Singular and Plural New gTLDs: Costly Headaches

ICANN has recently stated that it will allow the public to register plural and singular gTLDs that are variants of words already registered as domain names. .Books will be able to join the currently allocated .book, and .pet will be able to join .pets. Of course, a pair like .blue and .blues, two words that look alike but have different meanings, isn't at issue here. The focus is just plurals and singulars. But that leaves plenty of room for trouble, and ICANN has to tackle some tough questions now, before the policy launch. more

MOPO - The Latest Speed Bump on ICANN’s New gTLD Superhighway

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a Petri dish for acronyms. The latest one to be introduced into the ICANN lexicon is MOPO which is short for Morality and Public Order. MOPO is one of the four grounds by which a third party can challenge an application for a new generic top-level domain (gTLD). The profile of MOPO recently increased when ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC) provided formal advice to the ICANN Board regarding the current MOPO procedures set forth in ICANN's Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG) for new gTLD applicants. The resolution of this issue will largely determine whether new gTLD applications will be accepted by ICANN in 2011 as planned or sometime in the far distant future. more

Stopping the Flow of Online Illegal Pharmaceuticals

Reading through Brian Kreb's blog last week, he has an interesting post up on the White House's call upon the industry on how to formulate a plan to stem the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals...It is unclear to me whether or not the goal of this initiative is to stem the flow of online crime in general or to reduce the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals flowing into the United States (since presumably this cuts into the profits of large pharmaceutical companies... more

Wow. That’s a Lot of Reserved Names

ICANN recently updated the list of reserved second level domain names. Those are names that you won't be able to register in any of the 1500 or so new domains they're planning to add. There's rather a lot of them, currently 629. The names are in three groups, the ICRC (the Red Cross), the IOC (the Olympic games) and everyone else. Several years ago the Red Cross and later the Olympics came to ICANN and insisted that they make a special list of forbidden names, separate from the various trademark registries. more

How to Discredit Net Neutrality

On Tuesday (November 30) Internet backbone provider Level3 publicly accused cable-based ISP Comcast of trying to thwart competing video services delivered through the internet. Comcast was, according to Level3, suddenly choosing to charge it more because of its carriage of Netflix traffic. The accusation was consciously framed to raise net neutrality alarms. It appeared as if a cable TV giant was using its control of internet access to make access to a competing, over the top video service more expensive... Then the full story came out. more

Regime Change on the Internet: Conference Notes

"Regime Change on the Internet? Internet Governance after WGIG" was the first public event held in the United States on July 28, 2005 to review the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) report. Here are my notes from the event: "Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator, UN Working Group on Internet Governance, reminded the audience that the mandate of the WGIG was specifically articulated by the first part of the WSIS - "To investigate and make proposals for action as appropriate". It was not for sweeping regime change as the conference title would suggest." more

Nominations For Board of Public Interest Registry (Operator of .ORG) Close Nov 24

Would you be interested in helping guide the future of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .ORG domain? If so, the Internet Society is seeking nominations for three positions on the PIR Board of Directors. The nominations deadline is Monday, November 24, 2014. More information, qualification requirements and the submission form can be found here. more

FCC Banning Wireless Devices that Interfere with White Spaces Spectrum

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed a ban on some wireless microphones and other low-powered devices that operate in the 700-MHz band after the digital TV transition in February, next year. This is part of an attempt to clear any potential interference with the "white spaces" spectrum which will be fully available for "public safety as well as commercial wireless services". more

NAF Caught Revising Past UDRP Decisions?

In a previous CircleID article, it was discovered and documented that NAF Panelists and Complainants were systematically copying/pasting nonsense into UDRP decisions. It has been a couple of months with no action by ICANN, and no public statement by NAF. In a shocking new development, though, it turns out that NAF has quietly edited a past UDRP decision! more

A Closer Look at the ‘Level 3 + Global Crossing’ Union

On Monday, 11 April 2011, Level 3 announced they had entered a definitive agreement to acquire Global Crossing. According to the Renesys Market Intelligence rankings, this merger would bring together the world's #1 and #2 global providers, with over half the Internet market on earth dependent on the combined entity. If the deal gained regulatory approval in the US and elsewhere today, how would the Internet provider landscape change? We'll answer that question in this blog, giving the proposed union a fictional name of Level Crossing for the purposes of our discussion. more

DITL Data Isn’t Statistically Valid for This Purpose (Part 2 of 4)

For several years, DNS-OARC has been collecting DNS query data "from busy and interesting DNS name servers" as part of an annual "Day-in-the-Life" (DITL) effort (an effort originated by CAIDA in 2002) that I discussed in the first blog post in this series. DNS-OARC currently offers eight such data sets, covering the queries to many but not all of the 13 DNS root servers (and some non-root data) over a two-day period or longer each year from 2006 to present. more

Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance - Part II

This is the second part of a three-part series interview by Geert Lovink with Jeanette Hofmann, policy expert from Germany, where she talks about her experiences as a member of the ICANN's Nominating Committee and her current involvement as a civil society member of the German delegation for the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). "So much in the current debates over global governance seems to go back to the issue what place governments and individual nation states have within global governance. What has been your ICANN experience? Ideally, what would be the place of the state? Do you believe in a federal structure? Should, for instance, bigger countries, in terms of its population, have a great say?..." more

WebRTC/RTCWEB Congestion Control Workshop on July 28 in Vancouver

As we start moving more real-time communications into web browsers with the upcoming WebRTC/RTCWEB offerings, what do we do about congestion control? How do we ensure that all these browser-based communications sessions share the network fairly? With RTC capabilities now already available in builds for browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, how do we deal with the expected increase in voice, video, chat and data traffic? more

Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales

Garth Bruen reports on a paper published by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics of Boston University School of Law authored by Bryan A. Liang and Tim Mackey titled, "Searching for Safety: Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales". From the paper: "Online sales of pharmaceuticals are a rapidly growing phenomenon. Yet despite the dangers of purchasing drugs over the Internet, sales continue to escalate. These dangers include patient harm from fake or tainted drugs, lack of clinical oversight, and financial loss. Patients, and in particular vulnerable groups such as seniors and minorities, purchase drugs online either naïvely or because they lack the ability to access medications from other sources due to price considerations. Unfortunately, high risk online drug sources dominate the Internet, and virtually no accountability exists to ensure safety of purchased products."  more

30 Years Ago Today, the Switch to TCP/IP Launched Today’s Internet

It was 30 years ago today, on January 1, 1983, that the ARPANET had a "flag day" when all connected systems switched from using the Network Control Protocol (NCP) to the protocols known as TCP/IP. This, then, gave rise to the network we now know as the Internet. more