Get rich quick: the new domains with the most registrations are .BIZ and .INFO, clones of .COM and .ORG for people who missed out the first time. Despite vigorous marketing and, for .INFO, price cutting, neither is more than a pale shadow of the original, and both are plagued with sleazy registrants. Nonetheless, we can expect a few more clones like .WEB, who will make their money from defensive trademark registrations, domain squatters, speculators, and a few suckers who think that SAUERKRAUT.WEB can be the gateway to a mail-order fortune.

Idealists: Another unpersuasive theory says that a TLD enables communities. The best example to date is .CAT for Catalonia, which is modestly successful but doesn't tell us much since Barcelona is a rich sophisticated city that would be awash in Internet content with or without a domain. On the other hand .MUSEUM is a noble failure, with only about 200 registrants, a lot of dead links, and negligible visibility. Two pleasant young men have been trying to get .BERLIN through ICANN for years, and there are other candidates like .ECO, but it's hard to see why anyone would switch from their existing domain in .DE or .ORG or whatever since they haven't for any of the community domains we have now. I've heard claims that tiny language groups in danger of dying out need their own TLD, but it seems to me that if they could raise the $185K that a TLD application costs, they'd be a lot better off hiring linguists and programmers to compile dictionaries and adapt text and web tools to work in the language.

Certification: sponsored TLDs are supposed to ensure that all of their registrants meet specific requirements, so you know that a domain in, say, .COOP is an actual co-operative. The flaw in this theory so far is that none of the sponsored TLDs so far have been in areas where there's a problem with fakes, nor do they have any process to verify that registrants remain eligible. The little poultry packer that registered CHICKEN.COOP sold out to a larger company, but nobody noticed they weren't a co-op any more until I wrote to .COOP management and told them. They thanked me and encouraged me to report any more violations I saw, so I guess I volunteered to be the compliance department. The number of registrations in .COOP is on the order of 1% of the co-ops in the world, so it appears that the other 99% of co-ops are getting along fine without a special domain.

The .PRO domain is supposed to be just for licensed doctors, lawyers, accountants and maybe other licensed professionals (the web site is a bit vague), who have to present their licenses to register, but a combination of mismanagement and financial problems have allowed in large numbers of speculators and other registrants who clearly don't meet the criteria, so it doesn't tell us anything useful. I could imagine that a .BANK domain that carefully vetted its registrants to be sure they were real banks with government banking licenses might help tell real from fake bank web sites and mail, but that certification niche seems to be taken already by green bar SSL certificates.

Branding: The new rules allow single owner domains, so we can expect Apple to get .MAC and probably other companies will register their name like .IBM or brand names. Marketers are doubtless salivating, but for regular users, it's hard to see why you'd want to be BOB.MAC and rent your identity to your computer vendor.

Non-English languages: This is the only one that has any urgency at all. China really wants .中国 in addition to .CN, and a lot of other countries with non-Roman writing would also like localized domains. ICANN has a separate process for non-ASCII TLDs, so I'll ignore them for now.

So running down this list, where's the compelling argument? Does anyone (ignoring those with vested interests) really think that more TLDs will break the .COM monopoly? That more "community" TLDs will be any more of a success than the failures to date? That anyone will use a TLD rather than a search engine as a directory?

The only unambigous beneficiary of new TLDs is ICANN, whose cash flow will increase by $185,000 per application, and all of the consultants they've hired to do the evaluations because ICANN's many highly paid staff evidently can't do it themselves. Since a lot of the new TLDs will be run by organizations with little or no experience as a registry, we can expect them to learn slowly and painfully about all the sleazy tricks that crooked registrants pull.

In sum, neither of the two classic arguments for new domains, competition and directories, have worked in the past decade, and there's no reason to think they will in the future. Other than support for non-English languages, all of the other rationales strike me as wishful thinking, not business models. So I look forward to .中国 and its ilk, but other than that, they're all going to fail, very expensively.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

Why do we run content filters at the recipient's side? Paul Graham's Plan for Spam introduced them that way. After several years, we can say that plan doesn't work very well. Email has become much less reliable. One way to recover reliability, at least between trusted parties, is to run filters at the sender's side. Let's look at the diagram in more detail.

Users are connected through authenticated and possibly encrypted connections, both senders and recipients. Some users are connected through the Internet, some directly to the relevant server.

