Multi-Stakeholder Debate at the IGF: Lessons from a Safari

Here at the IGF in Kenya, we're debating how governments, private sector, and civil society can improve the multi-stakeholder model that's helped the Internet become such a vital part of life around the world. Makes me think of another kind of multi-stakeholder model I saw last week on a photo safari in Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve. more

Market Forces Should Control Registry Services?

Sonia Arrison, a director of the Center for Technology Studies at the California-based non-profit Pacific Research Institute, writes an interesting op-ed piece in the Internet news publication CNET News.com. She argues that the job of privatizing the domain name system should be completed and that market forces should control registry services such as SiteFinder deployed by VeriSign for about three weeks in September...While not a position I would agree with, as I would prefer more government control and additional regulation, it is definitely insightful and well written. She makes some interesting quotes... more

Assessing Current Generic New gTLDs

If we are already familiar with new generic Top-Level Domains from the ICANN new gTLD program, also called "new gTLDs", are we just as familiar with these new domain name extensions, which are called "generic" and which could be an alternative to the existing ".com" domain name extension? Not so many... As the list of new gTLDs is very long, we can easily say that there is a Top-Level Domain for any kind of business: a ".club" for Clubs, a ".news" for News, a ".dentist" for Dentists, a ".actor" for Actors, etc... more

Registration Operations Association Workshop Update

In a series of recent blog posts I've described the technical challenges in registration operations, a proposal for an industry association, and announced an interactive workshop to explore association formation. This is an update on where things stand with the workshop. The first Registration Operations Association Workshop is scheduled for Thursday, 16 October 2014 in the Pacific Palisades room at the Los Angeles Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel, the same venue being used for ICANN 51. more

Trademark Owners Beware: Cybersquatting Spreads to Twitter

TechCrunch reports that its brand has been taken as a Twitter name, and that there is a landrush going on to get these names, which are already trading for money. The problem is so bad that a name brokerage, Tweexchange, has sprung up to get to facilitate sales. more

Old New Telco Thinking

Ahh, so the telecom incumbents have come up with a "new" idea for the Internet -- usage-based pricing. That's right, more usage (for things like VOIP and video especially) means more costs to operate the network, so users should pay by the bit, or some similar metric. It's all so logical! But wait a minute. I thought what sparked the consumer Internet revolution was the fact that ISPs didn't charge by the minute, but offered flat-rate monthly fees. And what catalyzed the boom in cellular usage here in the US was the shift from heavily usage-based pricing to the largely flat rates we see today... more

.AI You Ready? A Domain to Add to Your Portfolio… Before Someone Else Does

On the sunny beaches of Anguilla -- a small island of just 35 square miles -- I'm sure artificial intelligence (AI) is the last thing people are thinking about. The primary industries of Anguilla, set in the Leeward islands in the Caribbean, are tourism and offshore banking. However, this nation has been assigned the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .AI -- which is being repurposed to represent artificial intelligence. more

RIPE NCC Publishes Case Study of youtube.com Hijack

As you may be aware from recent news reports, traffic to the youtube.com website was 'hijacked' on a global scale on Sunday, 24 February 2008. The incident was a result of the unauthorised announcement of the prefix 208.65.153.0/24 and caused the popular video sharing website to become unreachable from most, if not all, of the Internet. The RIPE NCC conducted an analysis into how this incident was seen and tracked by the RIPE NCC's Routing Information Service (RIS) and has published a case study... more

Spanish Police Raid the Offices of .cat gTLD Registry

The offices of the .cat gTLD registry Fundació puntCAT were raided by the Spanish police this morning. The company reported the incident via a series of tweets as the raid was being carried out. more

Is There Such a Thing as Technical Internet Governance?

In ICANN's "President & CEO Goals for Fiscal Year 2021", Göran Marby went out to make a curious distinction in the document's second stated goal, according to which he intends to "Implement a common strategy for Internet governance (IG) and technical Internet governance (TIG)". Proceeding to state that "we will begin by identifying the most important issues we need to address, followed by an assessment of where and how we can intervene, the venues we should use, and the resources required to be effective". more

IPv6 DNS Blacklists Reconsidered

I opined about a year ago that DNS blacklists wouldn't work for mail that runs over IPv6 rather than IPv4. The reason is that IPv6 has such a huge range of addresses that spammers can easily send every message from a unique IP address, which means that recipient systems will fire off a unique set of DNSBL queries for every message... Now I'm much less sure this will be a problem... more

Neglected Domain Renewals Increasingly Scooped Up by Crooks for Credit Card Stealing Purposes

The registrant of domain names with decent traffic who fail to renew them are proving quite costly for owners and others. more

LTE and Spectrum Stupidity

Mobile operators are counting on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology to handle surging demand for mobile data access. But LTE developers made some poor choices, cutting spectral efficiency and thus driving up operator costs. LTE was envisioned as an all IP system, but the RF allocations follow the voice-centric approach of earlier generations. While LTE standards allow for either Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) or Time Division Duplexing (TDD), all initial LTE equipment uses FDD. FDD requires two separate blocks of spectrum... more

DNS Firewall Market Expected to Grow From $90.5 Million in 2018 to $169.7 Million by 2023

DNS firewall market size is expected to grow from USD 90.5 million in 2018 to USD 169.7 million by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.4% according to a market research conducted by MarketsandMarkets. more

Confirmed: Bill Clinton to Address ICANN Meeting in SF

A personal source close to Bill Clinton has confirmed to us that the former president will give the keynote speech ICANN meeting in San Francisco March 14-18. The meeting promises to produce far more electricity than sleepy NGO-lawyer-techie-academic-lobbyist ICANN attendees are used to. more