When It Comes to gTLDs, Follow the Money (Part 1)

Introducing new generic Top-Level Domains represents, as ICANN says, "the biggest change in the Internet since its inception 40 years ago." Among the least understood aspects of this change is its potential to alter the economic power of ICANN as an institution. To see how that might happen, let's follow the money as it is expected to flow from the gTLD application process. ICANN expects to get a lot of money from gTLD applications: $92,500,000, to be exact. more

MAAWG Issues ISP Guidelines for End-User Bot Removal

Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has issued the first best practices aimed at helping the global ISP industry work more closely with consumers to recognize and remove bot infections on end-users' machines. The paper outlines a three-step approach with recommendations for detecting bots, notifying users that their computers have been compromised, and guiding them in removing the malware. more

Domain Name Registry-Registrar Vertical Separation: The Economic, Anti-Trust Red Herring

ICANN has operated on the fundamental principle that there should be separation within the domain name marketplace between registries (wholesale) and registrars (retail). This fundamental principle has been a pillar upon which ICANN has provided registrants (consumers) with increased choice, innovation, and price savings. Therefore it was with great surprise when ICANN staff unilaterally undertook this initial vertical separation analysis through exclusive consultation with ICANN contracting parties (registrars and registries), while totally excluding non-contracting parties (individual, business and non-commercial registrants)... more

National Broadband Infrastructure: Global Regulatory Re-Think Required

Around the world governments, regulators and the industry are struggling with the old regulatory legacy systems. These have become a major stumbling block in the transition to a new environment. Increasingly countries are beginning to understand the social and economic benefits a national broadband infrastructure can offer, but it is impossible to bring that about while the systems are based on the present regulatory regimes. To take these broader benefits into account we will need to develop government policies to facilitate the digital economy... more

ICANN, Civil Society, and Free Speech

Gordon Crovitz's Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the relationship between ICANN and the future of free speech quotes me a couple of times... Crovitz emailed me last week when he was researching his column. I was somewhat more critical of ICANN's status quo in our exchange than in the quotes he ended up using. Following are my full answers, emailed to him on Thursday. more

A Framework for Selecting New TLDs

Your corporate domain names send implicit messages (signals) through their Top-Level Domains (TLDs) and their second-level words. Shape your domain names so to send the right messages and to avoid sending unintentionally confusing messages. The post focuses on a framework to help bidders determine which TLDs send messages that are potentially profit generating... Soon TLDs such as ".car," ".cars," ".green," and ".eco" will be available to any qualified body whose request is favored by the allocation system. The system being discussed is a combination of beauty contests and auctions. more

Think China Is the Highest Spamming Country? Think Again

In my department, we block about 92% of our total email (around 2.5 billion per day) at the network edge without accepting the message. When we do that, we don't see any traffic from that IP anymore and don't keep stats on it due to the overwhelming volume of mail. However, we do keep stats on mail that we block with our content filter. I decided to go and calculate how much spam we receive from each country by mapping the source IP back to its source country... more

Trademark Attorneys Warn Companies About the Upcoming .CM Cybersquatting Possibilities

In light of recent announcements regarding Cameroon's country code Top-Level Domain, .CM, being opened to public registration, Tresa Baldas reports on Law.com: "Trademark attorneys are warning companies about a new target for cybersquatters known as '.cm,' which is the country code -- or top level domain -- for the West African nation of Cameroon. The dot-cm domain is a hot target for scammers, they say, due to 'cm' being a common typographical error for 'com' in the popular dot-com domain. Attorneys say this is significant to brand owners because Internet users searching for brand owners' Web sites frequently mistype dot-com as dot-cm and wind up on a bogus site. Not only is Web traffic lost, they say, but a brand name can get diluted or tainted along the way." (Also see, Nation of Cameroon Typo-Squats the Entire .com Space from 2006) more

Content Filtering Ineffective, Harmful According to Public Knowledge Study

A report released today by Public Knowledge points out that their recent analysis indicates filtering Internet content, as advocated by media companies, will not be effective and in fact harmful to the Internet. An accompanying 60-page whitepaper contains the full report including a number of reasons why the user of copyright filters should not be allowed, encouraged or mandated on U.S. Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks. more

New Analysis Suggests Recent Cyberattacks Against US and South Korea Originated from UK Not N. Korea

Nguyen Minh Duc, senior security director at Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (Bkis), says that the source of recent cyberattack against US and South Korean government websites was not North Korea -- as widely reported -- but UK. Based on Bkis analysis, a report today by Nguyen Minh Duc says that a master server located in UK was found to control the 8 Command and Control servers responsible for the series of cyberattacks last week.
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Networks and Nationalization

This post isn't about -- or isn't only about -- the use of computer technology to commit crimes. It's more about the use of computer technology to commit war. A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation about the legal issues cyberwarfare raises. We were talking about various scenarios -- e.g., a hostile nation-state uses cyberspace to attack the U.S. infrastructure by crippling or shutting down a power grid, air traffic control systems, financial system, etc. Mostly, we were focusing on issues that went to the laws of war, such as how and when a nation-state that is the target of a cyberattack can determine the attack is war, rather than cybercrime or cyberterrorism. more

Just Say No, to Your ISP Subverting Your DNS Queries

Over the past few weeks I have been seeing reports that some ISP's are actually subverting DNS queries to their own DNS server. Oh the humanity! What this means is that when you (your computer) does a UDP or TCP Port 53 DNS query the ISP is intercepting that and directing it to their own servers. Has anyone been told by their ISP that they are doing this? No? I didn't think so... more

DNS, My God It’s Full of Stars…

Since my last post about DNS subversion we have had some good feedback. We had 29 responses, I agree a small sample, but what we found is very interesting. Let's remind ourselves of what we are looking at? Does your ISP redirect DNS queries? Specifically, if you try to make a port 53 UDP or TCP connection to a server outside of your ISP's network does it get there? more

Comcast Unleashes Trial DNS Redirection in Select States

In a post today on Comcast's blog, Chris Griffiths, DNS Engineering Manger, has informed customers that they have begun to role a DNS redirection service -- a controversial service offered by several other ISPs over the years to redirect mistyped URLs to ad-based pages instead of a typical 404 error page. The service called "Domain Name Helper Service" is being launched as a market trial in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington according to the company. more

Poll Suggests Canadians OK With Internet Traffic Management If Treated Fairly

The Canadian Press reports: "Most Canadians support the idea of Internet traffic management as long as all users are treated fairly, a new poll suggests. The Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll found only about one in five of those surveyed had heard of Internet traffic management or "traffic shaping," a contentious issue now before the federal regulator... Sixty per cent of survey respondents said they found the practice reasonable as long as customers are treated fairly, while 22 per cent said Internet management is unreasonable regardless." more