The first MSA (?) relays according to current SMTP standards. The receiving server runs content filtering, but doesn't know what to do in case an accepted message turns out to be spam. The amount of mumbo jumbo required for effective spam filtering is high, and may involve delays. If the message is considered spam, most times it will be silently dropped. This is where unreliability stems from.

The second MSA (!) relays according to the VHLO proposed SMTP extension. The sender knows how to handle spam, because it knows any required detail about the authenticated sender. The recipient trusts the sender, not because they have specific arrangements, but because the sender identifies itself, e.g. providing its domain registration reference, and relays for its own users only, at least for the illustrated session.

VHLO, Verified Hello, provides a reliable channel that can be used in parallel with existing EHLO traffic. It employs the authentication, authorization, and vouching techniques that have been developed during the past years, and allows postmasters to manage them, e.g. getting aware of what conditions a receiver MTA requires… But I'm not going to describe protocol's details, that are being discussed. I want to ask: Are you ready to turn the table on spam?

Written by Ale, Tiny ISP and freelance programmer

In a blog post yesterday, Google said: "After last November's McColo ISP takedown, when spam volumes dropped by 70%, spammers worked overtime to fill the void. They succeeded: Within four months, spam levels rose back to pre-McColo levels. This upward trend continued through June 4, when another large ISP spam source, 3FN, was reported to have been dismantled. Spam volume immediately dropped 30%—not as extreme as McColo, but still significant. Although this created a sudden dip in spam levels, it also created an open invitation for opportunistic spammers to once again seize a market opportunity. Over the coming months, we anticipate watching new players once again drive spam levels back up. Since June 4, spammers have already made up a significant amount of ground, climbing 14% from the initial drop."

Related Links:
Q2 2009 Spam Trends Google, Jul.1.2009
Spam Rates Recovering From 3FN Takedown Brian Krebs, Washington Post, Jul.2.2009

Good morning. My name is Eric Brunner-Williams, and I am speaking to you on behalf of the initial signatories of the Step-by-Step proposal. I represent one of the signatories as the principal of the native, aboriginal, and indigenous cultural and linguistic Top-Level Domain (TLD) project, one of many similar efforts to preserve living languages and cultures.

Along with linguistic and cultural and city and regional TLD projects, we have started the Step-by-Step proposal.

We held a workshop on Monday which was well attended and we have had discussions with the relevant stakeholders, which are continuing.

After detailed discussions with many interested stakeholders, I am now presenting the Step-by-Step proposal to you, the board.

The Step-by-Step proposal is an early window, nothing more, and nothing less. We are convinced that while the still unresolved issues are relevant, a fair number of applicants fall under the RADAR and do not affect these open issues.

Applicants seeking to enter this early window should commit to the highest level of protection regarding these open issues:

• credible registration and compliance policies,
• recognition of legitimate protection of ip rights, and
• anti-phishing mechanisms,

through a shared binding code of conduct, implemented on a scalable platform.

The Step By Step proposal, while allowing some applications to move forward, harms none.

An early window tests the system.

Stakeholders having legitimate concerns about open issues, will be able to flag applications which do not conform to their standards, removing those applications from the early window.

Linguistic and cultural, regional and city applications mentioned in the draft of this proposal are examples. The early window is would be open to any application which is willing to commit to the higher levels of protection I mentioned previously.

We invite discussion with the board and the ICANN community. An online fora is available at stepbystep.tel.

And of course we invite discussion from the CircleID community as well.

The initial signatories are:

.NAI, Native, Aboriginal & Indigenous (languages and cultures)
.QUEBEC, PointQuébec
.BCN, The City of Barcelona
.CYM, dotCYM Cyf. (Welsh language and culture)
.EUS, PuntuEus Elkartea (Basque language and culture)
.GAL, Asociación PuntoGal (Galician language and culture)
.BZH, Association pointBZH (Brittany / Breton language and culture)
.LAT, Latin-American and Caribbean Federation for Internet and Electronic Commerce
and
.BERLIN, .HAMBURG & .KÖLN
and
CORE.

There are subsequent signatories, and question(s) from members of the Board. I'll provide these shortly.

There was a question from the Board, which I'll add here from the transcript shortly.

Written by Eric Brunner-Williams, CTO, CORE

Way back in the mid 1990s, it seemed obvious that Internet users would use the DNS as a directory, particularly once early web browsers started to add .COM to words typed in the address bar. This led to the first Internet land rush, with heavy hitters like Procter and Gamble registering diarrhea.com in 1995.

