Top 3 New Requirements to the TLD Evaluation Criteria and What They Mean for Applicants

Three sections of the redlined version of the Draft Evaluation Criteria for new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) caught my attention. It seems ICANN wants to ensure it has information to not only evaluate and score responses, but to conduct a post-launch analysis of the program's success in terms of expanded competition, consumer choice and trust. That additional information means more work by both the applicant and for ICANN. But it's a good move because pre-launch preparation and thought staves off mishaps and misfortunes later. more

Internet Religious Wars: Net Neutrality Episode

Turning network technical protocols into religion seems like an inherently bad idea -- transient and unstable at best. However, it happens. More than 40 years ago, the world of legacy telecommunications and network design formalism started the tendency with OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) and ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Networks). A few years later, the academic research community did it with their myriad host-to-host datagram protocols -- eventually calling one "the Internet." more

Meta’s Undersea Ambitions: A Cable to Power the AI Future

Meta has unveiled plans for an ambitious undersea cable project that, at 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles), would be the longest in the world—surpassing the Earth’s circumference. Dubbed Project Waterworth, the infrastructure aims to link the United States with India, Brazil, South Africa, and other regions, bolstering global connectivity and supporting artificial intelligence (AI) development. more

An Astonishing Collaboration

Wow. It's out. It's finally, finally out... So there's a bug in DNS, the name-to-address mapping system at the core of most Internet services. DNS goes bad, every website goes bad, and every email goes...somewhere. Not where it was supposed to... I'm pretty proud of what we accomplished here. We got Windows. We got Cisco IOS. We got Nominum. We got BIND 9, and when we couldn't get BIND 8, we got Yahoo, the biggest BIND 8 deployment we knew of, to publicly commit to abandoning it entirely. It was a good day... more

About Those “Mission Critical” Bits

News that Google and Verizon are negotiating "better than best efforts" Internet routing probably comes across as a betrayal of sorts to network neutrality advocates. Bear in mind that Information Service Providers ("ISPs") do not file public contracts known as tariffs and have the freedom to negotiate deals with individual clients. On the other hand ISPs, regardless of their FCC regulatory classification, cannot engage in unfair trade practices that achieve anticompetitive goals such a tilting the competitive playing field in favor of a corporate affiliate, or special third party. more

Mitigating the Increasing Risks of an Insecure Internet of Things

The emergence and proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices on industrial, enterprise, and home networks brings with it unprecedented risk. The potential magnitude of this risk was made concrete in October 2016, when insecure Internet-connected cameras launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a provider of DNS service for many large online service providers (e.g., Twitter, Reddit). Although this incident caused large-scale disruption, it is noteworthy that the attack involved only a few hundred thousand endpoints... more

Most Government Domains in the US Have Adopted Email Authentication Program to Prevent Fake Emails

According to reports, the majority of the U.S. federal domains have met the deadline to adopt an email authentication program to prevent fake emails from being sent. more

The Cold-War Fight Against Domaining Continues

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win!" quote by Gandhi pretty much summarizes the evolution of the domain name monetization and development business. I have watched this business come of age for more than half a decade... In the beginning nobody cared... then when people started talking about how great it was, 'smart people' and the "legitimate web" laughed. Then the trucks with money showed up... A significant double-digit percentage of global Internet traffic is now owned by domain holders with generic names. So the fight is on.  more

2020 Domain Name Year in Review

2020 - a year like no other. The impact of COVID on the domain name industry was felt far and wide as ICANN meetings were held virtually, travel was cancelled, TLD launches were delayed, the topic of domain name abuse was front and center, and we all tried to navigate a "new" normal. Unlike many sectors, the domain name industry was fortunate and, in many ways, survived 2020 unscathed. Much of our industry was able to continue working from home after an initial period of adjustment. more

MicroID: A Microformat for Claiming Ownership

This morning I learned about MicroIDs from Doc Searls. Jeremy Miller has proposed MicroIDs as a microformat that "allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere." A MicroID is a hash of two hashed values. The first is a verified communication ID. The second is the URI of the site that the content will be published on. You end up with a unique, long string of gibberish that can be put in the header of a Web page or even wrapped around one part of a page... more

ICANN New gTLD Auction Proceeds Approaching $30 Million

While the debate continues as to whether most new gTLDs are a sound long-term investment for their registry operators, there's no disputing that the program has been an economic boom for ICANN. The 1,930 first round applications each required an application fee of $185,000, which added up to a tidy $357 million. Even after refunds for withdrawn applications ICANN still cleared about a third of a billion dollars from the first round before a single string was delegated. more

Tucows Comments on ICANN Applicant Guidebook

The latest ICANN Applicant Guidebook was released in mid-April and covers the introduction of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLD). The introduction of new gTLDs has been an ongoing conversation for more than a decade. We have an opportunity to approve the final draft in time for consideration of the new gTLD implementation program during the ICANN Board meeting, which will be held on Monday, 20 June 2011, in Singapore. We submitted our comments yesterday and wanted to share them with you. more

The Addressing System for the Next (Wireless) Internet

I gave a talk yesterday at Northwestern called A DNS in the Air. My idea is that, in order to scale, the emerging wireless Internet needs something analogous to the domain name system (DNS) -- the infrastructure that allows you to reach sites across the Net. Billions of mobile phones, and even more billions of connected sensors and other wireless devices will completely overwhelm our current spectrum management regime. AT&T Wireless estimates we will need between 250 and 600 TIMES the current wireless capacity in 2018, less than a decade from now. more

Why ICANN Nairobi Security Concerns May Be a Blessing in Disguise

There is a questionmark over ICANN's upcoming meeting in Nairobi, Kenya again. This time it has more bite than the usual xenophobia: the COO has published a US Department of State report that lists the conference centre itself as a specific threat from a Somalian insurgency group, Al-Shabaab. In response, a number of Internet companies have already announced they are pulling their people. more

ICANN’s Noah: Chehade’s 40-Day Report Card

Forty days. That's how long Fadi Chehade has had to get a handle on the most complex, diverse and important non-profit corporation the world has ever known. The last guy to face such an unforgiving timeline was measuring timber in cubits. So if Cheade is Noah, I guess that makes ICANN Chairman Steve Crocker God, telling Fadi to wrangle all these diverse (and often diverging) constituencies and march them two-by-two into the boat, ahead of the coming storm. more