A Closer Look at Postponing of the Root Zone KSK Rollover Decision

On Sept. 27, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that the first root zone Key Signing Key (KSK) rollover - originally scheduled to take place on Oct. 11 - will be postponed. Although this was certainly a difficult decision, we fully agree that erring on the side of caution is the best approach to take. In this blog post, I want to explain some of the involvement Verisign has had in KSK rollover preparations, as well as some of the recently available research opportunities which generated data that we shared with ICANN related to this decision. more

ICANN gTLDs: When Names Are Borrowed from an Atlas

When names are borrowed from an Atlas, things happen. Use of Geographic names have always caused some problems for two reasons; one they are in the public domain so anyone else can use them and two they connote that business is confined to just that geographic area. Like Paris Bakery, Waterloo Furniture or London Bank. Geographic naming was the biggest thing during last couple of centuries, as using name of a village or a city as a moniker was considered being on top of the hill. more

Summit to Focus on Knowledge Sharing for IPv6 Deployment

The IPv6 Forum, the North American IPv6 Task Force, and Charmed Technology, Inc. today announced that the U.S. IPv6 Summit 2003 will be held December 8 - 11, 2003 in Arlington, VA, at the Doubletree Crystal City. The U.S. IPv6 Summit 2003 will focus on deployment, technical depth of key IPv6 features, and applications or services of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).  more

Thoughts on the Open Internet - Part 2: The Where and How of “Internet Fragmentation”

In defining what is meant by "Internet Fragmentation" it is useful to briefly describe what is meant by its opposite, an "Open and Coherent Internet". As we've explored in the previous section, "coherence" implies that each of the elements of the Internet are orchestrated to work together to produce a seamless Internet which does not expose the boundaries between discrete elements. more

“Thin Brand Line” Breaks as Canon Announces Plans for .CANON

Until today's announcement by Canon, no large brand had broken the "thin brand line" by revealing their plan to apply for their own new top-level domain. Now with Canon's announcement, other major companies have been challenged to either announce their TLD plans or else state that they plan to forgo the chance to brand themselves at the top level of the domain name space. more

Law Enforcement Agencies Will Have Authority on Registries and Registrars

Accessing Whois information and acting on a litigious domain name is becoming a nightmare for law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement agencies must have an access to the information provided by registrants in the Whois database and, in specific cases, have authority to act FAST on a domain name. The EU has a solution for this and it's coming in 2020. more

Apple Setting Up First Data Center in China to Comply with Tougher Cybersecurity Laws

Apple today reported it is constructing its first data center in China, in partnership with a local internet services company, in order to comply with the tougher cybersecurity laws enacted last month. more

UDRP and the Law: Should Cybersquatting be the Default View?

I have returned to the subject of the title on a number of occasions and it is worth revisiting. Like judicial proceedings, the substance of disputes under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and Panel determinations are publicly available. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) mandates in its Rules that all decisions must be delivered to the parties within "three business days" of their receipt of the decision and posted on providers' websites. more

Strong Support for IDNs, GEOs and/or Communities to Go First

ICANN's public comment period on how to resolve the contention scenario for probably 1,409 new gTLDs entering the root has closed on 19 August 2012. Alltogether 98 comments from parties around the globe have been received, representing language communities, cities, corporations, entrepreneurs and Internet users. In contrast to many comment periods we have participated in during the 7-year long policy development process for new gTLDs it seems that a clear opinion emerges from the applicants' community and other parties. more

China on Its Way to Becoming a Formidable Satellite Internet Service Competitor

In a study of the Internet in China in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I observed that "China has been able to execute plans effectively by allocating resources to competing, government-owned enterprises," and Kai-Fu Lee shows that they have pursued a similar strategy with respect to AI. Now they are doing the same with low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband satellite constellations. more

Large-Scale Study by Security Researchers in China Sheds Light on the Scope of DNS Interception

During the 27th Usenix Security Symposium held in Baltimore, MD last week, a group of researchers from China revealed results obtained from a large-scale analysis DNS interceptions. more

How Not to Develop Public Policy

Some of ICANN's current proceedings on the introduction of new generic top level domains (gTLDs) provide a case study on how not to develop public policy. In particular, the Rights Protection Mechanism proceedings, with serious implications for trademark owners, have followed a course that does not correspond to the ideal of ICANN's bottom-up, consensus-based processes for policy development. More importantly, these proceedings are effectively unilateral developments in international law without the benefit of treaties or international conventions. more

Defining Broadband

The FCC is seeking public comments to help create a better definition of "broadband". The effort is in relation to its development of a National Broadband Plan by February 2010 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Accurately noting that "broadband can be defined in myriad ways" and "tends to center on download and upload throughput," the FCC seeks a more robust definition. The definition will be part of the governance over those receiving funding for broadband development as part of the Recovery Act. This could get interesting. more

.ECO Top-Level Domain in Danger?

I once wrote about about the legal right objections on Guillon.info and with all these new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) announcements, I find it interesting to check if an application could be blocked by paragraph 3.2.2.2 of the latest Draft Applicant Guidebook. more

IPv6 Day a Couple of Days After

June 8th IPv6 World day came and went without any major glitches, let alone disruption of the internet, and witnessed varying traffic fluctuations depending where on the net observations were made. From a Tata Communications AS6453 perspective, a global tier 1 IP wholesale network, data gathered by a number of probes gave an interesting pulse on what happened in some major international arteries of the internet. more