Everyone wanted to get into .COM, since that was the de-facto directory for the Internet. Network Solutions, the predecessor to VeriSign, had a monopoly on registrations in .COM and that was a problem. Many people thought the solution was to add more TLDs with different monopoly registrars (often themselves.) I believe that I was the first to propose breaking the registration monopoly by splitting registries and registrars in December 1996. One of ICANN's undeniable successes is the competitive registrar market, which (as I predicted) as allowed a wide variety of sales models, and a lot of bundling of low-cost domains with web hosting and other services.

Since 1996 we've learned two things about TLDs: TLDs make a lousy directories, and users don't use the DNS for directories anyway. Several of the new TLDs introduced by ICANN since 2000 were intended to be structured as directories. The .AERO domain reserved two letter domains for airlines and three letter domains for airports, using standard industry codes, which was a clever idea, but not one that interested many airlines or airports. The .MUSEUM domain tried very hard to be a directory, with names organized both by the type of museum (metropolitan.art.museum) and the location (vam.london.museum) but that didn't work either.

A huge change in the Net since the late 1990s is that everyone uses search engines to find what they're looking for, to the extent that many non-technical users don't know the difference between the address and search boxes in their browsers. (Sometimes they'll type a search term into the address box, which keeps domain squatters in business.)

So if TLDs aren't useful as directories, what could they be useful for? We'll address the possibilities tomorrow.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

Yesterday after the news broke I told the Financial Times: "There's been this impression in the internet industry that when the Chinese government makes a demand, they have to roll over and play dead. The lesson here is that's not necessarily the case." I'll put it more strongly here: The Green Dam episode proves yet again that when companies respond to critics by saying things like: "it's beyond our control if we want to do business in China" or "there's nothing we can do or we will get kicked out," that is a huge pile of, well, equine excrement.

What should be abundantly clear from events of the past several weeks is that industry and even ordinary citizens can have a real impact on policy outcomes in China—especially information and technology policy that has a direct impact on large numbers of people nationwide. It's not clear whether a new deadline will be set, the mandate radically revised, or the whole thing quietly scrapped. Which of those three options becomes reality depends very much on the actions over the next few months by industry, Chinese netizens, and various other actors.

Andrew Lih writes:

This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China's decision system is much more nuanced than what a "Communist" regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.

While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state's legitimacy.

Sky Canaves at WSJ.com's China Journal has a great post titled Green Dam and the Politics of Consent, in which she points out:

While it's impossible to know what impact Chinese critics of the plan had relative to the vocal protestations of foreign governments, trade organizations and PC makers, the ministry's latest move on Green Dam highlights the consensual nature of government and politics in China, which emphasizes stability and agreement among all parties involved.

Dan Harris sees this as an example of how China really is moving in the right direction:

China is billing it as a delay, but I can virtually guarantee this software will never be heard from again. I say this for two reasons. One, the people did not like it and Beijing does NOT want to go against the people on something like this. Since there is absolutely no reason to believe the people will ever start liking something like this, there is absolutely no reason to believe the software will return. Two, I know movement has been slow, and I know it has been in fits and starts, but if we were to draw a straight line through the rises and falls, freedom is on a fairly inexorable march in China.

William Moss, a.k.a. "Imagethief," however, isn't ready to pop the champagne just yet:

Green Dam Youth Escort may have submarined as predicted, but make no mistake, this isn't over. The objective that drove it the Green Dam plan, the desire to "purify the Internet", still stands. All attempts are being made to wrap the demise of Green Dam in face-saving balm, but there is no disguising the thoroughly humiliating nature of the episode. Nothing stokes the fires of zealotry like a bout of punishing humiliation, and I'd expect to see that zealotry redirected in coming months in an attempt to justify the Green Dam initiative. The recent assault on Google may be a sign of things to come. PC makers may be able to breathe a sigh of relief now, but portals, video sharing sites, social networks, Internet cafes and others may be in for an interesting few months. Watch this space.

