On the Need to Separate the Telecom Business Agenda from Government Policy

At Guadalajara, Mexico this week, in the policy debate kicked off by the ITU, Russian Federation's Minister of Communications proposed that the ITU should give itself veto power over ICANN decisions. This proposal by the Regional Commonwealth in the field of Communications (RCC) calls for the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to be scrapped and replaced by an ITU group. more

A Tempest in a Libyan Teapot

The .LY domain is Libya, and their government recently cancelled the registration of the short and snappy VB.LY, provoking great gnashing of teeth. If you direct your attention to the address bar above this page, you'll note that it's at JL.LY, equally short and snappy. The .LY registry started allowing two letter second-level domains last year, and there was a quiet land rush. Now they restrict those domains to people actually in Libya, but say they'll let us keep the ones we have. How concerned am I that they'll take my domain away, too? more

Libyan Government Seizes vb.ly Domain

The one-page link shortening service provider, vb.ly, has been seized with no apparent warning by the Libyan government which manages the ".ly" county code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD). According to reports, Nic.ly, the registry operator of the ccTLD in Libya informed the user of the domain that the content of its website was considered offensive, obscene and illegal by the Libyan Islamic Sharia Law and therefore revoked. more

Plutocrats and the Internet

The new month visits on us a new attempt to control the Internet; the UN's specialized agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), is holding its quadrennial plenipotentiary meeting in Guadalajara, Jalisco this week. The governments assembled there are considering a few proposals that can best be described as piquant. more

A Case for Limited New TLD Flavors

La Casa Gelato in Vancouver, Canada, is doing just fine by selling a grand total of more than 500 ice cream flavors (wild asparagus, balsamic vinegar, dandelion -- you get the idea). On the other hand, Apple Inc. has built its enviable business on the principle of the fewer options the better. So, what does the confused ICANN need to do with its proposed new top-level domains (TLDs)? My advice: Go the Apple route. more

ICANN Dressing Up for New gTLD Party in San Francisco

The ICANN Board met on September 24-25 2010 in Trondheim, Norway, to consider and act on the impediments still in the way of the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program. They passed a number of resolutions that provide very clear indications of how things are going. The short version is that the news is good for new gTLDs. ICANN is nailing down the final outstanding issues and the timetable is clearer than ever. more

NAF Panelists and Complainants Caught Systematically Copying/Pasting Nonsense Into UDRP Decisions

In a recent article at DomainNameWire.com, CitizenHawk was called out by a National Arbitration Forum (NAF) panelist for the submission of automated complaints which contained complete nonsense. Through the discussion in the comments to that article, the community discovered that the problem is far deeper. It turns out that UDRP panelists at NAF have been churning out boilerplate cut/paste decisions of their own, with utter nonsense of their own, and that this has been going on for years. more

IP Address Exhaustion In 12 Easy Questions

It seems that there is an increasing level of interest in the topic of IPv4 address exhaustion, so I thought I'll share a set of answers to the most common questions I've been asked on this topic in recent times. ... If there is a common factor in many of these challenges, it is scaling the network to meet an ever expanding agenda of more users, more devices, more traffic, more services and more policies. more

ARF is Now an IETF Standard

When a user of a large mail system such as AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail reports a message as junk or spam, one of the things the system does is to look at the source of the message and see if the source is one that has a feedback loop (FBL) agreement with the mail system. If so, it sends a copy of the message back to the source, so they can take appropriate action, for some version of appropriate. For several years, ARF, Abuse Reporting Format, has been the de-facto standard form that large mail systems use to exchange FBL reports about user mail complaints. more

Come to the First Ever Dedicated New gTLD Conference: .nxt

Sometimes the heavens align. With the release of a number of resolutions from the ICANN Board on Sunday, we learnt two things: One, that there is a determined drive to get the rules for new Internet extensions, gTLDs, finalized in December at a meeting in Cartagena. And two, that the meeting immediately after that - in March 2011 - will be held in San Francisco. more

How I Think CIRA Should Evolve: Towards CIRA 2.0

There's been some good discussion here about possible policy changes which Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) could consider. But there's more to the CIRA Board election which is underway than simply arguing about whether a PO Box satisfies a "presence" requirement. CIRA's done pretty well over the past decade, but it's not perfect. As a candidate for re-election to the CIRA Board (and currently Vice-Chair) here are some of my own personal thoughts regarding ways in which CIRA might improve. I call this (unoriginally, I know) CIRA 2.0. more

U.S. Uses Domain Names As New Way to Regulate the Net

Governments have long sought ways to regulate Internet activity, whether for the purposes of taxation, content regulation, or the application of national laws. Effective regulatory measures have often proven elusive, however, since, unlike the Internet, national laws typically end at the border. Earlier this month, the United States began to move aggressively toward a new way of confronting the Internet's jurisdictional limitations - the domain name system. more

Will US Government Directives Spur IPv6 Adoption?

Yesterday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. government hosted a workshop discussing the state of IPv6 in the United States and its impact on industry, government, and the Internet economy. I was asked to be a panelist, along with industry executives from ARIN, ISOC, ICANN, Comcast, Akamai, Verizon, Google, VeriSign, DOE, NIST, and DREN. Moderated by Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States, this was the first event in the past few years to truly shine a spotlight on IPv6 adoption (or lack thereof) and introduce key directives to move this issue forward. more

Silvia Hagen: It’s Not About IPv6 Transition But Urgent Integration

As the IPv4 address pool is rapidly reaching exhaustion, Silvia Hagen, a leading expert on IPv6 and the author of O'Reilly's book, "IPv6 Essentials," stresses that a primary step towards IPv6 address space is not about "transition" but "integration". IPv4 and IPv6 are going to co-exist for many years to come and so what companies need to do, in the first place, is to look at their IPv4 landscape and identify areas of priority, Hagen said in a recent interview with CircleID. more

Policy Failure Enables Mass Malware: Part II (ICANN and OnlineNIC)

On Wednesday September 29th at 1PM there will be a meeting in the Old Executive Building in Washington D.C. with Registries and domain Registrars to discuss illegal Internet sales of prescription drugs. ICANN was originally invited but declined because citing "inappropriateness" . One "U.S." Registrar who definitely will not be in attendance is OnlineNIC more