It's been 15 long years since the standard for DNSSEC was developed and sadly adoption has been painfully low until recently, thanks to Dan Kaminsky, the infamous Internet Researcher who indentified that gaping hole in the DNS. The discovery of the fundamental flaw in DNS sparked industry wide attention! Every day, we move a little closer to widespread DNSSEC adoption, so I thought I'd take a moment and highlight some of the most notable milestones... more
Saipan DataCom, Inc.’s upcoming late March 2009 open launch of chi.mp (“Content Hub & Identity Management Platform) has implications for trademark holders that seem to have gone unnoticed to date. Chi.mp is a free platform that enables social network users to create social hubs on their own stand-alone hosted Web sites... As an attorney representing both trademark owners and domain name registries, I see chi.mp as a unique situation. more
The draft New gTLD Applicant Guidebook (version 2) has been released along with an analysis of the comments to the prior version. The documents are voluminous. I glanced at the revised draft Base Agreement, and it's clearly unacceptable as there continue to be no price caps in place to protect domain name registrants... more
ICANN has its 34th international public meeting in Mexico City on 1-6 March i.e. in just over a fortnight. One of the consistent concerns I hear in my role as general manager of public participation for the organization is that there is not a way for people to ask questions to the staff and the Board. I don't think that's really true but I do accept that the formats used are not liked by a large number of people... more
We've had snow storms recently in the UK, so there is much talk about storms. It strikes me that some might view the current issues at Nominet as a storm in a teacup – a small event that has been exaggerated out of all proportion. Not unsurprisingly, I don't agree. I think that the storm has already had a significant effect on Nominet... more
Paul Stahura published a great report demonstrating that trademark holders have historically not been blocking their names across multiple Top-Level Domains (TLDs). I have always been a fan of number crunching -- "numbers never lie". Since Paul has already done a remarkable job of statistical analysis, I am going to wear my theorist hat and prove a reworded form of the Hypothesis using logical deduction and common sense... more
The following is an analysis based on the hypothesis that trademark holders are not, in general, registering their trademarks as domain names across the existing top-level domain namespace. To determine if the hypothesis is true, we examine domain names registered in the popular generic top-level domains ("gTLDs" such as .com, .net and .info), also using other publicly available information such as the USPTO database of trademarks, the English dictionary, DNS entries, UDRP records and whois records. more
During the sunrise period for .eu domains there was quite a bit of controversy, as a number of high profile names were grabbed by companies that had no legitimate right to them. One of the domains that caught my attention at the time was dublin.eu (see Irish Times article). So what about the .tel sunrise?
Were companies like Lantec, who grabbed the dublin.eu domain, actively seeking high profile names this time round? more
This very interesting document was released by ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) for public comment yesterday. And it asks some fundamental questions while at the same time pointing to sources such as the Honeynet Alliance's reports on fast flux. more
A cranky letter from the NTIA to ICANN, submitted in late December during ICANN's comment period for new top-level domains, has encouraged the awkward coalition of those opposed to new TLDs. The NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration), a division of the Department of Commerce, is the agency tasked with being ICANN's watchdog. So a letter from them carries some weight, though not as much as some people think... more
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