A piece in today's Financial Times (subscription required) points out that scrapped mandates sometimes get resurrected later on in somewhat different forms. One example was Beijing's failed attempt to require that all mobile phones sold in China adhere to a new WAPI standard (alternative to Wifi). Strong industry pushback caused that mandate to be scrapped but it's now been revived, the FT writes:

In 2004, the Chinese government surprised the communication industry with an edict that the homegrown wireless encryption standard—in competition to WiFi—would be compulsory for all mobile data products sold in the country. Only just before the May deadline, Wu Yi, then vice-premier, backed down during a visit to the US. After China failed to win recognition for WAPI as an international standard two years later, the industry assumed the episode was over.

But now, WAPI is back, with a demand by the Chinese government that WiFi handsets for sale in the country will only receive approval if they are also equipped with WAPI.

I agree with "Imagethief" that while the Green Dam mandate may never be revived in its present form, we can absolutely expect that Chinese government efforts to clean up Internet smut, promote a "green Internet," and control Internet content in the name of protecting China's children are by no means over.

There is the short run and the long run. In the short run, everybody's unavoidably in for a rough patch which is likely to continue in one way or another through the end of the year with the 60th anniversary of the PRC's founding on October 1st.

In the long run the Chinese public will value companies that treat adults like adults and give them choice and control over their lives. In the long run such products will win consumer loyalty. Ethical business practices that demonstrate respect for users' and customers' interests and rights—despite a very difficult regulatory environment—will serve companies better in the long run. A roll-over-and-play-dead policy is no way to build a brand's reputation in China or anywhere else.

Industry should take the Chinese government at its word that its goal is to protect children, and try to work out sustainable, ethical solutions on that basis. The drive to censor porn does actually have roots in genuine public frustration about children's easy access to smut and violence on the Chinese Internet. There is a real problem and lots of people expect their government to do something about it. Chinese parents' frustration is shared by parents around the world. Whether the problem can actually be solved by technical means without over-censoring and violating civil liberties, however, or whether the problem's real solutions are social and cultural (requiring parents and teachers to do the hard work as parents and teachers instead of foisting most of the responsibility on companies and governments), is subject of debate in China as well as in pretty much every country with substantial Internet penetration.

Because the Chinese government is un-transparent and unaccountable it will keep using porn as an excuse not only to exercise political control but also to go after foreign companies like Google when the mood suits them (with Chinese competitors egging them on)—and maybe even to help give a leg up to home-grown businesses. But it's also important to recognize that the Chinese government views itself as being part of a global pro-censorship, anti-porn freak-out "we have to do something" bandwagon.

Even democratically elected governments are increasingly turning to national-level Internet censorship as a solution to child porn and hate speech, and in some cases also intellectual property theft, and other real or perceived social ills—depending on whose opinion you go by. The German parliament passed a bill two weeks ago to implement a national Internet filtering system. As I wrote in my op-ed for WSJ Asia last month (links added):

In a petition against the bill, German civil liberties groups call it "untransparent and uncontrollable, since the 'block lists' cannot be inspected, nor are the criteria for putting a Web site on the list properly defined." These concerns aren't unfounded: Some German politicians have already suggested extending the block list to Islamist Web sites, video games and gambling Web sites, while book publishers have suggested it would also be nice to block file-sharing sites too.

Since 2007 Australia's Labor government has advocated a policy of mandatory national filtering. In the face of fierce public criticism the censorship plan may be downgraded to a voluntary industry initiative. But critics remain concerned the block list will not be selected and maintained in a transparent or accountable way—and that the process for appeal is very unclear, making it likely that some Web sites will be blocked in error or that "mission creep" could take place without adequate public supervision.

In Britain, a "block list" of harmful Web sites, used by all the major Internet Service Providers, is maintained by a private foundation with little transparency and no judicial or government oversight of the list. At least one British family protection group, Mediamarch, has already spoken out in support of the Green Dam concept of moving censorship from the network down to the device level.

PC makers, mobile phone companies, search engines like Google and Internet content providers will remain under strong government pressure in China to "do something" about things the government doesn't like—just as today they are under pressure in many other countries from Thailand to Turkey.

