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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
A number of people, notably Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, have been asking about how to Break The Internet. Since Mme Reding seems to have absolutely no prior experience in the Information Technology, Computing or Telecommunications industries, I have prepared this brief HOWTO. "1. Declare the creation of a new Root Zone. This is the easy bit - all you have to do is spout great volumes of hot air at a conference in Geneva, and then storm out in a huff when other people refuse to take you seriously. Then you get the PFY who services your photocopier to declare the creation of a new European Root Zone! Hooray!" 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
I ran into a Reuters headline today, which illustrated to me the pace at which some legislative bodies operate. Yes, this .kids idea is timely. It is an idea so good, that I remember multiple different bidders proposing it in the initial wave of new TLDs laid in front of ICANN back in 2000. The contenders all had fantastic presentations and capabilities, which I heard voiced in the Marina Del Rey ICANN meetings as the 44 initial proposals were culled into seventeen, and then into the seven... more
The Sponsored TLD .CAT got the green light to move ahead from ICANN this week, another of the sTLD proposals in the second round of submissions to gain momentum toward being added to the root. When I shared the news today with folks, the most common response was a tongue in cheek response, 'Where is .DOG?'. ...Still, comedy aside, this is not a TLD for animal species, but rather for a language. more
The UDRP is obviously not working. Two websites, fundamentally the same (criticism at trademark.tld), two opposite decisions, both within weeks of each other! A Complainant (Biocryst Pharmaceuticals Inc) initiated a complaint to WIPO about one of my criticism websites (biocrystpharmaceuticals.com). The Panel found in my favour. Another Complainant (Eastman Chemical Inc) meanwhile made a complaint to NAF regarding another of my criticism websites (eastman-chemical.com). The Panel found against me. The two websites are fundamentally the same, both websites in criticism of the practices of the individual companies concerned... more
You all remember Sitefinder don't you? According to The Register, CentralNic , owner of a number of popular domains including uk.com and us.com, has added wildcard A records to .uk.com. Cue the usual round of sniping about Internet stability (with which, as you will see, I agree). The question is, given the difference in scale (.com and .net are huge; .uk.com is quite small) will anyone notice? And does it matter? Certainly CentralNic seems to think the small scale of their domains excuses or at least mitigates the Internet stability side effects of their ploy. more
Dot XXX is in for some interesting times, I fear. First the ICANN GAC chair Sharil Tarmizi is suggesting that more time be given for government and public policy feedback on .XXX. Objections certainly have started to come in from rather high places, such as from the US Department of Commerce. Personally speaking I'm inclined to be in favor of .XXX because it at least gives people in the adult entertainment industry their own online space and a stronger voice (gTLD)... more
Responding to the .xxx intervention by the US Commerce Department, the Internet Governance Project has produced a "STATEMENT OPPOSING POLITICAL INTERVENTION IN THE INTERNET'S CORE TECHNICAL ADMINISTRATIVE FUNCTIONS." You can view the statement here and add your name as a signatory at the bottom. Over 60 people have endorsed it. The Statement claims that "The NTIA's recent intervention in the .xxx proceeding undermines assurances" that the U.S. government's special unilateral authority over ICANN "would never be used to shape policy but was only a means of protecting the stability of the organization and its processes." The NTIA's open acknowledgment of the influence of religious groups made the intervention particularly dangerous. more
In light of the recent decision by the United States government to "maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file" and ICANN's recent decisions to add more gTLDs (including .xxx), and to renew VeriSign as the .net registry, readers may be interested in the just-published report of the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation. ...a comprehensive policy-oriented examination of the Domain Name System in the broader context of Internet navigation. 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
A recent decision by a federal court in Virginia illustrates some interesting legal issues that arise from the global nature of the domain name system. It also highlights a powerful mechanism under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act ("ACPA") by which a plaintiff can proceed with a legal action to recover a domain name without regard to the court's personal jurisdiction over the registrant. more
The Working Group of Internet Governance has released its final report [PDF]. As I wrote this week in my Law Bytes column, the report comes on the heels of the U.S. statement that it has no intention of surrendering control of root zone file. The WGIG report developed a working definition of Internet governance that states: "Internet governance is the development and application by Governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet."... more
The ICANN Meetings are in full flow here in sunny Luxembourg. The venue is immense and located a cab, bus, or shuttle ride from the various hotels. So far, the big topics are the .Net finalization (focusing on the readjustment of the pricing verbiage), the USDOC root announcement, the shell registrar accreditations used in the batch pool for the purposes of getting dropped names, and the practice of registrars exploiting the 5 day add grace period to register in excess of 50000 names to watch how much web traffic they have, and returning the ones that do not at no cost... more
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