http://www.circleid.com/ Postings from Patrick Vande Walle on CircleID en Copyright 2008, unless where otherwise noted. 2008-08-09T08:44:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/88984_icann_auction_new_top_level_domains http://www.circleid.com/posts/88984_icann_auction_new_top_level_domains ICANN has just published a paper from its contractor PowerAuctions LLC, regarding the use of auctions to award new Top Level Domains (TLD) strings in case of contention. I can understand what ICANN wants to avoid. In the past, it has been criticized for using the "beauty contest" model with the redelegation of the .net TLD... However, the auction model is based on the idea that whoever wins the auction will be able to recoup its investment on the sale... More...]]> 2008-08-09T08:44:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/ipv6_considered_a_problem http://www.circleid.com/posts/ipv6_considered_a_problem Google Blog Search Alert looking for posts over IPv6 in my RSS reader. What strikes me is the number of posts explaining how to disable IPv6 in Windows Vista, MacOSX, Ubuntu and other flavours of Linux. It looks like disabling IPv6 makes web browsing faster for a lot of people, independently of which operating system is being used. More...]]> 2008-08-07T11:18:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/87111_gartner_new_top_level_domains http://www.circleid.com/posts/87111_gartner_new_top_level_domains Gartner, the well known IT consulting company, has published a report on the new top level domains that will appear some time next year. The report totally misses the mark. In a pure US centric vision, it focuses on ".com" as the must-have TLD, totally overlooking the fact that a ".com" is mostly worthless e.g. in Germany, where ".de" is the TLD one must have to succeed locally... More...]]> 2008-07-11T12:22:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/new_top_level_domains_internet_standards http://www.circleid.com/posts/new_top_level_domains_internet_standards The recent decision by ICANN to start a new round of applications for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) is launching a round of questions on the IETF side about its consequences. One possible issue may be with vanity gTLDs like apple, ebay etc. Some expect that every Fortune 1,000,000 company will apply for its own TLD. My guess is rather the Fortune 1,000 for a start, but this does not change the nature of the issue, i.e. those companies may want to use email addresses like user@tld. More...]]> 2008-07-07T06:51:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/icann_sport_top_level_domain http://www.circleid.com/posts/icann_sport_top_level_domain given me the green light, I can officially announce I am working on a proposal for a .sport TLD, to be submitted to ICANN for consideration as a new TLD next year. There is still a long way to go in terms of getting the proposal ready, but I this this one is a winner... More...]]> 2008-06-12T15:18:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/domain_names_users_vs_registrants http://www.circleid.com/posts/domain_names_users_vs_registrants names@work writes that ICANN's constituencies are a "bad idea". While I am not sure to agree with him on the general principle, he makes some interesting remarks. Among others, he points out that the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) includes groups that seem to be redundant (the Business and Intellectual Property constituencies) and others like domainers which are not represented in the ICANN arena, yet are an integral part of the domain name business... More...]]> 2008-06-09T06:36:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/85288_european_commission_pushes_ipv6 http://www.circleid.com/posts/85288_european_commission_pushes_ipv6 communication on IPv6, in time for the IPv6 Day in Brussels next 30th May. It goes in the same direction as the report presented at the OECD Ministerial meeting on "Future of the Internet Economy", that was held in Seoul, Korea earlier this month. At the same time, the Commission committed to make its own web services available on IPv6 by 2010. It is good to see that intergovermental organizations take the lead on this, after 10 years of failure of the private sector to actually deploy IPv6... More...]]> 2008-05-28T08:39:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/84410_domain_registrars_ipv6 http://www.circleid.com/posts/84410_domain_registrars_ipv6 ICANN has added IPv6 name servers for the root zone, and that many registries have enabled IPv6 on their DNS servers, I thought it would have been easy to update the DNS records pointing to my domain to mention a IPv6-only DNS server. This way, we could have native name resolution end-to-end in IPv6. We are not there yet, it seems. More...]]> 2008-04-04T11:13:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/811110_luxembourg_investor_sdomain_names http://www.circleid.com/posts/811110_luxembourg_investor_sdomain_names EuroDNS, the Luxembourg registrar, used its well attended New Year party last Wednesday to invite the Minister of Telecoms, Jean-louis Schiltz to talk about a law voted at the end of December 2007. According to the Finance and Budget Commission Report on Draft Law 5801, Revenues generated from use of, or license to use, a Domain Name are exempted from Luxembourg corporate taxes up to 80%. More...]]> 2008-01-11T11:33:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/71199_whois_privacy_pay_for_it http://www.circleid.com/posts/71199_whois_privacy_pay_for_it strange reaction on the failure of the GNSO working group on Whois to reach a consensus. After all, they say, "Privacy concerns with Whois that were identified years ago have already been addressed by in the marketplace"... More...]]> 2007-11-09T10:39:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/79197_developing_internet_standards_engineers http://www.circleid.com/posts/79197_developing_internet_standards_engineers Milton Mueller and Patrik Fältström over the deployment of DNSSEC on the root servers. I think the discussion exemplifies the difficult relation between those who develop standards and those who use them. On the one hand, Milton points out that the way the signing of the root zone will be done will have a great influence on the subjective trust people and nation states will have towards the system. On the other hand, Patrik states that "DNSSEC is just digital signatures on records in this database". Both are right, of course, but they do not speak the same language... More...]]> 2007-09-19T08:57:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/inextricable_internationalized_domain_names http://www.circleid.com/posts/inextricable_internationalized_domain_names ICANN has embarked on the IDN boat at the same time it wants to introduce DNSSEC and new gTLDs. This promises lots of fun. Or grey hair, depending how you look at it. First is the issue of country code IDNs. The ISO-3166 table, based on two letter codes, is a western convention. Some cultures do not use abbreviations or acronyms. Some do not use a character-based alphabet, but a syllabic one. Hence, the next logical step would be to represent the full country name in local script, rather than a transliteration of the ISO string... Imagine the case of India, where there are 1.652 languages, of which 24 are spoken by more than one million people... More...]]> 2007-07-05T10:08:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/what_prevents_ipv6_deployment_europe http://www.circleid.com/posts/what_prevents_ipv6_deployment_europe ZDNet UK has an article on IPv6 and what may slow down its deployment. Jay Daley, from Nominet points out to the fact that the current IPv6 allocation policy used by RIPE NCC is geared towards ISPs. This is a complaint I have heard time and time again. Under the current policy, you have to show to RIPE NCC that you are going to allocate 200 address blocks to your customers before you are allocated a /32 block. Obviously, a large corporate network cannot afford to renumber every time it switches ISPs... More...]]> 2007-06-18T10:29:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/deploying_ipv6_implementation_rest_of_us http://www.circleid.com/posts/deploying_ipv6_implementation_rest_of_us More...]]> 2007-06-04T16:53:00-08:00 http://www.circleid.com/posts/xxx_back_on_radar_screen http://www.circleid.com/posts/xxx_back_on_radar_screen previous post. The new story is now that the ICANN board did not reject the .XXX application as such, but only the agreement negotiated between ICM Registry and the ICANN staff at that time. How subtle these things are... More...]]> 2007-01-08T09:25:00-08:00