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You'd be surprised how many people are asking that question at the moment, but you won't be surprised to know that the only thing they agree on is that they either don't know, or that they disagree with the people that believe they do. I am not going to attempt to provide my own answer, but I will point to a paper just released by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). POST, among other things, produces regular, concise briefings for the UK Parliament on whatever are the important topics of the time. And they have now done one on Internet Governance. more
ICANN's new Registry Service Technical Evaluation Service (RSTEP) process is definitely a positive step forward for ICANN. The comment period for the Tralliance proposed new service using the DNS wildcard feature closed Wednesday night. ...Ken Fockler commented "there are no right answers and no wrong answers, just judgments and decisions made on those judgments." In this light, I would be interested in hearing different perspectives on the following questions... more
In the last few years there have been many discussions on how the Internet is governed, and how it should be governed. The whole World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) ended talking about this problem. It caused exchange of letters between the US Secretary of State and the European Union presidency. And it caused a public discussion, organized by the US Department of Commerce on that issue. I saw some reflection of this discussion and here are some comments on that. My colleague Milton Mueller of the Syracuse University sent me an e-mail today in which, among other, it says, "A global email campaign by IGP generated comments from 32 countries... more
Yesterday, ICANN took a decision to not approve the .xxx in the top-level domain zone. The application was proposed by the ICM Registry. ...My explanation for my vote is as follows: "I think there should be more new TLDs. Many more. I believe my vote was not on the controversial issue about content (and ICANN should not deal with content), but on the simple issue if the agreement is good to be accepted. I also wrote on April 22nd in my blog that ICM at least are trying to prevent harmful content reaching our children. I prefer that, than just saying, ".xxx is bad, abolish it". OK, we did that. Now what?" more
Cities are among the largest regional authorities and natural human communities we know. Of course there are countries like China, India or the USA which count some hundred million or even a billion inhabitants. But there are also countries with far less than 100,000 inhabitants, like Tuvalu, Andorra or Barbados. If city communities are ranked by the number of inhabitants as independent entities among country communities, cities like Tokyo, New York, Shanghai or London head the ranking because they have more citizens than many countries. London for instance has more inhabitants than the Netherlands, and Tokyo outpaces Canada in that respect. Interestingly, there are only around 400 cities worldwide with more than 1 million inhabitants... The following post will give an overview of how cities are being identified on the Internet via Top-Level Domains and the opportunities that lay ahead. more
It has taken almost three years -- by some counts, more than 6 years -- but ICANN's domain name policy making organization has finally taken a stand on Whois and privacy. And the results were a decisive defeat for the copyright and trademark interests and the US government, and a stunning victory for advocates of the rights of individual domain name registrants... more
Internationalized (non-ascii) domain names (IDN) are a key issue for ICANN. Yesterday, the Board completed two days of workshop presentations about various matters (IANA, security, GAC relationships), and we were briefed on the IDN testing that is planned. I thought it might be useful to make clear the distinction between the tests (which are testing mechanisms for IDNs) and the very difficult policy questions that confront ICANN. As several people explained to me yesterday, they're different. more
In a report released today, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has announced a 20% increase in the number of cybersquatting (abusive registration of trademarks as domain names) cases filed in 2005 as compared to 2004. The report further indicates that "in 2005, a total of 1,456 cybersquatting cases were filed with WIPO's Arbitration and Mediation Center. This increase represents the highest number of cybersquatting cases handled by the WIPO Center since 2001." more
It is now clear that by sending its letter of August 12 blocking approval of the .XXX domain, the US Government has done more to undermine ICANN's status as a non-governmental, multi-stakeholder policy body than any of its Internet governance "enemies" in the ITU, China, Brazil, or Iran. And despite all the calls for a government role that would ensure "rule of law" and "accountability" of ICANN, the interventions of governments are making this aspect of Internet governance more arbitrary and less accountable. more
In a paper entitled "DNS Détente", written in the authors' personal capacities, Tricia Drakes (a former member of the ICANN Board) and Michael D. Palage (a current member of the ICANN board) have attempted to address some of the unresolved issues of the recent Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) 3 session in Geneva as discussions head to the final phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis (Nov 16 to 18, 2005). More specifically, the paper focuses on one of the "fundamental stumbling blocks to the continued evolution of Internet Governance"; The insistence of the United States Government (USG) that it retain its historically exclusive role in connection with authorizing changes to the Root A server, particularly with respect to country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Shared further is the content of this paper. more
ICANN has announced today that it has tentatively agreed to settle a longstanding dispute with VeriSign Inc. The dispute which began in part from SiteFinder, a controversial search service VeriSign created in late 2003 for users who mistype Web addresses. The following is an excerpt from today's press release... more
Ever since Neustar announced they signed a deal with GSMA to oversea global database for the mobile operators last week (see also Washington Post), there are many debates about the deal online. "Neustar, a company that should certainly know better, has announced that they're going to create a .gprs TLD to serve the mobile phone industry This, of course, requires creation of a private root zone, against the very strong warnings in RFC 2826" said Steven Bellovin. To the more supportive John Levine: "This isn't quite as stupid as it seems. The GSM industry needs some way to maintain its roaming user database, the database is getting considerably more complicated with 3G features, and it looks to me like they made a reasonable decision to use DNS over IP to implement it rather than inventing yet another proprietary distributed database." more
The desired goal of most of the other countries other than US is to end up with their own local language suffixes, own local language domain names, basically their own Internet, with its own domain registration policies -- in a nutshell, a very big and a very complex global mess, indeed. This fight over ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is all about a golden key, as without it, the Internet is completely useless. ...It's also ICANN, the organization that from the start has made some very stringent and often very weird policies about such issues as the golden keys. Now its global authority is being challenged, and such fights could divide the power of this controlling body, and any adverse outcome will simply split the Internet. more
The recent announcement in eWeek titled "Feds Won't Let Go of Internet DNS" (slashdotted here) has some major internet policy implications. The short, careful wording appears to be more of a threat to ICANN than a power grab. In short, the US Department of Commerce's (DOC) National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it was not going to stop overseeing ICANN's changes to the DNS root. ...Of course, they have done next to nothing to support DNSSEC or other proposal for securing the DNS, but it sounds reassuring. The last sentence shows that the Bush administration shares the Clinton administration's lack of understanding of how the internet should evolve... more
The U.S. government has announced today that it will indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet's root servers, ignoring pervious calls by some countries to turn the function over to an international body. more
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