Proposal for .sport, a New Top-Level Domain

OK. Now my lawyer has 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»

CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners

Earlier this year, I wrote glowingly about the new CIRA whois policy, which took effect today and which I described as striking the right balance between access and privacy. The policy was to have provided new privacy protection to individual registrants -- hundreds of thousands of Canadians -- by removing the public disclosure of their personal contact information... Apparently I spoke too soon. more»

Security Research Names Hong Kong and China Most Dangerous Country Domains, Finland Safest

Recent security report suggests country code top-level domains '.hk' and '.cn' -- belonging to Hong Kong and China respectively -- are currently among the most dangers domain names. As to why? Making the Hong Kong online registration process "more user-friendly" by allowing registration of several domains at one time as well as "buy-one, get-two domains," are partly blamed for the decline in security. As a consequence, "phishers usually registered eight or more domains at one time." Hong Kong last year began to tighten policies to rectify the situation. more»

.hk the "Most Unsafe" Domains?

Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine's top stories list. But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published. McAfee's study seems to be based on a year's worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk ccTLD. These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards... more»

Top-Level Domains .arpa, .org, and .uk Adopting DNSSEC

The Internet is slowly inching closer to ratcheting up the security of its Domain Name System (DNS) server architecture: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) plans to go operational with DNSSEC later this year in one of its domains. more»

Scotland Wants Its Own Top-Level Domain '.SCO'

The Scottish Nationalist Government is reportedly considering a formal request with ICANN seeking a ".sco" top-level domain to replace the distinctly "Unionist" .co.uk. Proposals which could see the endings of websites based in Scotland changed from '.co.uk' to '.sco' are currently being looked at by the finance secretary. The campaign for the '.sco' suffix has been led by Nationalist backbencher Christine Grahame and it will see to it that most Scottish Governments and agencies change their website suffixes immediately. more»

Current Difficulties With Displaying Internationalized Top-Level Domains

Earlier this week, we inserted eleven new top-level domains in the DNS root zone. These represent the term "test" translated into ten languages, in ten different scripts (Chinese is represented in two different scripts, and Arabic script is used by two different languages). This blog post is not about that. (If you're interested about it, read our report on the delegations.) What I would like to talk about is some of the difficulties we face today in expressing scripts in a consistent way over the Internet... more»

ICA Posts Position Paper and Analysis of Snowe "Anti-Phishing" Legislation

The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) has posted a position paper and analysis of S. 2661, introduced on 2/25/08 in the US Senate. While we are firmly opposed to phishing and other criminal activities that may utilize domain names we are very concerned about the provisions of the proposal that appear to provide trademark owners with a means to avoid both UDRP and ACPA actions and alternatively bring private claims against domain names with a lower burden of proof and the potential for far higher monetary damages, without even requiring an allegation that the DN was in any way being utilized in a phishing scheme... more»

Dot Travel: The Rise and Fall of a Brilliant Concept

Jens Thraenhart of Tourism Internet Marketing writes: "I was saddened when I read the press release... and I realized that the dot travel concept may have been killed by greed and short-term vision." more»

ICANN Unleashing Single-letter and Single-digit Domain Names, Seeking Best Method

ICANN will be seeking proposals for potential allocation methods of single-letter and single-digit domain names at the second level in generic Top-Level Domain registries. Examples include a.com, i.info, 4.mobi, 8.org. Comments regarding the potential uses for revenue generated from the sale of such domains are also requested. more»

US Homeland Security Wants Control Over DNS

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created after the attacks on September 11, 2001 as a kind of overriding department, wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government... During the current ICANN meeting in Lisbon, Bernard Turcotte, president of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) drew everyone's attention to this proposal as a representative of the national top-level domain registries (ccTLDs). more»

Dot Name Domain Registry Charging for Whois Access, Security Researchers Not Happy

The company that manages the .name top-level domain registry is charging for access to domain registration information (Whois data), a step that security researchers say frustrates their ability to police the Internet and creates a haven for hackers who run internet scams. more»

New Map Illustrates All 245 Country Code Top-Level Domains

Byte Level Research has published a map that illustrates not only all 245 country codes but the size of each country and territory. The map is quite up to date and comprehensive including country codes for such places as Svalbard (.sj), Southern Georgia (.gs), and Bouvet Island (.bv), which is uninhabited. "Today, companies must register as many as a hundred country codes to be competitive globally -- and protect their intellectual property. This map helps professionals keep track of all these country codes -- and see where the Internet is headed. For example, China is on pace to have the most popular country code on the planet by 2012," said Yunker," said John Yunker, president of Byte Level Research and developer of the map. more»

ICANN Tests IDN TLD (Live!)

At ICANN San Juan, I found out from Tina Dam, ICANN's IDN Program Director, that she was putting together a live IDN TLD test bed plan which includes translations of the string .test into eleven written languages (Arabic, Chinese-simplified, Chinese-traditional, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish) and ten scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, Tamil)... Two days ago, ICANN provided an update on this project... more»

New Paper Discusses Global City TLD's in the Public Interest

"The Internet's impact on cities grows daily as it electronically enables the meeting, movement, and exchange of people, ideas, products, and cultures at a range and frequency never before possible, creating what Marshall McLuhan called the 'global village'." So begins a paper in which Dr. Michael Gurstein and I present a short review of the history of TLDs and the negative effects their omission from the Internet's naming schema is having on cities. We then identify 12 areas where city-TLDs will benefit Global Cities if planned and developed in the public interest. more»