Industry should give the Chinese government as little excuse as possible to use child protection as an excuse to accomplish other goals that have much less public support and which are contrary to globally recognized human rights norms. Industry should perhaps encourage and maybe even fund in China a set of public forums and independent research efforts and so forth to examine how can industry work together with China's parents, teachers, and government to protect China's children. Initiate efforts to work with Chinese experts to develop strong culturally appropriate Chinese-language parental control software that puts control in the hands of end users. China is a potential R&D test-bed to innovate on genuine best practices in child-protection technologies… to the extent that we can realistically expect technology to be able protect children from humans…

Ultimately the problem extends well beyond China and the solutions must also be approached in a global way. It's too easy once technical censorship systems are put in place for them to be abused, or for there to be "mission creep" even in democratic societies. There is little consensus in democratic countries on questions like: What are the best ways to protect children in the Internet age? Is too much emphasis being placed on technical solutions? Do politicians and civil society need to recognize that ultimately the solutions are social and cultural? How best to develop child protection policy and business practices that really accomplishes the goal of protecting children without encroaching on civil liberties and giving governments the excuse to censor content that goes beyond porn without appropriate accountability mechanisms? We need a more intelligent global policy and industry discourse on these questions, because as it stands global political trends are not on the side of free speech protections… whatever the trend-line might look like in China on any given day.

Written by Rebecca MacKinnon, Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong

The filter, called Green Dam Youth Escort, was to have been required from Wednesday, but the industry ministry said computer makers needed more time."

Related Links:
Green Dam is Breached… Now What? Rebecca MacKinnon, Jul.1.2009
Censorship software already installed in over 500,000 Chinese computers The Telegraph, Jul.1.2009
Party celebrates China web filter delay Reuters, Jul.1.2009
China delays internet filter plan BBC, Jun.30.2009

Importance of the Internet

Many governments feel that the Internet should be administered under a multilateral treaty similar to that governing the phone network. They cite two trends that diminish the importance of the state: (a) the information revolution empowers new forms of international actors (NGOs and activists), and (b) the global marketplace is decreasing the "state's economic pillar of power as companies increasingly become global citizens and economic boundaries no longer correspond to political ones." (see Myriam Dunn Cavelty, "National Security and the Internet: Distributed Security through Distributed Responsibility," p. 1.) There are a few well-publicized exceptions to the latter trend, namely Yahoo's failure to convince a French court that Yahoo.fr had the ultimate control over its content and could defy French law by selling Nazi memorabilia. A second example is Google's decision to stop indexing certain Web sites, in effect censoring content, because of pressure from the Chinese government. (see Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World) Nevertheless, states see the Internet, in general, as a medium for overcoming the global digital divide by facilitating economic and social development.

Besides the global importance of the World Wide Web, digital devices communicate with each other through unique Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Lopsided country allocation of IPs—Stanford University is reported to have been allocated more IPv4's than China—can have tremendous impact on economic development.

ICANN

ICANN's regulatory and supervisory activities constitute global public policy of a type usually exercised only by governmental (or intergovernmental) entities. But the group's name and organizational chart make it easy to miss the breadth of ICANN's role. For example, trademark issues are neither part of the corporate name nor a separate division under ICANN's organizational structure.

The United States controls ICANN through the document that created the body, the 1998 memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the new organization and the U.S. Department of Commerce. ICANN's birth was marked by a clash of perspectives. The United States, in its view, was giving up power when it created ICANN. Other countries didn't buy that notion. The government didn't control ICANN, but the U.S. private sector did, so authority still rested within American borders. (see Kenneth Neil Cukier, "Who Will Control the Internet?" Foreign Affairs (Nov./Dec. 2005), p. 10.)

Klein and Mueller explain how ICANN's control of the root (the top of the domain name hierarchy and the Internet address space) is being used to control the Internet itself in such key areas as trademark and copyright protection, surveillance of users, content regulation, and regulation of the supply of new domain name extensions. Moreover, ICANN's powers are open-ended: the entities it regulates must commit to implementing any further policies that the organization adopts. (see Hans Klein and Milton Mueller, "What to Do About ICANN: A Proposal for Structural Reform," (April 2005).)

Decentralization

When designing bargaining strategies, we are not talking about a start-from-scratch redesign of ICANN. The future role of the United States depends on conditions now; historical developments and current endowments cannot be ignored in planning for the future. Thus, there has to be incentives for the United States to loosen control.

