Wildcarding Subdomains Is OK; Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Isn’t - Goforit v. Digimedia

This is a super-interesting dispute involving two not-so-interesting litigants. The plaintiff Goforit runs a type of meta-search engine at goforit.com. After spending 5 minutes at the site, I couldn't identify a single reason why anyone would want to use it. Also inexplicably, Goforit appears to be quite pleased with its trademark rights in "Goforit," a term that seems more like an exhortation than a trademark. more

Ensuring Maximum Resilience to the DNS?

Yesterday CommunityDNS noticed a sudden, heavy spike in traffic through its Anycast node in Hong Kong. While comfortably processing queries at 863,000 queries per second for close to 2 hours the occurrence was undeniable. While we can't say the increase in traffic was specifically due to DDoS, its sudden increase is suspicious and reminds us that DDoS is still a popular tool used by the malicious community. more

How to Discredit Net Neutrality

On Tuesday (November 30) Internet backbone provider Level3 publicly accused cable-based ISP Comcast of trying to thwart competing video services delivered through the internet. Comcast was, according to Level3, suddenly choosing to charge it more because of its carriage of Netflix traffic. The accusation was consciously framed to raise net neutrality alarms. It appeared as if a cable TV giant was using its control of internet access to make access to a competing, over the top video service more expensive... Then the full story came out. more

Rings of Fire

Rightfully, Olympic is a very sacred word and a very pure concept for the Olympic Committee as they have protected this brand and all of its related intellectual property components at every instance for about hundred years. However, the word Olympic as a name is geographic based on Mount Olympus and over the many centuries belonging to the public domain. ... Dot-Olympic ideally should belong to the Olympic committee, if they so desire, but in a contest or any other situation the ownership of this name would simply become a question of going after a diluted geography based public domain name. more

The Ultimate Differentiator: Reliability!

Every company that monitors their site or application performance focuses on two key metrics Availability and Speed. However, there is a third metric, Reliability, which is often misunderstood or in some cases ignored by companies. Reliability measures availability, accuracy, and delivery of a service within a time threshold. Reliability is difficult to define and measure as it is different for each company and service. To simplify it, you can think of Reliability as how consistent are you in delivering the "service". more

Bad Timing: Comcast, Netflix, NN, Cable Modems, and NBCU

Comcast, the largest broadband provider, largest pay-TV company, and third-largest telephone company in the country, distributes communications services to more than a third of the country. Today Comcast's existing overwhelming market power was on display in major public battles with (1) Level 3 and (2) cable modem manufacturer Zoom. The takeaway from today: No market forces are constraining Comcast -- or any of the other major cable distributors, none of which compete with each other. more

A Tale of Two Governance Models

As many of us in the Internet community gear up for the ICANN meeting in Colombia next week, it's important to remember that not everybody embraces the multi-stakeholder approach that we've gradually learned to love. Just a month ago, a group with a very different vision of how to run things wrapped up their own Internet governance meeting in Latin America. Their meeting was three times as long and accomplished about a third as much, but they'd still like to see their model replace the ICANN model. more

ITU, the Internet, and a Very Contentious Footnote

I was part of a small APNIC delegation that attended the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference (PP-10) with a limited Sector Member role as an observer. Our aim was to be available to ITU Member States with questions on IP addressing issues and to follow Member State discussions on the ITU's role in Internet governance issues. Four adopted resolutions at PP-10 were of particular relevance to Internet management, of which one was new: "Facilitating the transition from IPv4 to IPv6". more

The Three Lessons We Can Learn from gTLDs’ Past

History is a great teacher, we are told. So, on the cusp of an explosion in new top-level domains, what can we learn from the two previous expansions of the Internet's naming space? And what are the pitfalls to avoid? Let's just assume the fundamental and obvious lessons of realistic expectations, a solid business plan and prudent resource management, and instead focus on the little talked about but still critical lessons that will separate the winners and the losers in this race. But first - a caveat! more

The Next Internet Revolution Will Not Be in English

This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions. Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range of Arabic domains. I left off the Latin country code equivalents (in, cn, th, sa, etc.) to illustrate what the Internet is going to look like (at a very high level) in the years ahead. more

Domain Dialing

The emergence of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) and country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) allowed the internet browsing to become much easier and intuitive. After all, from the user's perspective, it is so much easier to remember a domain instead of an IP address... The IP addresses replacement by domain names helps the Internet to become this global phenomenon that we know. Unfortunately, this revolution that had occurred in the domain market was not followed by other markets. more

The Year IPv6 Made it to Major League

May 6th 2007: ARIN board of trustees passes a resolution advising the Internet community that migration to a new version of the internet protocol, IPv6, will be necessary to allow continued growth of the internet. June 29th 2007, Puerto Rico: ICANN Board resolution states that: The Board further resolves to work with the Regional Internet Registries and other stakeholders to promote education and outreach, with the goal of supporting the future growth of the Internet by encouraging the timely deployment of IPv6. Oct 26th 2007 at the RIPE 55 meeting in Amsterdam... Nov 15th 2007: IGF meeting, Rio de Janeiro... This is but a small sample of the fast growing visibility IPv6 acquired this year, 2007. more

Cyber Crime: It’s All About Data (Part 1)

Cyber crime = crime. How do we make police forces understand this and how to get it prioritized? In this series of blogs I am looking into whether aggregating data can change the way cyber crime is approached and prioritized. At a seminar at the IT Security trade fair in Utrecht detective super intendant Charlie McMurdie, head of the cyber crime unit of the London Metropolitan police, said that cyber crime was recently prioritized by the UK government. She also said the following and I'm allowed to quote this... more

Implications of ICANN’s New TLD Disqualification Policies and Cybersquatting 3-Strike Law

ICANN's proposed final applicant guidebook unraveled some new policies that would disqualify applicants from the new TLD program. ICANN states that if you lose 3 UDRP cases, you will be disqualified from being a major shareholder, partner, officer, director of a new top-level domain registry... Has ICANN opened a new can of worms with the 3-strike rule? more

The Internet Monopolies?

Tim Wu had an OpEd published in the Wall Street Journal this weekend: In the Grip of the Internet Monopolists. There are commentaries on the piece on The Technology Liberation Front and TechCrunch. The more I thought about the OpEd, the more troubling it seemed. more