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Open letter to US House Subcommittee for Oversight Hearing on gTLDs

This is an open letter to the United States House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and the Internet regarding the Oversight Hearing on new Top-Level Domains to be held on Wednesday 4 May. The intention of the open letter is to highlight the imbalance of intellectual property interests on the panel and to ensure the Subcommittee is presented with some balanced facts and benefits of the new Top-Level Domain program. more

DNSSEC Ready Set Go! But, Wait, Are You Ready?

The year 2010 is turning out to be the "year of DNSSEC" from Registry implementations, Registrar implementations, ISP support, to the Root being signed this summer. Because we are dealing with such critical infrastructure, it is important to not lose sight of careful implementations. more

Three Things TLD Registries Must Know About China’s Domain Name Regulation

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

CPH TechOps Retrospective 2018

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

The Verisign Shared Registration System: A 25-Year Retrospective

Every day, there are tens of thousands of domain names registered across the globe -- often as a key first step in creating a unique online presence. Making that experience possible for Verisign-operated top-level domains (TLDs) like .com and .net is a powerful and flexible technology platform first introduced 25 years ago. more

Top 10 Biggest Domain Stories of 2012 and Predictions for 2013

So my prediction from last year that "ICANN will open the new gTLD application period without any glitches" could not have been more wrong. And yes - I actually used the word 'glitches'... Regardless of my crystal-ball gazing skills, it's been another incredibly eventful year, and below are the Top 10 Domain Stories from 2012. more

A Case for Further DNS Registrar Industry Self-Regulation

In most industries, businesses that blatantly act against the interests of their customers to favor their own internal profit centers would either not be allowed or else subject to controls and oversight by the government. It is universally regarded as an unfair and deceptive business practice. In the domain name registrar business, however, the normal practices of legitimate business dealings and customer protection seem woefully wanting. Kelly's Case described here illustrates the point... more

Online Freedoms: Safeguards Must Be Balanced With Free Expression

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a major contextual factor of global internet governance discussions over the past year, and it appears that discussions in ICANN are no exception. Threats to the integrity and security of the DNS have become a regular topic of debate within the ICANN community. In recent months, these discussions have increasingly focused on the idea of 'DNS abuse' and, more specifically, COVID-19-related DNS abuse. more

ICANN, VeriSign, and the Swamp

ICANN has initiated arbitration (before the ICC's International Court of Arbitration) against VeriSign under the .net Registry Agreement, seeking declaratory judgments that many things VeriSign has done or attempted to do over the years (Sitefinder, ConsoliDate, IDN, WLS, and stemming the abusive actions of shell registrars when they destructively query the registry for secondary market purposes) violate that agreement. more

The Philosophical Case for Expanding the Domain Name Space

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

Is ICANN Running a Racket?

On March 13, 2019, I published an article on CircleID, Portrait of a Single-Character Domain Name, that explored the proposed release and auction of o.com, a single-character .com domain name that was registered in 1993 and assigned to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) by Dr. Jon Postel. Although the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has since raised serious objections... more

IDN Parody on verisign.com

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

VeriSign and ICANN Settle Lawsuit

ICANN has announced today that it has tentatively agreed to settle a longstanding dispute with VeriSign Inc. The dispute which began in part from SiteFinder, a controversial search service VeriSign created in late 2003 for users who mistype Web addresses. The following is an excerpt from today's press release... more

How Could the Internet be Governed: Perspective from Bulgaria

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

TLD Operators Should Not Police Content, Says EFF

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a letter today stating "companies and organizations that run the Internet's domain name system shouldn't be in the business of policing the contents of websites, or enforcing laws that can impinge on free speech. more

Industry Updates

2025 .US Town Hall Registration Open: Explore Industry Trends & Policy Insights

DNIB Reports 378.5 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q3 2025

Understanding DNSSEC: Best Practices and Implementation Challenges

Radix Premiums Surge as .Tech Leads the Charge in H1 2025

Radix selects Tucows Registry as Back-End Registry Services Provider

DNIB Reports 371.7 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q2 2025

Radix Releases UA Readiness Study on E-Commerce Platforms to Support Broader Internet Compatibility

Domain Name Industry Brief Reports 368.4 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q1 2025

Radix’s Premium Domains Surge in H2 2024, Led by .Fun Boom

Domain Name Industry Brief Reports 364.3 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q4 2024

Domain Name Industry Brief Reports 362.3 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q3 2024

2024 .US Town Hall Registration Open: Explore Industry Trends & Policy Insights

Radix Achieves Record Premium Domain Sales in H1 2024, Led by Surging Interest in .Fun

Domain Name Industry Brief Reports 362.4 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q2 2024

Domain Name Industry Brief Reports 362.4 Million Domain Name Registrations in Q1 2024