“.Pol”, a “.Com” for Political Candidates

In the coming months, ICANN will ambitiously expand the number of top-level domains (TLDs). ICANN could add ".movie" and ".paris", among others, to the existing ranks of ".com", ".org", ".gov", and ".edu". Here's another they should consider: a new ".pol" TLD that is reserved exclusively for political candidates and entities. A ".pol" TLD is needed to alleviate problems linked to a now-common phenomenon called political cybersquatting... more

Why Are the EU Data Protection Authorities Taking Away Our Fundamental Right to be Safe?

What if we created a rule that gave everyone - good or bad - the right to hide their license plate, where they live, who they are, and just go incognito? What if we made it a right to walk into any building in the world, and simply say "No, thank you" when the security guards asked for one's identification? The criminals would celebrate, and we'd all be utterly alarmed. We would immediately be afraid for our personal safety. more

Friction-Free Commerce, Spam-Free Future

I'm sitting here at the Inbox conference on e-mail, and listening to an encouraging, plays-nicely-with-other-children talk from Ryan Hamlin, GM of anti-spam technology and strategy at Microsoft. Over the past couple of months, with evidence abounding at this conference, a number of big industry players have been getting together to fight spam. Most significantly, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL - plus a bunch of (other) ISPs are getting together behind a single standard for "Sender ID " - (actually, server authentication) name not yet determined... more

Corporate Domain Registration Practices in Light of New gTLDs

For years, corporate domain name administrators have scoffed at every new second-level and third-level country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) liberalization, and rightly so. Until recently, most had continued the practice of registering significant numbers of variations, misspellings and typo-squats. While I have never encouraged the practice of registering every variation in every geography, as this becomes prohibitively expensive over time... With what seems to be the imminent launch of hundreds of new TLDs as a result of ICANN's new initiative, companies appear to be saying enough is enough, and meaning it. more

Valuing IP Addresses

The prospect of exhaustion of the IPv4 address space is not a surprise. We've been anticipating this situation since at least 1990. But it's a "lumpy" form of exhaustion. It's not the case that the scarcity pressures for IP addresses are evidently to the same level in every part of the Internet. It's not the case that every single address is being used by an active device. A couple of decades ago we thought that an address utilisation ratio of 10% (where, for example, a block of 256 addresses would be used in a network with some 25 addressed devices) was a great achievement.  more

The Rise of Cyrillic Domain Names

This week, on a cruise ship navigating Russia's Neva river, around 250 domain registrars and resellers are gathered for the RU-CENTER annual domain conference. RU-CENTER is the largest Russian registrar in a market that is dominated by three companies. RU-CENTER and competitor Reg.Ru both manage around 28% of domains registered in the country's national suffix... RU-CENTER is also a figurehead for Russia's drive to make Internet use more palatable for those who are not natural ASCII writers. more

SEO Secrets of Keyword-Relevant Domain Extensions

The Domain Name Association (DNA) recently commissioned Web Traffic Advisors, with supporting analysis from Kevin Rowe of Rowe Digital, to do an independent study, Hidden Advantages of Relevant Domain Names, to answer the following question: Can domain name extensions, especially meaningful or relevant domain name extensions (e.g. .Club, .Online, .Rocks, .Today), have the same opportunity as traditional or more generic ones (e.g. traditional .Biz, .Com, .Info, .Org)? more

Scientists Set New Internet Speed World Record: 4.5 Million Times Faster Than Average Broadband

In a groundbreaking development, scientists from Aston University, in collaboration with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan and Nokia Bell Labs in the US, have set a new world record in internet speed. more

Why We Need to Find Solutions on Internet Governance As Soon As Possible

Internet Governance is the buzzword, especially over the past couple of years, with debates and negotiations taking place almost with the same intensity and pathos of delicate issues, such as terrorism. But Internet Governance is a delicate issue. At the beginning, there was the web that made everything better... Life was good and exciting. That was Internet 1.0. But consider Internet 2.0, currently in development. No longer an egalitarian utopia, it has become much like the rest of our society -- divided by class, geography, culture, religion and politics. And its growing fragmentation threatens us all -- because we will be asked to take sides. more

Google Fiber Project: Programming Key to Success

Google has officially rolled out its long-touted Google Fiber Project showcasing what broadband should look and feel like to all users. Yes, it sets the new standard for broadband connections with a 1Gig speedster, over 100 times faster than current broadband offerings in the U.S. Not-withstanding, just speed will not be the determining success factor; the availability of competitive programming will become the deciding judgment in Google's move to tout reasonable costs to bundled broadband. more

The “ICANN Africa Strategy” Is Not the Same as the ‘African Agenda’

The ICANN-45 International meeting of the ICANN Global Community in Toronto, Canada provided an opportunity for the unveiling of the initial draft of the ICANN Africa Strategy, an episode that will always be remembered as a landmark moment which signaled the official commencement of ICANN's new approach to Africa. Indeed, a new chapter has started regarding how ICANN will relate henceforth to Africa. more

June Court Decision Detrimental to Domaining Practices

In a June court ruling, domainer Navigation Catalyst and registrar Basic Fusion lost a cybersquatting lawsuit to Verizon... This is an extremely interesting and potentially precedent-setting case regarding domaining and domain name tasting. The court condemns both practices, leading to a preliminary injunction against the domainer and its registrar based on the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). As far as I can recall, this is the first time that a domainer has lost an ACPA lawsuit in court, and it provides an important data point confirming that domaining can be cybersquatting (a previously unresolved issue)... more

URLs: Ontologically Speaking

I was reading David Weinberger's reports on how the New York Times is planning on tackling its "link rot" problem where articles slip behind the pay-wall. Part of their solution appears to be to replace articles with their summaries. As usual, this got me thinking about telephony. Why don't phone calls and callers have URIs or URLs? ...Let's take addressing the endpoints first. Obviously, ENUM is one way of "Internetising" the phone number address space. more

Botnets Shift Focus to Credential Abuse, Says Latest Akamai Report

Akamai's Fourth Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet, was released today in which it states that the analysis of more than 7.3 trillion bot requests per month has found a sharp increase in the threat of credential abuse, with more than 40 percent of login attempts being malicious. more

Ukraine’s Internet Access and Quality in Rapid Decline Since Russian Invasion

New research paints a rapidly deteriorating picture of the Internet in Ukraine since Russia's invasion. Published by BroadbandNow, the research analyzes internet access and quality in Ukraine over the past six weeks beginning February 1st. more