DNS

Nominations Open for 2024 Public Interest Registry (PIR) Board of Directors

Are you interested in helping guide the future of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .ORG, .NGO and .ONG domains? (and more) Or do you know of someone who would be a good candidate? If so, the Internet Society is seeking nominations for two positions on the PIR Board of Directors. The nomination deadline is 31 January 2024. more

NTIA & You: NTIA’s Intention to Transfer IANA Functions to the Global Community Is Welcome, But…

It is no secret that both the US government, ICANN, and the global Internet community have argued and worked tirelessly for the past 15 odd years on the vexing issue of globalizing the US government's role in the IANA function. Despite the desire, long-held by many, for the US to relinquish its control of the IANA function, it is clear that getting to full multistakeholder control of the function is not going to be easy. more

Say YES to DNSSEC

With the latest "DNSpionage" attack, ICANN astutely prompted domain name holders to fully deploy DNSSEC on their names. Afilias absolutely supports this and encourages the same. In this post, I remind you of why DNSSEC is important and our continued role. Afilias has a long history in the development and advocacy of DNSSEC. In 2007, we partnered with Public Interest Registry to help found dnssec-deployment.org. more

The New ICANN Emerges in Seoul

With the loud crashing of a traditional drum ceremony and an impromptu electric guitar performance by a young Korean whose rendition of Pachabel has been downloaded sixty million times on YouTube, the 36th meeting of ICANN was kicked off this morning (Korean time) by new CEO Rod Beckstrom and his fellow Directors and assembled one thousand or so participants. ICANN has always been about change, but the atmosphere in Seoul this week is charged with a sense of new challenges and new opportunities. more

Can ICANN Manage the DNS Root Zone by Itself? “No!” Says US Department of Commerce

In a recent letter, the US Department of Commerce NTIA strongly denied being engaged in discussions about a "root zone transition" from VeriSign to ICANN. The community, ICANN President Strategic Committee (PSC), and perhaps ICANN and IANA staff are suddenly informed that no transition of root zone management is going to occur. What happened? With the touted ICANN transparency and accountability principles, why such a shift in (perceived) ICANN strategic directions coming from its overseeing government department? more

Spam from Mobile Networks? Who Woulda Thought…

Mobile networks aren't usually thought of as sources of spam, but a quick look at some of the resources that track spam reveals they actually are. This is counter intuitive at first glance because when most people think of mobile they think of smartphones, and those aren't known to be sources of spam (at least not yet). What's really going on is PCs connected to mobile networks with air cards, or tethered with a smartphone where it's permissible, are the culprits more

The Uncertainty of Measuring the DNS

The period around the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century saw a number of phenomenal advances in the physical sciences. There was J.J. Thompson's discovery of the electron in 1897, Max Planck's quantum hypothesis in 1900, Einstein's ground-breaking papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and special relativity in 1905, and Ernest Rutherford's study of the nucleus published in 1911 to mention but a few of the fundamental discoveries of the time. more

Summary of the Registration Operations Association Workshop

The first Registration Operations Association Workshop took place on Thursday, 16 October 2014, at the Los Angeles Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel. I'd like to thank the 64 people that took the time to attend and participate in the discussion, both in-person and remote. I started the workshop with an introduction to some of the technical challenges being faced by the domain registration industry. more

Caidagram: Visualising Geographically Annotated Internet Measurements

With measurement networks rapidly evolving up to hundreds of nodes, it becomes more and more challenging to extract useful visualisations from tons of collected data. At the same time, geographical information related to Internet measurements (either known or inferred with state-of-the-art techniques) can be exploited to build tools based on geography as a common knowledge base. We wanted to develop a tool to visualise different classes of geographically annotated Internet data, e.g., topology, address allocation, DNS and economical data. more

RIPE 71 Meeting Report

The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days. So this is by no means all that was presented through the week... As is usual for RIPE meetings, it was a well organised, informative and fun meeting to attend in every respect! If you are near Copenhagen in late May next year I'd certainly say that it would be a week well spent. more

ICA Tells DOC of Concerns Over USG and GAC “Scorecards”

The ICA has just dispatched a letter to Assistant Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Strickling in advance of the talks scheduled in Brussels on February 29-March 1 between ICANN's Board and its Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). Our letter expresses strong concerns that the positions being advocated by the U.S. government and the GAC regarding the proposed Final Applicant Guidebook (AG) for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) would be detrimental to ICANN's multi-stakeholder policy process and would undermine the rights of legitimate registrants at new gTLDs. more

Registrar Stakeholder Group in GNSO Works Against the ICANN Multistakeholder Social Compact

One of the essential features of the social compact that makes ICANN viable in its stewardship of the Domain Name system is that the operations of the Contracted Parties, i.e. Registrars and Registries, are governed by the cooperation of the contracted parties and the non-contracted parties, i.e. the stakeholders, in the creation of policy. In ICANN, contracts and other agreements are the method by which this policy is instantiated. more

Mexico City Hosts an Eventful ICANN Meeting

The Mexico City ICANN Conference was more eventful than some of us had anticipated. Among the highlights was Paul Twomey's announcement that he is stepping down as President and CEO of ICANN effective on June 30... Before the Conference, ICANN had released the second draft of its Guidebook for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). It was not greeted with universal acclaim... more

Who is Ready to Leap on the “Localized Internet”

Four pioneers are ready to Leap on the "Localized Internet". ICANN has approved four character strings of IDN ccTLD (Internationalized Top-Level Domain Names) after evaluation. The Lucky-Ones are Russian Federation, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. more

The Promise of Multi-Signer DNSSEC

DNSSEC is increasingly adopted by organizations to protect DNS data and prevent DNS attacks like DNS spoofing and DNS cache poisoning. At the same time, more DNS deployments are using proprietary DNS features like geo-routing or load balancing, which require special configuration to support using DNSSEC. When these requirements intersect with multiple DNS providers, the system breaks down. more