On February 7, ICANN released an initial report on the next step in the reform of Whois. The report will be open for public comment until March 23, 2020. In the analysis below, we make it clear what issues defenders of privacy and individual rights should address in their comments....
This post notifies ICANN org and its board that Noncommercial Stakeholders are still waiting for a consultation regarding the sale of .ORG. It explains why such a consultation is not a courtesy to be offered at ICANN's discretion, but is a requirement based on ICANN's own Registry Agreement (RA) contract...
The controversy over the sale of ORG has taken an ugly turn. As we have made clear in several blog posts related to the sale, what registrants need is not emotional cries to “stop the sale” but an ICANN-mediated renewal of the commitments made in the original grant, and some...
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,...
“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.”
