The Internet’s Weakest Link

This week two major transoceanic cables experienced outages that may last several days. The outages provide a reminder that several Internet bottlenecks exist where these cables make landfall. When one thinks of bottlenecks in telecommunications the first and last mile come to mind. Yet equally vulnerable are the last few 1000 feet of submarine cable links. more

Amazon Gets the Green Light for .Amazon TLD Following Intense Negotiations Involving South America

ICANN has lifted the stop on delegating the .amazon top-level domain, allowing the delegation of the domain to the company Amazon Inc. over the South American region. more

Comcast Fires Back at E360

Back in January, bulk mailer E360 filed a suit against giant cable ISP Comcast. This week Comcast responded with a withering response... Their memorandum of law wastes no time getting down to business: "Plaintiff is a spammer who refers to itself as a "internet marketing company," and is in the business of sending email solicitations and advertisements to millions of Internet users, including many of Comcast's subscribers." Comcast's analysis is similar to but even stronger than the one I made in January... more

Speculating in Domain Names: Pricing War(e)s

Speculation in one form of another has an ancient and honorable history. It not only creates entrepreneurial activity but fuels markets for selling wares and offering services, but also generates competition for consumers and wars over loyalty. The commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s, which extended market activity into virtual (cyber) space, has many of the virtues of the actual but also its vices: cheating and fraud, and other skullduggery. more

China Has Nearly 3 Times the Number of Internet Users as the US, and the Gap Will Only Widen

China has 772 million internet users, as compared to the United States currently at 292 million. While the US internet penetration has reached 89%, China is only 55% and growing fast. more

Hongyun Project – China’s Low-Earth Orbit Broadband Internet Project

Last December, State-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) launched the first experimental Hongyun (rainbow cloud) Project satellite, and they began testing it in March. The 247 kg test satellite is in orbit at an altitude of around 1,100 km, and they plan to launch four more test satellites this year and begin operating with a 156-satellite constellation in 2022. more

Mandatory Provision of Abuse Contact Information in WHOIS

An industry professional at Abusix is the backbone behind a proposal to improve and create better mitigation of abuse across different global internet networks. Basically, this introduces a mandatory "abuse contact" field for objects in global Whois databases. This provides a more efficient way for abuse reports to reach the correct network contact. Personally - as a Postmaster for a leading, white-label ISP, I applaud this with great happiness for multiple reasons. I also feel people who handle abuse desks, anti-abuse roles, etc. should closely follow this. more

Do New gTLDs Disrupt .com?

This post examines whether the new gTLDs program is a disruptive innovation to the dominance of .com. I then use the idea of disruptive innovation to explain the relative adoption failure of previous generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs), such as .biz, .info and .mobi. Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption explains battles between market entrants and incumbents. Examples of markets transformed by disruptive innovations include classified ads (Craigslist), long-distance calls (Skype), record stores (iTunes), research libraries (Google), encyclopedias (Wikipedia), and taxis (Uber). more

FiOS: A Reality Check

I wrote this in response to some interest in my experience with the reality of FiOS. The short summary is that there is no magic. Sure having Fiber is nice but it isn't that much different than my "cable" service. The bigger difference between Comcast and Verizon is in the nature of the businesses. Comcast is a content company trying to move on to it looks beyond the STB with its purchase of NBCU whereas Verizon seems to want to continue the 1990's vision of the STB as its entrée into the home. more

ICANN Threatens RegisterFly Termination

ICANN sent a 10-page letter to RegisterFly on February 21st threatening to terminate its accreditation. The letter is available here. ICANN's not exactly advertising this -- no conspicuous notice appears on its home page and, more curiously, no update has been posted by the Ombudsman despite two prior postings about RegisterFly in the past week. A member of the general public would be hard pressed to find out that any action has been threatened. more

Email and Social Media Accounts Under the Spotlight in UK’s Proposed New ‘Spy’ Plan

It would be reasonable to assume that your employer is archiving your email communications. But what about your personal emails, texts, phone calls and Facebook posts. Are these really private? Not for long, if the UK government has its way. It has been reported that its new anti-terror plan, if passed, would require Internet providers and phone companies to store all online communications by UK citizens for one year. more

When Will The Internet Be Divided Among Nations?

The desired goal of most of the other countries other than US is to end up with their own local language suffixes, own local language domain names, basically their own Internet, with its own domain registration policies -- in a nutshell, a very big and a very complex global mess, indeed. This fight over ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is all about a golden key, as without it, the Internet is completely useless. ...It's also ICANN, the organization that from the start has made some very stringent and often very weird policies about such issues as the golden keys. Now its global authority is being challenged, and such fights could divide the power of this controlling body, and any adverse outcome will simply split the Internet.  more

America’s Broadband Blind Spot: Audit Reveals Millions More Offline Than FCC Reports

A new audit has sharply challenged the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) broadband availability estimates, revealing that 26 million Americans lack access to fixed 100/20 Mbps internet, 6.4 million more than the FCC claims. more

Fair Use Incorporating Trademarks in Domain Names

The paragraph 4(c)(iii) safe harbors of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy are construed from a five word phrase, "legitimate noncommercial or fair use." "Noncommercial" like "identical" in paragraph 4(a)(i) has a defined meaning; it does not include domain names inactively held (for any alleged purpose), although non-use is not necessarily fatal to rights or legitimate interests. "Fair use" has a larger canvass; it includes nominative (commercial) use that is fair and Constitutionally protected speech. more

Trend Towards Liberalization Of Country Domain Names: Enters .CN

On Monday 17 March, domain name registrations under the new Chinese Internet address, .cn, were available for the first time to registrants both inside and outside of China. As China's equivalent of .uk, or .us, the .cn domain space will be the Internet address of choice for Chinese consumers and for corporations interested in operating in one of the largest Internet markets. more