Do “brandsucks.com” Names Really Have a “Destructive Potential”?

"'Sucks.com is the rightmost anchor of nearly 20,000 domains registered today. Two thousand domains have 'stinks.com' on the right and about the same number of domains begin with the term 'boycott'," write the authors of the recently released paper The Power of Internet Gripe Sites. According to their (interesting) study, 35% of the "brandsucks" domains are owned by the brand while 45% are available for registration. They thus advise brand owners "to take a serious look at the traffic that these names garner and the kind of unique marketing opportunity they can afford." ...I do not fully agree with their conclusions... more

NETmundial Initiative Taking Positive Steps Forward

The Net Mundial conference in Sao Paulo in April 2014 added a new element to the global Internet Governance Ecosystem. It demonstrated that the multistakeholder model for the governance of the Internet is able, not only to discuss issues of global importance, as we do it now for nearly ten years within the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), but it can also produce a concrete outcome. The Universal Declaration of Internet Governance Principle and the Sao Paulo Roadmap have enhanced the existing mechanisms. more

New York Times Sues FCC for Net Neutrality Records Concerning Possible Russian Involvement

The New York Times Co. filed a lawsuit today against the Federal Communications Commission concerning records the newspaper alleges may shed light on possible Russian participation in a public comment period before the commission rolled back Obama-era net neutrality rules. more

Top 10 Tips for Building a TLD Affiliate Network Using Social Media

It makes the strategist in my heart sing when I see that most of the new gTLDs labeled generic are in fact words that speak to a specific niche. Most are even so specific that the average person, a friend sitting next to you at a dinner party, your parents, can understand how a space online dedicated to that word might be a reasonable option for that audience and the names they chose online. And then inevitably you are forced to trot along the path of 'what about .com??!' with said dinner party guest. more

Mozilla Named “Internet Villain” for Supporting DNS-Over-HTTPS by a UK ISP Association

Mozilla was nominated as one of the three ISPAUK's 2019 Internet Villains for their proposed approach "to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK." more

I Had a Dream: ICANN Has 2 Billion Reasons to Support Developing Countries

Last week, the 50th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech was marked with much fanfare. Well, I too had a dream the other day, almost two weeks ago. I dreamt I was in a conference. Which is no news. The conference was an ICANN-sponsored conference. No news there either; I've been to many ICANN meetings. And it was on food security! An ICANN-sponsored conference on food security? more

Important New Jersey Supreme Court Decision in Internet Privacy

The New Jersey Supreme Court has issued an important decision on Internet users' right to privacy. The case involves a dispute about whether an ISP violated a user's privacy rights by turning over subscriber information (name, address, billing details) associated with a particular IP address. It ends up that the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid for a variety of reasons. As the user had a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in her Internet activities and identifying information, and because the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid, the New Jersey court determined that the ISP should not have turned over the personal data... more

Google Is Installing 1.6 Million Solar Panels for Its New Tennessee and Alabama Data Centers

The company has pledged that in the coming years, it will purchase the output of several new solar farms. more

Carriers Are Trying to Take Back Control of the Home Network

With all the focus on neutrality in the provider networks we must not lose sight of what is happening in our own homes. As with some of the efforts to make the networks work better (as measured in the providers' paternalistic) view, their attempt to retake the home is about serving us better by reducing the operators' costs. "Better" is of course in terms of the operator's own measures. It's not quite the same as in 1995 when providers opposed home networks and want to charge us for each machine... more

ICANN Maps Whois Models for GDPR

Earlier today ICANN held a webinar to provide an update on their data privacy activities in relation to whois and GDPR. Rather than simply talking about the various "models" they produced both a visual mapping as well as a matrix. While some attendees may not agree with how all the models are classified it is still a helpful way of showing the deviations from the current fully public whois model for gTLD domain name registrations. more

Complicating ICANN’s New TLDs Decision

Drawing on standard-setting approaches and the regulatory options at the disposal of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), I outline three alternative venues to decide on launching new top-level domain names (TLDs). ICANN needs to analyze all these venues before making a final procedural decision. more

A Short History of DNS Over HTTP (So Far)

The IETF is in the midst of a vigorous debate about DNS over HTTP or DNS over HTTPS, abbreviated as DoH. How did we get there, and where do we go from here? (This is somewhat simplified, but I think the essential chronology is right.) Javascript code running in a web browser can't do DNS lookups, other than with browser.dns.resolv() to fetch an A record, or implicitly by fetching a URL which looks up a DNS A or AAAA record for the domain in the URL. more

Dog Eats Opt-Out Requests, FTC Is Not Impressed

Last week the Federal Trade Commission settled a lawsuit against Yesmail, a large ESP (Email Service Provider). The facts of the case are not in dispute, but their meaning is. Yesmail, like most large ESPs, has absorbed a number of its smaller competitors over the years including a company called @Once. Back in 2004, they screwed up their incoming mail so that a whole lot of bounces and opt-out requests were erroneously filtered out as spam. As a result, thousands of people who'd told @Once to stop sending them mail kept getting mail anyway... more

The Case for Making 3G Mobile Internet Access Free in Cuba

Last week ETECSA began offering 3G mobile access to Cuba's national intranet and the global Internet and President Diaz-Canal tweeted the news. His tweet has received 216 comments so far and reading through them, many are effusively positive... Others were critical, noting that the prices are high relative to Cuban incomes (one said "absurd") and the technology is obsolete -- "Congratulations, but they're 20 years late." more

DOTZON Study: Digital Company Brands 2021

DOTZON presents the fourth edition of the Digital Company Brands study. After having introduced the study in 2018, DOTZON continued to expand and enhance the underlying data to display how cities successfully use their Digital Company Brands. The Digital Company Brand is the digital dimension of a company brand and mirrors the "digitalness" of a company. Purely digital company brands developed for the first time in the 1990s, with the emergence of Internet business models. Some of them were based solely on a generic Internet address, for example, www.hotel.de or www.amazon.com. more