DNS, DNSSEC
/ blogs
/ Apr 03, 2008 11:39 AM PST
As expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.) ...So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign's registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage... yet the cost is going up. How is this justified? ›››
DNS
/ blogs
/ Mar 20, 2008 9:27 AM PST
My weekly technology law column focuses on the growth of Internet censorship and the accompanying pressure on the business community to do something about it... China's censorship system may be the most extensive, but it is not alone. The University of Toronto's OpenNet Initiative, a world leader in tracking state-sponsored Internet censorship, recently co-published Access Denied, a book that highlights its pervasive growth. The book notes that some countries control all public Internet services, thereby creating an easy pipeline to implementing filtering technologies. Countries such as Syria have sought to chill access to the Internet by requiring cybercafe owners to record the names and identification cards of clients... ›››
DNS
/ blogs
/ Mar 11, 2008 7:11 PM PST
In the aftermath of the shutdown of Wikileaks.org by a court order issued at the request of Swiss Bank Julius Baer, Wikileaks has called for the boycott of registrar eNom. eNom is best known as the domain registrar that complied with the federal government's order to shut down a Spanish travel agency because it did business with Cuba -- the agency was not under U.S. jurisdiction and so was hardly violating U.S. law, but their domain was registered in the United States, and that was good enough for the feds. ›››
DNS
/ news
/ Mar 07, 2008 6:17 PM PST
ICANN has suggested it should become independent of U.S. Department of Commerce oversight when the current Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the agency expires in September 2009. However, some people have suggested the JPA should remain in place to provide accountability. Those include, Thomas Lenard, president and senior fellow at the conservative think tank iGrowGlobal, who has filed a comment with NTIA saying: "The fact that ICANN may be making progress toward meeting its responsibilities does not imply that the JPA is no longer needed..."
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Day two of Domain Pulse 2008 last Friday (see review of day one) focused on online security issues giving the techies amongst us details of security issues, and the more policy-orientated amongst us something to chew on in a few other presentations. Kieren McCarthy, these days of ICANN, also gave some insights into the drawn out sex.com drama with more twists and turns than the average soap opera has in a year! And Randy Bush outlined the problems with IPv6. Among other presentations... ›››
DNS
/ blogs
/ Feb 22, 2008 7:16 PM PST
I don't normally cheer for Google when I don't own shares in the company, but this time I will make an exception. Alma Whitten, Software Engineer at Google, today posted to their Public Policy Blog that IP addresses shouldn't be considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This is not a problem in the United States but it is in the EU, and if the EU actually were to legislate this it would most definitely affect Microsoft and Google's business functionality in the EU... ›››
DNS, IPv6
/ blogs
/ Feb 22, 2008 12:30 PM PST
Around 350 attendees came from Russia in the east to Ireland in the west, as well as a few people from elsewhere around the globe, to attend Domain Pulse 2008 in Vienna on February 21 and 22. Day one's focus was internet governance. The future of the DNS was one of the key issues addressed by Michael Nelson of Georgetown University in Washington DC, with domain names becoming less important, but their numbers still increasing, as online access by a myriad of devices skyrockets connect -- everything from the television, refrigerator, washing machine, pets, sprinkler systems and cars. ›››
DNS
/ news
/ Feb 11, 2008 1:56 PM PST
Internet issues from around the world are front and center in India as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opened its 31st International Public Meeting today in New Delhi. "This year is an important one for the future of ICANN. The U.S. government is in the middle of its Midterm Review of its Joint Project Agreement with ICANN, and we're arguing it's time to take the final step to originally envisioned private sector model for ICANN," said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN's Board Chairman. ›››
DNS, Whois
/ blogs
/ Feb 08, 2008 12:05 PM PST
Domain Pulse, the yearly get-together of the German-speaking registries of nic.at (Austria), Denic (Germany) and SWITCH (Switzerland) is happening on February 21 and 22 in Vienna. The conference alternates between the countries -- last year it was Switzerland, this year Austria and next year Germany... Domain Pulse covers everything in the domain name arena from management of the DNS, what's happening in each of the ccTLDs, after market and domaining, security threats to the DNS and internet as well as wider issues affecting the internet's development such as internet governance. ›››
DNS
/ news
/ Jan 24, 2008 12:31 PM PST
ICANN has asked the US government to be freed from official control. The plea was made in a lengthy report [PDF] sent to the US Department of Commerce. ›››
DNS, Privacy
/ blogs
/ Jan 10, 2008 12:09 PM PST
I have written a short paper on the topic of Internet Governance. Since it includes a number of resources, it would be easier for me to just point to a link with the document itself. Below are some selected excerpts from the document. "Several myths have been spreading around the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), but especially after the first Internet Governance Forum (IGF): The critical Internet resources (CIR) consist only of the IP addresses and the domain name system... There are only 13 root servers..." ›››
DNS, DNSSEC
/ blogs
/ Dec 19, 2007 11:42 AM PST
The Internet Governance Project has unearthed a consultancy report to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that makes it clear that the issue of root signing and DNSSEC key management has been recognized as a political issue within the US government for long time. ›››
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is an annual UN conference on Internet governance which was held this year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The topics discussed range from human rights online to providing Internet access in developing countries. A somewhat secondary topic of conversation is Internet security and cyber-crime mostly limited to policy and legislative efforts. Techies and Internet security industry don't have much to do there, but I have a few updates for us from the conference. ›››
DNS
/ news
/ Nov 14, 2007 2:08 PM PST
In an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil, Vint Cerf said the fact that the Web is almost entirely privately owned is a major obstacle to such control. "I believe it will be very hard to accomplish that objective for one simple reason -- 99 percent of the Internet, the physical Internet, is in private sector hands, operated by the private sector," he said, defending a different governance structure made up of multiple stakeholders. ›››
Broadband
/ news
/ Nov 14, 2007 1:29 PM PST
Now that more than 1 billion people use the Internet, international policymakers and computing experts are struggling with how to link the world's other 5 billion to the increasingly crucial network. "Ten years ago, to talk about 1 billion Internet users sounded exaggerated, unthinkable, but now we talk about the next billion," said Markus Kummer, the official heading the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Brazil. "It is clear sooner or later we will reach that number. It is also clear that next billion will be poorer than the first." ›››