Despite the emergence of regional networks, there is little danger of splitting the root. (see Milton Mueller, Ruling the Root, MIT Press, 2002. For analysis based on insights from economic theory on platform competition see Alex Tajirian, Splitting the Root Unlikely, DomainMart (November 15, 2005).) Moreover, centralizing the three addressing functions (domain names, IP, and root servers) was not a technical necessity but a deliberate design decision. (see V. Mayer-Schönberger and M. Ziewitz. "Jefferson Rebuffed: The United States and the Future of Internet Governance," Columbia Science and Technology Law Review 188 (2007), n. 22.) The United States needs international cooperation for the following reasons:

1. Policing of traffic flows and infrastructure is critical for global information flow.
2. Cooperation is needed to facilitate maintenance of critical global infrastructure.
3. Although there is a bias in favor of U.S. laws, harmonization of legal codes and enforcement reduces cost to all parties involved.

Control of ICANN is only one of the cards on the table of international relationships. Before agreeing to give up any control, the United States needs to classify its control into three categories:

1. Must have: These are critical components related to national security. Thus, they are not on the bargaining table.
2. Good to have: Components whose value to the United States is greater than their value to other countries. Thus, for the United States to give any of them up, it must receive from other countries a basket of guarantees and concessions of at least as much value, though these do not have to be related to ICANN. The basket can be comprised of hard and soft assets.
3. Nice to have: Those are roles whose individual value is worth less to the United States than to other countries; as such they are certainly not critical to the United States and can be used as bargaining chips. For example, a number of countries may see a good deal of symbolism and prestige in areas where we do not.

By prudently trading some of its "good to have" and "nice to have" assets, the United States can engineer a win-win situation.

Solutions

Giving up some control does not mean ICANN will be more responsive to the demands of its constituents. Activism is needed as a disciplinary instrument when interests diverge. There are a number of proposals for reform. Below, I outline a European proposal.

A paper by Mayer-Schönberger and Ziewitz suggests that a European internationalization proposal is viable. They point out that adoption has had to wait on matters of timing and some fuzzy details, as opposed to critical issues, but for tactical and historical reasons the United States should say yes to the proposal. (see Ibid, pp. 203—204) In setting policies, the proposal would be mandated to adhere to the fundamental principles of the Internet community. It could provide the basis for "instilling constitutionality, self-constraint, and liberalism into the Internet governance," the paper says. In addition, the study demonstrates that the European proposal could provide a number of advantages over a more unilateral solution. (see Ibid, pp. 203—204)

Sharing control does not mean that the United States faces less Internet risk. The country must vigilantly manage uncertainty by identifying potential crises and being ready to manage those that arise. (see Manuel Sutter, "A Generic National Framework for Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP)," ITU (August 2007).) One hopes that the Katrina fiasco is not a good example of Internet uncertainty management!

Written by Alex Tajirian, CEO

Similar features were quickly adopted by competitors including Opera (which Chrome quickly overtook at ~2%) and Firefox (which still has an order of magnitude more users at ~20-25%). Safari is really making waves too at around 1/3-1/2 of the share of Firefox (~8%) and with the recent release of Safari 4 it's a compelling alternative—especially given it passes the Acid 3 test with flying colours while Firefox 3.5 bombs out at 93/100.

HTML 5 features such as local storage and the video and audio elements are starting to make their way into the new breed of browsers too, though it's still often necessary to install Google Gears to get advanced offline functionality (e.g. most of the Google Apps suite) up and running. Google have drawn fire by missing the Firefox 3.5 launch and users finding Gears disabled are flocking to the gears-users Google Group to vent their frustrations, some going so far as claiming that "Google is trying to do what it can to push users to Chrome" and asking "Are we watching a proccess of Google becoming customer-deaf Microsoft?". Let's just hope it's ready in time for my travel later this week…

The point is that after the brutal browser wars which stagnated the web for some time (right up until Microsoft opened the floodgates by introducing Ajax), we're now starting to see some true competition again. Granted Internet Explorer is still a 1,000 pound gorilla at ~65% of market share, but even with a silk shirt in the form of IE 8 and a handful of lame ads it's still a pig and the target of the vast majority of security exploits on the web. This makes it an an easy sell for any competitor who manages to get a foot in the door (which is unfortunately still the hardest part of the sale).

The decision not to ship IE with Windows 7 in Europe will be interesting as it should draw mainstream attention to the alternatives which will flow on to other markets (as we've seen with adoption of "alternative" technology like Linux in the past—not to mention the whole Netbook craze started by OLPC in the third world). However, with the browser being where most of the action is today the operating system has become little more than a life support system for it—an overly thick interface layer between the browser and the hardware. Surely I'm not the only one who finds it curious that while the software component of a new computer is fast approaching 50% of the cost (up from around 10% a decade ago), the heart of the system (the browser) is both absent from Windows 7 and yet freely available (both in terms of beer and freedom)? Something's gotta give…

Anyway it's time to stop looking at the features and performance of the underlying operating system, rather the security and scalability of the browser. When was the last time you turned to the operating system anyway, except to fix something that went wrong or do some menial housekeeping (like moving or deleting files)?

