ICANNWatch

"The world's first free national wireless grid is no longer with us, after waves from Cyclone Heta swept over Niue's thirty metre cliffs, destroying everything. Although only one person died, the damage is so bad that there is talk of winding up the country , meaning their fortuitous ccTLD could go the way of .su."

Certainly not the most significant aspect of this disaster, but a curious question that comes up from time to time: What determines whether a ccTLD outlives a country?

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Sauce for the Goose, but not the Gander
posted by michael on Friday January 09 2004, @06:17AM

Recall the Peta.org case in which PETA wrenched back PETA.org from People Eating Tasty Animals (while making horrible law in the process)? Well, PETA has done some domain wrangling of its own, and registered beef.com.

OK, the two situations are not identical, since "beef" is generic for the formerly live bovine protein, and PETA is a trademarkable term, albeit one that is open to parody. But it's still funny.
Updated.

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VRSN and SSL: "rot-at-the-root dept."
posted by tbyfield on Friday January 09 2004, @02:10AM

Under the headline "Verisign Certificate Expiration Causes Multiple Problems" (posted, aptly, "from the rot-at-the-root dept."), Slashdot notes:

We had to do a little sleuthing today. Many readers wrote in with problems that turned out to be related. A certificate which Verisign used for signing SSL certificates has expired. When applications which depend on that certificate try to make an SSL connection, they fail and try to access crl.verisign.com, the certificate revocation list server. This has effectively DOS'ed that site, and Verisign has now updated the DNS record for that address to include several non-routable addresses, reducing the load on their servers. Some applications affected include older Internet Explorer browsers, Java, and Norton Antivirus (which may manifest itself as Microsoft Word being very slow to start). Hope this helps a few people, and if you have other apps with problems, please post about them below.

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Verisign to make changes to the .COM/.NET (again)
posted by tbyfield on Friday January 09 2004, @02:04AM

NetWizard writes "According to a recent NANOG post and an InfoWorld story, 'Verisign will change the serial number format and "minimum" value in the .com and .net zones' SOA records on or shortly after 9 February 2004'."

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Organizations Need Each Other to Make DNS Work
posted by tbyfield on Monday January 05 2004, @09:36PM

AF writes "In an interesting post on CircleID, Paul Mockapetris says: 'But don't think that I'm claiming to have solved the whole problem [with DNS]. What I certainly didn't anticipate was the political, legal, and commercial fight that would come with it.'"

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Why .biz is the Spam TLD
posted by tbyfield on Monday January 05 2004, @04:51AM

jmason writes "Anyone with a passing interest in spam -- or its avoidance -- will have noted the massive preponderance of .biz URLs in those mails. Ever wondered why? Well, wonder no longer."

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ICANN UDRP decisions unavailable
posted by michael on Friday January 02 2004, @10:06AM

Jan writes "While looking to get access to some recent UDRP decisions on the ICANN Site, to be precise at:
Search Decisions in Proceedings Under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy
http://www.icann.org/udrp/udrpdec.htm
and
Search Index of Proceedings Under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy
http://www.icann.org/cgi-bin/udrp/udrp.cgi
I found that the actual decision text is not accessible anymore. I tried like 20 of them and I get either a 404 or "Page could not be displayed" error.
Is this another step towards making the decisions more transparent?

Jan van der Reis
http://www.vanderreis.com"

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What the 'Net did next ...
posted by tbyfield on Friday January 02 2004, @05:21AM

dmehus writes "During this slow and long lull of domain name policy and ICANN related news stories, I thought it would be a good time to bring an article by BBC News Online technology correspondent Mark Ward to the attention of the ICANNWatch community. In it, ICANN Chairman of the Board Vint Cerf reflects on the history of the Internet and his involvement as somewhat of a 'midwife,' rather than the 'father' title he doesn't like. He also looks to the future and identifies two key, fundamental changes that will shape the next stage of the Internet. As he puts it, they are VoIP and ENUM."

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Domain Names Once Again Fetch Top Dollar
posted by tbyfield on Saturday December 27 2003, @02:54PM

dmehus writes "According to The Associated Press, domain names are once again fetching top dollar."

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Punycode IDN now active for .com and .net
posted by michael on Tuesday December 23 2003, @12:29PM

yggdrazil writes "I can't see that anyone has mentioned this, so I will: IDN domain names using the proper Punycode standard are now active in DNS!!! Domain names previously registered with a BQ-- prefix is now active in the root zone for .com and .net as their XN-- equivalent. Happened a few days ago.

Example:
http://www.grötärgött.com/
http://www.xn--grtrgtt-7wa4ne.com/

This means that these domains now work in standards based browsers, like Firebird, Camino and Opera. Currently the IDNNow plugin seems to be required to get it to work in MSIE. And I don't think it works in Safari yet." [Editor's note: didn't work for me in Mozilla 1.5 either...]

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NSI Wins One
posted by michael on Monday December 22 2003, @05:28AM

From Michael Geist's BNA Internet Law News:

4TH CIRCUIT UPHOLDS NSI CLAIM FOR DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATIONS The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a suit launched by Network Solutions in which it claimed registration fees associated with thousands of registrations by a Korean and a Dutch registrant. The court affirmed that the domain name registration agreement was enforceable and that a forum selection clause was also enforceable. Case name is Hoblad v. Network Solutions Inc.

