Unfortunately, it is not possible for a registrar to know a-priori whether a site is going to be used for phishing or not, says Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. There are many "squatters" who may have every right to register domain names with other companies' trademarks in them, per ICANN policy... more»
Yesterday, the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held hearings on ICANN's expansion of top level domains. Next week the House Energy and Commerce committee will also conduct their hearings on this same topic. more»
There are currently more than 77 million generic top-level domain (gTLD) names in the world (counting .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz domain names). 67.23 percent of these are hosted in the United States, which corresponds to 52,277,677 domain names, making it by far the most dominant country on the Internet. The United States has almost twelve times as many domain names as Germany in second place. more»
Study finds more than half of the Internet's name servers are configured incorrectly, leaving networks vulnerable to pharming attacks and enabling servers to be used in attacks that can wipe out DNS infrastructure. This is the key finding of a survey of the Internet's domain name servers released Monday.
...The number of DNS servers connected to the Internet rose 20% in the last year to 9 million. Most of that growth was in Europe and Asia, with many new DNS servers embedded in cable modems and phone gateways. more»
"It's a long-term investment, like owning a home," says Lawrence Fischer, vice president of business development at SmartName.com, a company that owns and manages thousands of domain names, including Stockquotes.com. "But if a major brokerage firm came along with a big offer, I would be willing to listen."
Plenty have been willing to pay. Sales of 5,851 domain names generated $29 million in 2005, compared with the sale of 3,813 names for $15 million in 2004, market researcher Zetetic says. Venture-capital firms, too, are betting on domains. Last year, Highland Capital Partners plunked down more than $20 million on YesDirect, a holding company with 600,000 domain names. YesDirect is developing content for websites using the names, says Bob Davis, a managing general partner at Highland. more»
Reporting further on the recent Bodog.com domain name seizure case based on gambling charges, Michael Geist writes: "In the Bodog.com case, U.S. officials targeted a site with limited connections to the country as the site had licensed out the bodog.com domain name in 2006 and stopped accepting U.S. bettors late last year. The legal issues surrounding its operations will be played out in court, but the manner in which the bodog.com name was seized could have a lasting impact on Internet governance." more»
Some 300,000 Europeans rushed to register their new ".eu" domain names in the first hour of being able to sign up for the new Internet addresses, officials said Friday.
By midday, registrations had exceeded 550,000. Until Friday, registration was limited to specific groups, such as registered trademark owners, public bodies and companies. Now, anyone who resides in the 25-nation European Union can buy a name on a first-come, first-served basis. more»
Why in the world would any company sign-up for a "New gTLD Application Monitoring Service" when ICANN intends to publicly post all applications on May 1st? Domain Name Watching and Trademark Watching Services make perfect sense when new registrations and applications are being submitted and granted on a daily basis. I think that we can all easily agree that trying to understand new domain name and trademark registrations without an automated service would be nearly impossible. more»
A branch of the U.S. Commerce Department is accepting comments on the fate of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that supervises Internet domain names.
The deadline for comments is Friday, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which began soliciting input June 7. more»
U.S. senators proposed legislation that would establish a new ".XXX" domain for racy or sexually explicit websites.
The bill proposed by senators Mark Pryor and Max Baucus, both Democrats, calls upon the US Department of Commerce to exclude sexually charged content from established website domain names such as .gov, .com, .org, .net, and .edu.
Bonus Links:
ICM Registry's Response on the Issue
More from CNET News more»
ICANN said it has rejected a proposed search service to help guide people who mistype ".travel" Web addresses or seek nonexistent ones.
The decision comes after a review panel warned that the proposal from Tralliance Corp., which operates ".travel," could hinder spam filters and other applications that rely on the Internet's Domain Name System. more»
The list of Internet domain names just got shorter. ICANN decided recently to yank ".um" -- for U.S. "minor outlying islands."
No one was using it anyhow, and the organization that has run ".um" -- the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute - no longer wanted to bother. more»
"In many parts of the world, dot-com is not the preferred domain suffix. In Germany, for instance, companies advertise their .de Web addresses more prominently than their .com addresses." ...Even with Google and Yahoo's best efforts, the Internet advertising revolution is still in its early stages, especially overseas. But if they're successful at bringing online ads to more countries, overseas domain owners are going to find themselves sitting on prime property. more»
Google announced on Thursday evening that a domain name search and registration service will be added to its Google Apps for Your Domain offering.
Google will partner with GoDaddy and eNom, two domain registration companies to offer the service. more»
The chairman of a key ICANN committee said questions remain about how to implement a new ".xxx" domain name for pornographic and adult websites, but the agency plans to vote whether to create the online back alley tomorrow.
Janis Karklins, chairman of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee, said Thursday that the board of ICANN had not yet answered questions about whether the application meets the standards needed to be established. more»
