The key to fixing any part of the Internet infrastructure is to understand the business cases for the parties whose behavior you want to influence and design the technology accordingly. People who follow this approach (Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web) have a chance of succeeding. People who ignore it (DNSSEC, IPv6) will fail. The root problem here is that the ICANN DNS does not differentiate between the parts of the Internet that are accountable and those that are not. more
ICANN is the only institution with responsibility for the functioning of DNS. And so it is natural that when there is a DNS problem for people to expect ICANN to come up with the solution. But having the responsibility to act is not the same as having the ability. Like the IETF, ICANN appears to have been designed with the objective of achieving institutional paralysis. And this is not surprising since the first law of the Internet is 'You are so not in charge (for all values of you). more
In his latest blog post, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond reports that Chinese authorities aren't happy with the automatic redirection of Google.cn to Hong Kong. They are threatening not to renew Google's Internet Content Provider license, which is required to legally operate any kind of Internet business in China. more
We have just returned from the Brussels, Belgium ICANN meeting where we released our Registrar audit, the Internet "Doomsday Book." There are many topics covered in the report, but we wanted to follow up specifically on the issue of WHOIS access and add data to our previous column Who Is Blocking WHOIS? which covered Registrar denial of their contracted obligation to support Port 43 WHOIS access. more
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post posing the question of whether or not more government regulation is required in order to secure the Internet. On the one hand, anonymity is viewed in the west as a forum for freedom of speech. The anonymity of the Internet allows dissidents to speak up against unpopular governments. However, the anonymity afforded by the Internet is not so much by design as it is byproduct of its original designers not seeing how widespread it would eventually become. more
At Friday's meeting of the ICANN board in Brussels, they voted, probably for the last time, to approve the 2004 application for the .XXX domain. Purely on the merits, there is of course no need for a top level domain for porn. This isn't about the merits, this is about whether ICANN follows its own rules. Despite overheated press reports, .XXX will not make porn any more available online than it already is (how could it?), there is no chance of all porn being forced into .XXX (that's a non-starter under US law), and .XXX will have no effect on the net other than perhaps being a place to put legal but socially marginal porn far away from any accidental visitors. more
Those who have been involved in the ICANN process as long as I have naturally become accustomed to ICANN controversies at all levels. But the latest is a "wrong" of international ramifications. The four (4) versions of the Guidebook for the new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) have been hundreds of pages long with a lot of The Good, The Bad, and to some, The Ugly. However, something new has appeared in the 4th and latest version called DAG4 can be called: "The Disturbing". more
This Friday, it looks as though the ICANN Board will follow the clear conclusions drawn by its independent review and approve dot-xxx. Given the importance of the first use of the review process, the importance of the Board being seen to be accountable and the fact that the community was pretty unanimous in recent public comment, it is pretty much the only reasonable course of action. The question then is: how do things move forward? more
When it comes to accountability, ICANN would rather be compared to other U.S. nonprofit companies than to the regulatory bodies it more closely resembles. If they truly wish to be treated like a nonprofit, rather than a regulator, there is a very simple solution: make all contributions strictly voluntary. more
Reporting from Brussels, Belgium. Since January KnujOn has been conducing its own audit of ICANN Registrar contractual compliance and illicit commerce within the generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) space. Our findings are shocking. more