Why is ICANN Traveling Without Moving and Thwarting Innovation in the Domain Space?

While I was giving my .music presentation at ICANN Studenkreis in Barcelona, Spain last week, it dawned upon me. There was not one single ICANN staff member sitting in the room taking notes on any of the presentations given by TLD applicants. I was convinced that it would be beneficial to ICANN staff to observe our presentations and perhaps receive useful feedback from TLD applicants that could be used to better draft the Expressions of Interest recommendation. more

TLDs of Vacant or Close to Vacant Places in the World

Royal Pingdom has put together a list of top ten places with designated country code Top-Level Domains that are barely inhabited. The list starts off with '.hm' for Heard and McDonald Islands, an Australlian territory, with zero population. Others include '.pn' for Pitcairn Islands (Population: 50), '.tf' for French Southern and Antarctic Lands (Population: 140), '.cc' for Cocos (Keeling) Islands (Population: 596) and '.va' for the Vatican City (Population: 826). more

The Greatest Free Riders of Our Time

Former Southwestern Bell CEO, now General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre famously accused Google of free-riding his network, despite the obvious truth that Google pays for traffic delivery to peering points and ISPs gladly enter into reciprocal peering agreements in lieu of cash transactions that would likely result in a near zero payment as roughly equivalent traffic balances out. Mr. Whitacre did raise a legitimate question whether there are free riders and I'm seeing one darling and one unexpected group flying below the radar. more

Obama Reinforces Belief in Net Neutrality

Following his State of the Union Speech last week, Obama was asked a number of user-submitted questions via prepared via YouTube. Popular questions included the issue of open internet and neutrality, to which Obama responded: "I'm a big believer in Net Neutrality. I campaigned on this. I continue to be a strong supporter of it. My FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has indicated that he shares the view that we've got to keep the Internet open..." more

Should a Domain Name Registrar Run from a PO Box?

In 2008 KnujOn published a report indicating that 70 ICANN accredited Registrars had no publicly disclosed business location. The fundamental problem was one of community trust and consumer faith. Registrars extend their legitimacy to their domain customers who then transact and communicate with the public. more

ICANN’s Weak Accountability Remains a Problem

The JPA is dead, and in its place is the Affirmation of Commitments. Much debated, this change is anticipated to bring more global participation into ICANN's governance. Increased globalization may turn out to be beneficial for the Internet community, if it helps to shore up ICANN's institutional weaknesses. But the Affirmation leaves important questions unanswered... more

DNS, Content Providers Including Google and Neustar Propose Extending DNS Protocol

A proposal to extend the DNS protocol has been submitted by Google and other DNS and content providers such as Neustar/UltraDNS. Wilmer van der Gaast and Carlo Contavalli on behalf of the Google Public DNS team said: "Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy." The proposal aims to ultimately help send users to nearby servers in order to improves speed, latency, and network utilization. more

ICANN Begins Public DNSSEC Test Plan for the Root Zone

The deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for the root zone got an official start today with its public signing for the first time. DNSSEC for the root zone is a joint effort between ICANN and VeriSign, with support from the U.S. Department of Commerce to improve security of the Internet's naming infrastructure. Kim Davies, ICANN's Manager of Root Zone Services, says: "What happened today was the deliberately un-validatable root zone started being published on l.root-servers.net. It is anticipated this will be rolled out across the other root servers over the coming months. This phase is designed to identify any issues with the larger DNS response sizes associated with DNSSEC data." more

Are Google, Microsoft and Apple the Next Utilities in Telecoms?

Over the last few years the increasing amount of discussion about telecoms reveals that the real competition for telecoms companies is not from other telcos, but companies such as Google and others. While I agree with this, obviously it is important to analyse it further. more

Leadership and Persuasion: Internet Freedom

Secretary Clinton's major address on internet freedom made the connection between humanity and technology. We've been waiting a long time for our political leaders to have the courage to express thoughts like this, to have a vision about the role of the internet in human history, and yesterday the day arrived. The speech wasn't an isolated event, of course. more

Google Puts Its Foot Down

Google's announcement that it will "review" its business operations in China and is no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, is generating a range of reaction in China. Conversation over at the #googlecn hashtag on Twitter -- created shortly after the announcement -- has been raging fast and furious. more

Top Three Reasons to Just Say No to ICANN’s Current EOI gTLD Proposal

On December 9, 2009, the ICANN Board announced its intention to vote during its upcoming February 4, 2010 meeting to approve a plan by which ICANN would solicit "Expressions of Interest" (EOI) from prospective applicants for new Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .BLOG. But given a number of significant governance and public policy concerns raised by the current EOI proposal, the ICANN Board should take no action on it before the next in-person ICANN regional meeting--in Nairobi, March 3-7, 2010. more

Does the US Get the Bold Broadband Vision Congress Has Asked For?

The US Congress asked the FCC for a bold plan to achieve the bold vision expressed by the Congress... We discussed this issue in our Big Think group and here are some comments. more

Google and China: Some General Thoughts

I have deferred blogging on the Google/China imbroglio for a few reasons. First, heavyweights such as Jonathan Zittrain have tracked International online censorship and online security issues more closely than I have. Second, after Google's provocative blog post, I wanted to see the facts develop rather than rely solely on Google's assertions. The spin doctors are now moving in, so the useful development of the factual record will be slowing down. more

Comcast and e360 Settle Lawsuit

e360 initially filed suit against Comcast early in 2008. They asserted a number of things, including that Comcast was fraudulently returning "user unknown" notices and that they were certified by ReturnPath. Comcast filed a countersuit alleging violations of CAN SPAM, violations of the computer fraud and abuse act, as well as a number of other things including abuse of process. In April of 2008 the judge ruled in favor of Comcast and dismissed e360's case, while allowing the countersuit to proceed. more