1st Sealed Bid gTLD Contention Auction Completed for the String .One

The first sealed bid auction for a new gTLD contention set was completed last week for the string .One. To our knowledge this is 1st auction to be conducted by a third party other than Applicant Auction to settle a contention set and marks the first time a new gTLD contention set was settled through a "Single Sealed Bid Second Price" auction... The winning bidder for the new TLD extension was One.com of Dubai, AE, which will act as the worldwide registry for .One domains. more

Anyone Who Still Thinks IPv6 Won’t Happen Clearly Isn’t Watching the Measurements

Anyone who still is using the "I'll-just-wait-on-IPv6-because-it-will-never-happen" approach is clearly NOT watching the measurements. First, there was the news last week that Google's IPv6 measurement had crossed over 3% less than five months after crossing the 2% mark. Then today comes word from the World IPv6 Launch measurements program that the February 2014 measurements are up... more

Designing Effective Regulation for IPv6 Adoption

So you are the IT regulator for a country and you are convinced that the shortage of IPv4 address space represents a threat to the development of the Internet in your country and you want to do something about it. Being that as regulator you don't really run the countries IP networks, what can you really do? I've heard many regulators in over 30 countries grapple with this problem. The purpose of this article is to think through some ideas to guide action on using (or not) regulation to drive IPv6 adoption. more

ICANN’s Uncertain State: 2014

In a recent video interview conducted while he attended the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade stated "legitimacy comes from accountability". That statement is correct. It is also troubling, in that many of ICANN's recent policies and activities raise serious questions regarding whether it is sufficiently accountable and therefore perceived as acting in a legitimate manner - as well as whether it is continuing to faithfully abide by the Affirmation of Commitments (AOC) it entered into when the US government terminated direct oversight of ICANN in 2009. more

Keynote Speaker for Name Collisions Workshop: Bruce Schneier

There may still be a few security practitioners working in the field who didn't have a copy of Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography on their bookshelf the day they started their careers. Bruce's practical guide to cryptographic algorithms, key management techniques and security protocols, first published in 1993, was a landmark volume for the newly emerging field, and has been a reference to developers ever since. more

Who Are the Major New gTLD Applicants and… (Part Three: Minds + Machines)

Minds + Machines was the first "new gTLD portfolio applicant" I spotted early in 2008, when .PARIS started being mentioned. Then came a few other projects like .HORSE and later .VODKA. Being French, my vision of good new gTLD suffixes may be slightly different to those native English speakers. Therefore, I favour some TLDs such as .SURF and .ART over some clearly English terms others such as .HORSE. more

Extreme Vulnerability at the Edge of the Internet - A Fresh New Universal Human-Rights Problem

By design, the Internet core is stupid, and the edge is smart. This design decision has enabled the Internet's wildcat growth, since without complexity the core can grow at the speed of demand. On the downside, the decision to put all smartness at the edge means we're at the mercy of scale when it comes to the quality of the Internet's aggregate traffic load. Not all device and software builders have the skills - and the quality assurance budgets - that something the size of the Internet deserves. more

Luddites of the 21St Century Unite?

In the past few weeks doom and gloom stories about the future were printed, discussed and opined in the press. The down and out of the message of futurists is that the middle class is going to be swept away in the coming years because of software and robotic solutions (from here on: automated processes), making humans redundant... Do Luddites of the 21st century need to rise? I want to look at the topic from a few angles. more

Comcast-TWC: Why Compete and Innovate When You Can Buy Market Share?

Expect a charm offensive as Comcast and scores of sponsored researchers explain how acquiring Time Warner Cable will promote competition and enhance consumer welfare. You might not hear too much about two traditional concerns remedied by actual facilities-based competition: incentives to innovate and reduce prices. Comcast will frame its acquisition as necessary to achieve even greater scale to compete with other sources of video content and maybe to compete with the limited other sources of broadband access. more

EU to ICANN: Go Back to Drawing Board on Auctions!

The European Commission is not a big fan of the David versus Goliath ICANN new gTLD auction scenario. On December 12 last year, ICANN released a set of revised public auction rules. These auctions are presented as the avenue of last resort for resolving new gTLD contentions. As is ICANN's custom, the rules were put out for public comment. The EU submitted its statement on the very last day of the comment reply period. more

IPv6 and the Browser Wars

IPv6 adoption continues to gain ground at a slow pace. This is to be expected. The complications associated with hardware and software upgrades, as well as the lack of reachable content, means that IPv4 is still king of the hill. To me, this situation seems to mirror one a few years back with web browsers. Sometime around the turn of the century, Internet Explorer became the dominant browser. Riding on a 90% market share for Windows, the incumbent - Netscape Navigator - did not stand a chance. However, with it came a dark age for web developers. more

More Problems Crop Up With Universal Acceptance of Top Level Domains

I've often found truth in the famous George Santayana quote, "Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." That's an apt warning for what is currently happening - again - with the hundreds of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) that are launching ... and failing to work as expected on the Internet. First, a quick refresher: As most CircleID readers know, in the early 2000s, seven new gTLDs were launched: .AERO, .BIZ, .COOP, .INFO, .MUSEUM, .NAME and .PRO. Aside from Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs), these were the first top-level changes to the DNS since the early days of the Internet. more

Who Are the Major New gTLD Applicants and… (Part One: Famous Four Media)

This article is the personal analysis by a new gTLD consultant who has been following the ICANN new gTLD program from the beginning but with a Frenchman's perspective. I recently read an article which made me smile because entitled "the top 10 new gTLDs to follow in 2014". But according to what? I partially read it to find out that it was written by a professional from a certain culture and written for a certain culture. None of the top 10 new gTLDs listed in the article were of any interest to me: a French person. more

Colloquium on Collisions: Expert Panelists to Select Papers, Award $50K First Prize

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the verb collide is derived from the Latin verb collidere, which means, literally, "to strike together": com- "together" + lædere "to strike, injure by striking." Combined instead with loquium, or "speaking," the com- prefix produces the Latin-derived noun colloquy: "a speaking together." So consider WPNC 14 - the upcoming namecollisions.net workshop - a colloquium on collisions: speaking together to keep name spaces from striking together. more

Who Are the Major New gTLD Applicants and… (Part Two: Uniregistry)

This, the second in a series of articles looking at portfolio gTLD applicants, is focusing on Uniregistry. At the moment, the Uniregistry press machine is buzzing, like an angry bee, about two of the 50 TLDs in its portfolio: you may have read about .TATTOO and .SEXY. Yes! .SEXY but, according to Uniregistry, it is nothing to do with sex; it is about fashion, modelling and attitude. more