ICANN's Noncommercial Stakeholders Group (NCSG) has sent a letter to the ICANN board asking it to enter into negotiations with Ethos Capital to ensure that its operation of the ORG domain conforms to criteria upon which the original award of ORG was made. Invoking the original Request for Proposals in...
On November 13, the Internet Society announced that the .ORG domain registry will be sold to a for-profit private equity firm. Much of the community that pays attention to ICANN is in an uproar about it. There is now a movement to “Save .ORG;” there are claims that the sale...
DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is a new IETF standard that modifies DNS to encrypt its queries. The stated objective of the new standard is to improve the security and confidentiality of DNS queries and reduce latency. Ever since we did our first study on the use of PKI in routing,...
The routing of Internet packets is one of the most important Internet governance issues you have probably never heard of. Yet Internet routing security made the popular press this summer. Two events in particular were noteworthy: Swiss-based operator Safe Host improperly updated its routers and advertised BGP routes to its...
A few days ago, ICANN announced that it had renewed Public Interest Registry’s (PIR) contract to run the .ORG top level domain. As an .ORG registrant, we are generally satisfied with PIR’s operation of the domain. Equally important, we approve of its use of .ORG revenues to support the IETF...
ICANN's Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) has published a new proposed governance model for the DNS Root Server System. Root servers are critical parts of the domain name system. While Public Technical Identifiers, which used to be known as the IANA, defines the contents of the root zone file,...
March 4 was a landmark day in the history of Whois. The final report of ICANN’s Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP), setting out a new, more or less privacy-compliant Whois policy, was approved by the GNSO Council, ICANN’s policy development organ for domain names. The policy recommendations in that report,...
Today the Internet Governance Project published a new report indicating that the transition to a new Internet standard may get stuck somewhere between the old and the new. The data communications protocol supporting the Internet (IPv4) is almost 40 years old, and its 32-bit address space is too small for...
The ICANN policy process for bringing Whois into compliance with privacy law has just about reached the end of its first phase (we will report more on that when it releases the final report). The next phase will focus on what is sometimes called "access" but is more accurately described...
Last year Georgia Tech's Internet Governance Project teamed up with ICANN's Office of the Chief Technology Officer to research the economic factors affecting the decisions of network operators to deploy Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The study was commissioned because we both believe that the Internet community needs a better...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”