At the December 2004 ICANN meeting in Cape Town, Vint Cerf said this to the Public Forum: "I want to go on record as saying... that I am no longer sure that I have a strong understanding of why I would be motivated to create a new TLD..." Dr. Cerf posed a question that has yet to be answered or even discussed by the DNS stakeholder community. While the technical and business cases for the introduction of new TLDs have been successfully made, what is the philosophical case for adding new TLDs? What semantics are encoded in TLDs, and how could those semantics be expanded in a consistent way? more
Guilllaume Rischard setup a parody on verisign.com using the IDN spoofing trick. He managed to get one registrar to register verisign.com with a cyrillic S (U+0405) (ie xn--veriign-mog.com :-) This actually started in #joiito a couple of weeks ago after the Eric published the spoofing attack paper. A joke was made that it would be funny if someone did it to verisign.com and so he did. I suppose I could rant why VeriSign should adopt the JET Guideline (or ICANN Guidelines) but this parody would send a louder message. more
Recently there have been a number of news reports/articles that are incorrect or misleading in interpreting China's domain name management policy. James has posted an article aiming to clarify what is going to in China's domain name market. Considering the potential negative impact of those reports on the participants of this market, I supplement James's post by pointing out three things, which I believe critical for any TLD registries that hope to have a better understand of China's domain name regulation and the special action based on it. more
Byte Level Research has published a map that illustrates not only all 245 country codes but the size of each country and territory. The map is quite up to date and comprehensive including country codes for such places as Svalbard (.sj), Southern Georgia (.gs), and Bouvet Island (.bv), which is uninhabited. "Today, companies must register as many as a hundred country codes to be competitive globally -- and protect their intellectual property. This map helps professionals keep track of all these country codes -- and see where the Internet is headed. For example, China is on pace to have the most popular country code on the planet by 2012," said Yunker," said John Yunker, president of Byte Level Research and developer of the map. more
Efforts to take down websites for copyright infringement are likely to move beyond U.S.-based domain name registries, with ICANN promising to more closely cooperate with global law enforcement agencies and governments. During an open session with the Government Advisory Committee (GAC), the ICANN board confirmed that it will enforce its contracts with registrars more effectively in order to meet expectations from governments and law enforcement authorities. more
In the last few years there have been many discussions on how the Internet is governed, and how it should be governed. The whole World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) ended talking about this problem. It caused exchange of letters between the US Secretary of State and the European Union presidency. And it caused a public discussion, organized by the US Department of Commerce on that issue. I saw some reflection of this discussion and here are some comments on that. My colleague Milton Mueller of the Syracuse University sent me an e-mail today in which, among other, it says, "A global email campaign by IGP generated comments from 32 countries... more
As part of Verisign's ongoing effort to make global internet infrastructure more secure, stable, and resilient, we will soon make an important technology update to how we protect the top-level domains (TLDs) we operate. The vast majority of internet users won't notice any difference, but the update will support enhanced security for several Verisign-operated TLDs and pave the way for broader adoption and the next era of Domain Name System (DNS) security measures. more
The .net Top Level Domain (TLD) contains the names of the main group of DNS root servers as well as the names of the servers for several other large TLDs, such as .com, .org, .arpa and .mil. Most of the focus about the .net redelegation has concerned the quality of the registration systems. But that is a minor matter next to the quality of the name server operation. more
From the perspective of the domain name industry, 2018 was strongly influenced by, among other things, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Temporary Specification and especially the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP). For the Contracted Parties House (CPH) TechOps Group, one year after its foundation, it was a very exciting and intensive time. This initiative was created to tackle technical and operational needs and challenges plus ideally to create best practices. more
In Part 1 of this series of blog posts I described the need for an industry association of operators to discuss the technical tasks, such as the development, deployment, and ongoing systems administration of the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), performed by registries and registrars to ensure interoperability and share best practices when providing registration services. In this blog post I'll describe a way to make that happen. more
There are thousands of sites and services on the 'net that offer domain name whois lookup services. As of last night, many of them may have stopped working. Why? Many of them rely on fairly rudimentary software that parses the whois from Verisign (for .com and .net) and then relays the query to the registrar whois. The site or service then displays the whois output from the registrar's whois server to you. more
I've always been a fan of co-ops. In New York, we shop at greenstar.coop and my wife banks at alternatives.coop, in the UK we shop at co-operative.coop. So when the .COOP domain opened, I wondered if I could get my own clever domain name, but found that chicken.coop was taken by a small producer co-op in the southern U.S. Drat. more
It nearly goes without saying that if ".CA" means and should continue to mean, "Canada", the registration of a .CA domain name ought to involve some tie to Canada. As Canadian Internet Registration Authority ("CIRA") CEO, Byron Holland, aptly put it, "The fundamental requirement of having a Canadian presence in order to get a dot-ca domain name make sense...because it is a country code and there is an assumption that there is some "Canadian-ness". And that is why, in a nutshell, I support a Canadian 'presence requirement' for the registration of .CA domain names. Nevertheless, the question of what constitutes an appropriate 'presence requirement' is an interesting issue... more
At ICANN San Juan, I found out from Tina Dam, ICANN's IDN Program Director, that she was putting together a live IDN TLD test bed plan which includes translations of the string .test into eleven written languages (Arabic, Chinese-simplified, Chinese-traditional, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish) and ten scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, Tamil)... Two days ago, ICANN provided an update on this project... more
The introduction of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to the Internet moved a step closer Friday, when the ICANN Board laid out its plan for the final stages of approving the new gTLD program. In a lengthy resolution, passed unanimously at the conclusion of a week of consultations in Cartagena, Colombia, the Board sought to draw a line under some policies where it believes the community has reached agreement, while highlighting others where further discussions are needed before the doors are opened to applications next year. more