the domain name business since the late 1990's. With the new Top-Level Domain (TLD) issue so white hot and with Antony's firm right in the mix, I thought it was time to get his take via an interview. If anyone has questions (or challenges perhaps?) to anything below, I'm happy to forward to Antony for a response. more

New gTLDs: The Registry Lock

Last week, The New York Times website domain was hacked by "the Syrian Electronic Army". Other famous websites faced the same attack in 2012 by the Hacker group "UGNazi" and, in 2011 by Turkish hackers. Basically, it seems that no Registrar on the Internet is safe from attack, but the launching of new gTLDs can offer new ways to mitigate these attacks. more

ICANN and the Data Quality Act: Part III

This is the third part of a multi-part series reported by ICANNfocus. In this part, the focus is on how ICANN implementation of the Data Quality Act would address congressional concerns. "Congress is deeply concerned by ICANN's management and is demanding meaningful change in how the organization governs the internet. Congressional concerns regarding ICANN and Congressional oversight activities were detailed in Part II of this series." more

Video: IETF Chair Jari Arkko Summarizes The Activities of IETF 87 In Berlin

The 87th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Berlin, Germany, concluded on August 2, 2013. IETF Chair Jari Arkko recently published his summary of IETF 87 on the IETF Blog highlighting what he felt were some of the more important aspects of what was a very successful IETF meeting. I also had the privilege of interviewing Jari on video about the meeting. more

Secure Unowned Hierarchical Anycast Root Name Service - And an Apologia

In Internet Draft draft-lee-dnsop-scalingroot-00.txt, I described with my coauthors a method of distributing the task of providing DNS Root Name Service both globally and universally. In this article I will explain the sense of the proposal in a voice meant to be understood by a policy-making audience who may in many cases be less technically adept than the IETF DNSOP Working Group for whom the scalingroot-00 draft was crafted. I will also apologize for a controversial observation concerning the addition of new root name servers... more