Written by Sam Johnston, Strategic Consultant Specializing in Cloud Computing

The European Electronic Crime Task Force—not to be confused with the private study group of the same name that began operating in 2003—will tackle identity theft, hacking and other computer-based crime from a headquarters in Rome, Italian officials said…

Read full story: Computerworld

From the report: "While the term "data-stealing malware" is a relatively new one, its sole purpose for existence is a familiar story: To steal proprietary information such as online banking credentials, credit card numbers, social security numbers, passwords, and more from compromised networks and PCs in order to fuel an underground cyber crime economy driven by profit-seeking criminal networks that cross geopolitical boundaries."

Read full story: Domain Name Wire

Other findings include:

• More than 7,300 domains exploited the four financial brands in the study, with 16 percent of the domains registered since September 2008
• 24 percent of these cybersquatted domains registered since September 2008 used the focus terms—foreclosure, mortgage, refinance and unemployed—translating to a registration rate of more than one cybersquatted domain per day exploiting the focus terms
• Domains registered since September 2008 were 50 percent more likely to use the focus terms than domains registered earlier
• 52 percent of the domains identified in the study did not encrypt customer data, putting consumers' personal identity information at risk

Related Links:
MarkMonitor Research Shows How Online Scammers Are Using the Financial Crisis to Prey on Consumer Trust in Leading Brands Press Release, Jun.29.2009
Social Networking Phishing Attacks Up More Than 240% Dark Reading, Jun.29.2009

"It is very normal that more than one-third of the domain names we see each day in spam messages come from China," Warner wrote. "When one also considers the many '.com' and '.ru' domain names which are also hosted in China, the problem is much worse. More than half of all spam either uses domain names registered in China, is sent from computers in China, or uses computer in China to host their web pages."

Related Links:
Spam Crisis in China Gary Warner, Jun.20.2009
Chinese Registrars Need Rap on Knuckles, Expert Says PC World, Jun.29.2009

Thomas Noren, head of LTE product development at Ericsson sees one day 50 billion devices shouldered by LTE (source). He sees LTE as the truly global standard putting to rest the long and acrimonious rivalry between CDMA and GSM protagonists and even sees the Chinese third way with their TD-SCDMA aligned on LTE. Mobile WiMax is, in his mind, already relegated to the dustbin of history.

But whether or not it will all be riding on LTE, the 50 billion mark for addressable devices will be reached sooner rather than later. It goes without saying that to realize this vision, LTE needs IPv6. It was reassuring to see Verizon confirm their support for IPv6 and it would be great to see the other early movers such as our Canadian trio Bell, Rogers and Telus, our Nordic friends Teliasonera, Tele2 and Telenor not to forget our Japanese friends NTT Docomo and KDDI also voice their commitment. IPv6 is a minor aspect in the big LTE scheme of things but is essential for its success as a truly global and pervasive means of communications.

While some of the world's leading LTE proponents and experts exchange notes at world summits and the WiMax Forum has very interesting summits of its own, other parts of the ecosystem are also conspiring to reach the 50 billion device milestone sooner rather than later. Foremost amongst them is the IPSO Alliance, their mission as indicated by the acronym is to make sure small objects with embedded IP can communicate between each other and those of other suppliers. The Alliance organized an interoperability demo at the Interop in Las Vegas in May. Sensors from a variety of suppliers located on three continents, all addressable in IPv6, supplied over 100,000 readings on temperature, humidity etc. As stated in the press release: "Each node in the demonstration communicated using IPv6 directly between the sensor nodes without the use of proprietary protocols, gateways or translators". It is easy to overlook the magnitude of this news and to what extend the gates to the true emergence and growth of the Internet of things have been opened by this initiative.

It is safe to bet it will not take a decade to see 50 billion addressable things on the Internet. These things are obviously devices as the Webster tells us that device means amongst other things : 'a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function'.

As to whether all these device things will talk via LTE, that remains to be seen; what is sure though is that they'll talk IPv6.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy