In the ICANN realm, TechOps stands for Technical and Operations and its goal is to simplify processes, to find solutions, and to advise on technical and operational matters. There are three TechOps groups: The Registry, the Registrar and the joint Registry and Registrar, also known as Contracted Party House (CPH). How did we get there and what exactly are we doing? more
The domain registrars discussion -- despite the occasional bizarrity -- mostly demonstrates that there is no unanimity among registrars on this issue. So, what arguments can be made in favor of either model, from a registrant's point of view? The thick domain registry model -- under the assumption that registries are more diligent with registrant data than some registrars may be -- helps take care of escrow concerns... more
Google revealed on its official blog today that it is handling an average of more than 70 billion requests per day on its free Public DNS service. According to VeriSign's latest public statistics, it is handling only an average of 59 billion DNS requests per day, less than that handled by Google. more
Go Daddy Software, Inc. has filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Arizona against VeriSign Inc., seeking a temporary restraining order against VeriSign's new Site Finder service, a paid-advertising page VeriSign has established on the Internet to which the traffic associated with mistyped, and other, domain names will be directed. Go Daddy's lawsuit claims that VeriSign is misusing its position as the .com and .net domain registry to gain an unfair competitive advantage by intercepting (and profiting from) internet traffic resulting from the scores of invalid domain names that are typed into users' browsers on a daily basis. more
Three years ago, the first Internet-Draft on Registry Maintenance Notifications for the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) was published, which will become a Request for Comments (RFC). The IETF Registration Protocols Extensions (REGEXT) working group is the home of the coordination effort for standards track EPP extensions. They released eight RFCs over the last couple of years, and they are currently working on more than 15 Internet-Drafts. more
PIR, the registry operator for .org, has sent notices to registrars that it is implementing an anti-abuse policy that offers no due process for innocent domain registrants... While it's good intentioned, there is great potential for innocent domain registrants to suffer harm, given the lack of appropriate safeguards, the lack of precision and open-ended definition of "abuse", the sole discretion of the registry operator to delete domains, and the general lack of due process. more
The Number Resource Organization (NRO), acting as the Address Supporting Organization (ASO), today announced it has submitted correspondence to ICANN regarding the Internet Society's proposed transfer of ownership of PIR, the .org registry, to Ethos Capital. more
As the WHOIS debate rages and the Top-Level Domain (TLD) space prepares to scale up the problem of rogue domain registration persists. These are set to be topics of discussion in Costa Rica. While the ICANN contract requires verification, in practice this has been dismissed as impossible. However, in reviewing nearly one million spammed domain registrations from 2011 KnujOn has found upwards of 90% of the purely abusive registrations could have been blocked. more
TLD registrations in the Internet's root-zone file currently are divided into two broad classifications: generic and country-code top-level domains. With respect to the latter classification, no new "strategy" is required to add further ccTLDs as a relatively well-working process is already in place to integrate the occasional new country-code top-level domain. With one of these two classifications under reasonably sound management, it is therefore perfectly understandable to see that the ICANN organization consequently views its obligation to "Define and implement a predictable strategy for selecting new TLDs" as a mandate "to begin the process of allocating and implementing new gTLDs"... the flaw in this conclusion, however, stems from the presumption that the Internet's taxonomy must necessarily contain only the two above-so-mentioned broad classifications. I am proposing a third TLD classification -- based on languages. more
Some of the root server operators post public statistics for their domain name traffic at the top-level. For example, the graph (which can take a bit of time to generate, given ICANN's slow servers) for the L-root server's most popular Top-Level Domain (TLD) queries demonstrates, to no one's surprise, that .com is king. What's more interesting, though, especially given the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) debate, is to look at the most popular invalid (non-existent) TLDs. more
You could call this Part Three in our series on Illicit Internet Pharmacy. Part One being What's Driving Spam and Domain Fraud? Illicit Drug Traffic, Part Two being Online Drug Traffic and Registrar Policy. There are a few facts I'd like to list briefly so everyone is up to speed. The largest chunk of online abuse at this time is related to illicit international drug traffic, mostly counterfeit and diverted pharmaceuticals. more
ICANN Board Chair Vint Cerf now works for a company whose motto is, "Do No Evil." So how could Vint and his fellow board members be engaged in a massive capitulation to the enterprise greed of dot-com operator VeriSign? The story of how the Internet community got to its current impasse over the future of the ICANN-VeriSign relationship is overly complicated but the bottom line is that we are suffering from woes created by the U.S. Government with the best of intentions over the past fifteen years. And only the government has the capacity to stop equivocating and do the right thing for all of us. The road to hell is paved with good intentions... more
Earlier this year we requested your questions on one of ICANN's most heated discussions -- issues involving top-level domains (TLDs) -- which we passed on to Vint Cerf, Google's VP and Chief Internet Evangelist and chairman of the board of ICANN. Despite an understandably heavy schedule, Vint Cerf has taken the time to personally respond to more questions than we had originally anticipated. So with our special thanks, here are his responses. more
By now anyone who's part of the domain investment or broader ICANN community is aware of the curious saga of the recently launched .XYZ registry. Soon after its young CEO boldly stated, "we hope to reach 1 million .XYZ registrations in the first year and 5 million registrations in the first three years", the registry launched with a remarkable total of nearly 18,000 registrations on its first day, a total that has quickly grown to more than 100,000. But it was soon noted that "the zone files showed that over 70% of all .XYZ registrations had been made at NetworkSolutions... more
Lost amid the furor about ICANN's rule change that may (or may not) lead to a flood of TLDs is the uncomfortable fact that almost without exception, the new TLDs created since 2000 have been utter failures. Other than perhaps .cat and .mobi, they've missed their estimates of the number of registrations by orders of magnitude, and they haven't gotten mindshare in the target community. So what went wrong? more
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