The cursory, and so far as one can tell indisputably correct, decision is here.

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.pro Remains .proVisional
posted by michael on Saturday December 20 2003, @01:14AM

As noted sardonically by Lextext, .Pro-bably Never, and painfully by Ambler, .Pro delayed. Again. and Again. And yet Again, the .pro folks have announced Yet Another Delay in their roll-out. Which means there is something as slow as ICANN's evaluation of its 'experiment' in TLD creation.

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CentralNic Bought By 'Media Group'
posted by michael on Friday December 19 2003, @10:04AM

Anonymous writes "CentralNic, the registry for EU.com, UK.com and others, has been taken out of liquidation by 'a large media and telecoms group'. "

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VeriSign buys Guardent for $140 million
posted by michael on Wednesday December 17 2003, @10:40AM

dmehus writes "Fresh from completing its sale of Network Solutions to distressed asset buyout firm Pivotal Private Equity for over $100 million, Internet security and domain name registry company VeriSign has agreed to acquire Guardent for a cool $140 million in cash and stock. Guardent is a so-called managed security services firm. Although VeriSign offers similar services, Ben Golub, SVP of VeriSign Security Services, admits that his company is less strong in the area of vulnerability assessment and management -- something where Guardent excels."

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WSIS Activists Challenged WIPO
posted by Mueller on Monday December 15 2003, @05:29PM

Best event at WSIS: a band of activists acting under the banner "WSIS? WeSeize" issued official invitations with the WIPO logo inviting WSIS participants to the screening of a film at WIPO headquarters in central Geneva. The invitations were issued with a wink and an explanation: this was, in some way, a "Disney" film. A Disney film? Oh boy!

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WSIS and the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus
posted by Mueller on Monday December 15 2003, @05:12PM

One of the most interesting features of the World Summit on the Information Society is the aggressive role played by "civil society organizations" in the process. Although governments had the final say, and oftentimes civil society (CS) was excluded from key sessions or reduced to a subordinate role, the presence of these political, research and cultural groups loomed large in setting the overall tone of the event. Civil society groups organized themselves into loose "families" and "caucuses" to develop positions on issues and propose language. They also forwarded "leaders" or spokespersons to plenary sessions to interact with governments and other observers. In general, CS statements made very high-level normative statements and addressed distributional equity issues without getting very specific about policy.

But in Internet governance policy, as IcannWatch readers know well, the devil is always in the details.

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Will the World Summit Reinvent ICANN?
posted by Mueller on Friday December 12 2003, @01:17AM

Unexpectedly, ICANN and Internet governance emerged as one the the central issues of the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). While the US government would have preferred not to have ICANN discussed at all, being satisfied with the status quo, three days ago it reached compromise language on an agreement to create a "working group" selected by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to "define Internet governance" and review many of the key issues of representation and structure faced back in 1998 - although this time, given the nature of the working group, the report would focus primarily on ICANN's relationship to national governments.

Is this just a clever way to defer and defuse intergovernmental pressures to take over ICANN? Or is it a mandate to reinvent it? It depends on whose spin doctors you talk to.

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Zuccarini pleads guilty
posted by michael on Wednesday December 10 2003, @12:59PM

GeorgeK writes "Yahoo news is reporting that infamous typosquatter John Zuccarini has pleaded guilty of using typos of domain names to lure minors to pornographic sites."

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NeuStar bungles number portability?
posted by tbyfield on Wednesday December 10 2003, @03:01AM

NeuStar, a perennial favorite in the soap opera that is ICANN, got some minor mentions in unexpected context this week. In "Cellphone Number Transfer Hits a Snag," 5 December New York Times article (free reg req'd, articles disappear [not], etc.) on the recent tribulations of consumers who try to exercise their newfound number-portability rights, notes that the problems at AT&T Wireless -- mainly long delays -- are "more pronounced than at other carriers."

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Berkman's John Palfrey on the Nature and Future of ICANN
posted by michael on Tuesday December 09 2003, @07:01PM

While on the subject of Berkman papers, check out John Palfrey, The End of the Experiment, described as a "working paper" on ICANN and governance. Mr. Palfrey is the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and while I've only skimmed the paper it looks to be very interesting, whether or not one agrees with it -- and there is plenty there for people on all sides of the ICANN debates to take issue with.

This is a thoughtful and ambitious paper based on a mountain of research. It covers a lot of territory. It may make some people mad. I enjoyed it, even though I would debate some of the conclusions.

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Past Articles

December 9

· ICANN Doesn't Listen--Official (7)
· Weinberg Tackles Sitefinder (and ICANN on Sitefinder) (2)
· No U.N. "Showdown" This Week (3)

December 8

· Pot. Kettle. Black. (4)
· Twomey Responds Quickly to NCUC Gaffe (1)

December 6

· Omission on New ICANN Website Speaks Volumes (1)
· ICANN gets a facelift (5)

December 4

· WIPO Poobah Uses T-word (2)

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