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Recently, there has been a lot of noise about China tightening control of the new top-level domains and how it could severely damper domain name registrations in China and one should make preparation for the worst. Initially, I tried to stay out of this as I know all the players behind this. But given that at least 3 people have emailed me asking what's going on, I decided to clear the air here. more
Mozilla Foundation has announced changes to Firefox concerning Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) to deal with homograph spoofing attacks. According to the organization, "Mozilla Foundation products now only display IDNs in a whitelist of TLDs, which have policies stating what characters are permitted, and procedures for making sure that no homographic domains are registered to two different entities." Following is a statement explaining the current status of the Mozilla changes to Firefox regarding IDN... more
A press release on the ICANN web site says that ICANN and Verisign have agreed to settle all pending lawsuits, and there’s a new .COM agreement, all tentative but if history is any guide, nothing short of DOC action is going to stop it. The good news is that VeriSign has agreed not to make unilateral changes like Sitefinder. They have to give prior notice to ICANN for any material change in the operation of the registry, and if ICANN has any concerns there’s a lengthy process full of expert panels and Consensus and the like to decide whether they can do it. more
A long time ago in an Internet far away, nobody paid for DNS services. Not directly at least. We either ran our own servers, or got DNS service as part of our IP transit contract, or traded services with others. In ~1990 I was the operator of one of the largest name servers in existence (UUCP-GW-1.PA.DEC.COM) and I exchanged free DNS secondary service with UUNET. Two thousand zones seemed like a lot of zones back then -- little did we dream that there would some day be a billion or so DNS zones world wide. more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has released an "Advisory" concerning VeriSign's deployment of DNS wildcard (Site Finder) service: "Since the deployment, ICANN has been monitoring community reaction, including analysis of the technical effects of the wildcard, and is carefully reviewing the terms of the .com and .net Registry Agreements. In response to widespread expressions of concern from the Internet community about the effects of the introduction of the wildcard..." more
The new and proposed ICANN registry contracts contain no definite price terms, and thus permit potential tiered pricing on a per domain name basis. This has raised concern within the community that a registry operator might abuse its sole source position to engage in pricing practices detrimental to registrants. ...Notwithstanding the possibility of tiered pricing on a per domain name basis in connection with the recently executed sponsored registry contracts (.MOBI, .JOBS, .TRAVEL, .CAT, and .TEL), there have been numerous comments submitted in connection with this possibility in connection with the proposed contracts for the .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG registry contracts. There were four messages that motivate me to write this article... more
Two weeks ago, the US government announced it would transition its role in the IANA functions to the global Internet community. It tasked ICANN with the job of arriving at a transition plan and noted that the current contract runs out in 18 months' time, 30 September 2015. This week, ICANN started that process at its meeting in Singapore. And on the ground were the two key US government officials behind the decision. more
Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft and eBay are among a group of leading companies demanding ICANN to take a closer look at an "immediate and urgent matter" involving a subset of questionable domain name registrars. more
Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator, Secretariat of the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance, is a career diplomat, who has served as eEnvoy of the Swiss Foreign Ministry in Bern since April 2002. His main tasks include foreign policy coordination in the area of information and communication technologies, in general, and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), in particular. He chaired the negotiating group that developed an agreed text on Internet governance for the WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action in December 2003... Mr Kummer says: "The time-frame is very short indeed. And the task ahead of us is daunting." more
As new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) are launched, the industry mustn't overlook the customer experience. A key question is this: Will the software applications we all use, recognize the new TLDs and know what to do with them in a timely fashion? Think email and even form-fill applications. I speak from experience here. In 2006 when we launched the .MOBI TLD, there were arguably only a handful of .MOBI email addresses in existence. To my dismay, I found that often emails sent only from my .MOBI account were not being received at the other end... 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
Whatever you think the answer is (typically about ten bucks), the answer is likely to change radically for the worse, based on new contracts that ICANN is planning to approve. On July 28th ICANN posted proposed new contracts for .ORG, .BIZ, and .INFO, for a public comment period that ends four days from now, on the 28th. There's a lot not to like about these proposed contracts, but I will concentrate here on two related particularly troublesome areas, pricing and data mining. more
The following is an analysis based on the hypothesis that trademark holders are not, in general, registering their trademarks as domain names across the existing top-level domain namespace. To determine if the hypothesis is true, we examine domain names registered in the popular generic top-level domains ("gTLDs" such as .com, .net and .info), also using other publicly available information such as the USPTO database of trademarks, the English dictionary, DNS entries, UDRP records and whois records. 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
On Thursday, May 20, a final decision was issued in the Independent Review Process (IRP) brought by Afilias against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), rejecting Afilias' petition to nullify the results of the July 27, 2016 public auction for the .WEB new generic top level domain (gTLD) and to award .WEB to Afilias at a substantially lower, non-competitive price. Nu Dotco, LLC (NDC) submitted the highest bid at the auction and was declared the winner, over Afilias' lower, losing bid. more
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