Sites Under gb.com Go Offline Amidst Legal Battle Over Domain

Kevin Murphy reporting in DomainIncite: "Thousands of companies that use the pseudo-top-level-domain .gb.com have gone offline due to a legal fight between the registry and its founder. CentralNIC sells third-level gb.com domains as a 'Great Britain' alternative to .co.uk. A Google search reveals a great many small businesses use the extension for their web sites. They're all out of luck today."
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Global Internet Traffic Falls by Around 40% Due to a Google Outage

Worldwide internet traffic plunged by around 40% as Google services suffered a complete black-out, according to web analytics experts. The tech company said all of its services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down for between one and five minutes on Friday. more

US Opens Unified Cyber Security Command Centre

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today opened the new National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) — a 24-hour, DHS-led coordinated watch and warning center that will improve national efforts to address threats and incidents affecting the nation's critical information technology and cyber infrastructure. more

U.S. Federal Communications Commission Votes 2-1 for Net Neutrality Rollback

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 on Thursday to advance a Republican plan to reverse the Obama administration's 2015 'net neutrality' order. more

Carriers Are No Longer Operators

The classic view of a wireline or mobile carrier is that it was an "operator", it ran out cables, raised poles, installed switches, constructed central offices and base stations and the like. However, the figures from Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) show that firm is making 45% of its sales from services, meaning it is constructing and managing networks on behalf of "carriers". NSN is "carrying" a lot of telecoms traffic. This has been accelerated by the global financial crisis... more

ICANN Sued in an Attempt to Block .WEB Auction

Controversy over .WEB auction takes a new turn as various sources today pointed to a lawsuit filed against ICANN by Ruby Glen LLC, a subsidiary of Donuts Inc. -- the largest registry for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). more

Mozilla Offers Proposal for Solving Net Neutrality Problem

Mozilla says that the FCC shouldn't look at an Internet line only as a relationship between an Internet provider and a subscriber. Regulators should formally recognize that there's a third party involved: Content providers such as websites, apps, gaming and more, Mozilla says. more

Multi-Stakeholder Internet Governance Is Captured and Presumed Dead

Technical management of the Internet was delegated to ICANN by the U.S. government because it was believed that the private sector would be more agile and responsive to the needs of globally distributed stakeholders. However, this optimism and the faith it has produced has proven to be misplaced since ICANN's multi-stakeholder governance continues falling far short of the basic expectations set when it was created. more

The Need for Sustainable Open Source Projects

As a long-standing contributor to open standards, and someone trying to become more involved in the open source world (I really need to find an extra ten hours a day!), I am always thinking about these ecosystems, and how they relate to the network engineering world. This article on RedisDB, and in particular this quote, caught my attention. more

Cybersecurity Regime for Satellites and other Space Assets Urgently Required, Warn Researchers

"A radical review of cybersecurity in space is needed to avoid potentially catastrophic attacks," warn researchers at the International Security Department of UK-based thinktank, Chatham House. more

Practical Pointers for Paring Domain Name Portfolios

As we enter the new normal, many legal departments have already begun looking for ways to reduce spend even as they are being asked to register COVID-19 domains. IP maintenance fees for patents, trademarks and domains are a natural place to start. While paring back patent and trademark portfolios can yield some significant savings, it's well-known that most corporate domain name portfolios contain registrations that are no longer needed. more

SpaceX to Launch Satellites for Competitor OneWeb

On March 2, Russia covered the US flag on the Roscosmos Space Agency rocket that was scheduled to launch 36 OneWeb broadband satellites on March 5. The Russians made two obviously untenable demands -- that OneWeb guarantee that the satellites would not be used for military purposes and the United Kingdom government remove its investment in the company. OneWeb declined, and the satellites were removed from the rocket. more

The Operationalization of Norms and Principles on Cybersecurity

With two simultaneous processes getting underway in the UN General Assembly's First Committee, the UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Cybersecurity, and several technology and multi-stakeholder initiatives pushing cybersecurity improvement, the world of cyber norms has become both more interesting and more complicated. more

Early Disclosure of UDRP Complaints

Under the previous rules for the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), domain name registrants that had a complaint filed against them were supposed to be notified of the complaint by the trademark owner that filed it. Then, a revised set of UDRP rules that went into effect in 2015 eliminated the complainant's obligation to notify the respondent. Instead, the new rules only require the UDRP service provider (such as WIPO or the Forum) notify the respondent, presumably after the registrar has locked the domain name, preventing any transfers. more

Alphabet Launches New Cybersecurity Company, Chronicle

A new cybersecurity company called Chronicle has emerged from Alphabet's "moonshot factory," that's dedicated to helping companies find and stop cyberattacks before they cause harm. more