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On Monday 17 March, domain name registrations under the new Chinese Internet address, .cn, were available for the first time to registrants both inside and outside of China. As China's equivalent of .uk, or .us, the .cn domain space will be the Internet address of choice for Chinese consumers and for corporations interested in operating in one of the largest Internet markets. more
While travelling home from Geneva, I was thinking quite a lot on the relationship between a ccTLD (registry) and a Country. This is because many countries are starting to talk louder and louder about the responsibilities Countries have on critical infrastructure, or (possibly more important) the management of the critical infrastructure. Will for example any (none?) of ccTLD operators (servers) sustain a denial of service attack of a scale similar to the attack on the root servers? What can ccTLD operators do to resist the malicious attacks? Should this be discussed? more
I've been following the recent news on the World Summit on the Information Society, and it's getting really bizarre. The Wired article is one example of out of the out-of-this-world coverage on the World Summit; I heard a similar spin yesterday on a radio show that often shares material with the BBC. What king or dictator or bureaucrat has signed the document giving power over the Internet to one organization or another? Did I miss the ceremony? One laughable aspect of news reportage is that the founders and leaders of ICANN always avowed, with the utmost unction, that they were not trying to make policy decisions and were simply tinkering with technical functions on the Internet. 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
Isn't security as important to discuss as .XSS? The DNS has become an abuse infrastructure, it is no longer just a functional infrastructure. It is not being used by malware, phishing and other Bad Things [TM], it facilitates them. Operational needs require the policy and governance folks to start taking notice. It's high time security got where it needs to be on the agenda, not just because it is important to consider security, but rather because lack of security controls made it a necessity. more
We know from life: There is no rule without exception. The problem is, exceptions create space for interpretations and have the risk to undermine the rule. Take Article 19 of the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights from 1966. Article 19, paragraphs 1 and 2 define the individual right to freedom of expression. Paragraph 3 adds some exceptions where this right can be restricted to protect, inter alia, national security and public order. This is an understandable justification for a restriction, but it opens the door for misuse... more
The bulk of corporate domain portfolios largely consist of defensive registrations which often include common misspellings, product names, and abbreviations in countries where they may not even be doing business. More than ever, with the launch of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) expected to occur next year, companies are now taking a hard look at their defensive holdings and asking themselves whether or not they really need all of these registrations. more
There is considerable coverage this morning (or this evening in Tunis) on the last minute WSIS deal struck yesterday. The gist of the coverage rightly reports that the U.S. emerged with the compromise they were looking for as the delegates agreed to retain ICANN and the ultimate U.S. control that comes with it (note that there is a lot in the WSIS statement that may ultimately prove important but that is outside the Internet governance issue including the attention paid to cybercrime, spam, data protection, and e-commerce). This outcome begs the questions -- what happened? And, given the obvious global split leading up to Tunis, what changed to facilitate this deal? more
On March 13, 2019, I published an article on CircleID, Portrait of a Single-Character Domain Name, that explored the proposed release and auction of o.com, a single-character .com domain name that was registered in 1993 and assigned to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) by Dr. Jon Postel. Although the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has since raised serious objections... more
Back in 2005 an organization called the Coalition for Internet Transparency (CFIT) burst upon the scene at the Vancouver ICANN meeting, and filed an anti-trust suit against VeriSign for their monopoly control of the .COM registry and of the market in expiring .COM domains. They didn't do very well in the trial court, which granted Verisign's motion to dismiss the case. But yesterday the Ninth Circuit reversed the trial court and put the suit back on track. more
A domain name consists of two main elements: the second-level domain name to the left of the dot - often consisting of a brand name or relevant keywords - and the domain extension or top-level domain (TLD) to the right of the dot. Domain names form the key elements of the readable web addresses allowing users to access pages on the internet and also allowing the construction of email addresses. more
On August 27, 2014, the world became a bit more connected as the Internet welcomed more than 400 million Hindi language speakers in their own language. .???? (.Bharat), which means India in the Hindi language, was inaugurated on August 27 in New Delhi by Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad, India's Minister of Law & Justice and Communications & Information Technology. more
ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SECSAC) recently released some recommendations regarding the DNS infrastructure, specifying among other things, that sub-zone delegation be kept up-to-date. ...The SECSAC report doesn't mention, but I believe is trying to address, is the alarming fact that nearly 10% of the name servers listed in the root zone are lame, either they aren't authoritative for the zones they are supposed to be, or they are unreachable much of the time.
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A month ago, ICANN announced that it had a large set of proposed changes to its "Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names". The original guidelines are fairly confusing and not widely deployed by the ccTLDs, so one would think that the proposed revisions would be clearer and more useful. No such luck. Instead of describing what the problems with the old guidelines were, the committee that put together the new proposal simply added a whole bunch more rules. more
The MOU between the Department of Commerce and ICANN includes a series of specific milestones that the corporation is required to accomplish by certain specified dates. One of the specific requirements placed on ICANN by the agency is to define "a predictable strategy for selecting new TLDs using straightforward, transparent, and objective procedures that preserve the stability of the Internet...." The MOU goes on to state that "(strategy development to be completed by September 30, 2004 and implementation to commence by December 31, 2004)." more
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