Government keeps control of Web domain group ICANN
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The U.S. Commerce Department said on   Friday it would retain its oversight of the company that   manages Internet domain names, renewing an agreement that was   scheduled to expire this weekend.
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ICANN, the body that oversees the core functionality of the Internet and is responsible for regulating top level domains or TLDs (such as .
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VeriSign Inc. is continuing its legal fight against the main overseer of the Internet&#39;s domain-name system, despite the dismissal last week of its federal lawsuit against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is seeking ideas and opinions on ways to modify the agreement terms it enters into with Internet registrars to protect individuals and organizations that do business with them. The effort stems from theÂ recent debacle involving registrar RegisterFly, which ICANN had to strip of its accreditation due to poor quality of service, which prompted massive and loud complaints from many of its tens of thousands of customers. At its 29th International Public Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, ICANN on Monday hosted a workshop to discuss possible changes to its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and steps it is taking to make sure registrars provide good service to their customers. Participants in the workshop, titled "Protection of Registrants," generally agreed that the RAA is due for a makeover to prevent another RegisterFly-like situation and because much has changed since the RAA was last amended about seven years ago. "We need to deal with registrar accreditation and the procedures by which we accommodate registrants," said Susan Crawford, an ICANN board member who moderated the discussion. Among the issues panelists and audience members debated was the need for Internet registrars -- companies ICANN accredits to sell Internet domain names to individuals and organizations -- to escrow their customers' data with ICANN or another third party. That way, in the event of a registrar meltdown, ICANN, which manages and oversees the Internet's domain name system, could access the customer data and help customers switch to another registrar. "This is important to registrants. We want to be able to reconstitute a registrar if it fails so that registrants can continue to have access to their domains and be able to work with them," Crawford said. Ironically, in its current form, the RAA has a data escrow provision but it hasn't been implemented for several reasons. "It put a burden on ICANN to receive data, so the cost was all on ICANN. And until recently, there wasn't a budget item for the registered data escrow program," Crawford said. Details on how this escrow will work need to be established, such as what will constitute a valid trigger for the data release and what data will be stored. Jon Nevett, policy and ethics vice president of Internet registrar Network Solutions, said that ICANN's Registrar Constituency, which he chairs, has worked in recent months on the data escrow program with ICANN, which recently requested proposals to provide escrow services. A key point for registrars is how ICANN will protect their customers' data if it needs to be transferred, Nevett said. "There is a lot of private information in this data," he said. One of the issues ICANN is trying to work through is what data would be put in escrow. Under the current RAA provisions that data includes: registrant, administrative contact, technical contact, billing contact, name servers and expiration dates. "When the provision was drafted, these were the elements that were believed to be critically necessary to restore the functionality of a registrar," said Mike Zupke, ICANN's Registrar Liaison Manager. Changing the data requirements would require amending the RAA, he said. This issue is an interesting one, considering individuals' privacy concerns when registering a domain name, concerns that have prompted the appearance of "proxy" services that let registrants "hide" from the public some of the information they submit to a registrar, Crawford said. Nevett argued that providing data to an escrow party that the registrant wants to keep from public view doesn't compromise privacy, because the escrow data wouldn't be publicly available. Meanwhile, Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports Webwatch, suggested that ICANN provide more information about registrars, including ratings, so that consumers can make better informed decisions when choosing one. There are about 900 registrars currently, according to ICANN. "Measures that increase compliance are good," Brendler said, adding that ICANN might consider setting up a system to rate registrars and hold registrars to best practices guidelines. Stacy Burnette, ICANN's director of contractual compliance, said that starting next month her team will publish a report twice a year with results from their registrar audits. Citing preliminary results, Burnette said that in March her team found that of 881 audited registrars, 19 had non-working Web sites, and that in April, 192 registrars had invoices that were overdue by 30 days or more. Based on these findings, her group is seeking compliance from the offending registrars. Her group is also currently doing a "code of conduct audit" to ensure that registrars are not engaging in conduct that would give "the appearance of impropriety," she said. Meanwhile, a future audit will focus on registrars' back-end systems performance, checking on issues like availability, downtime and outages, to see if they are meeting standards set in their agreements with ICANN. Moreover, an ongoing audit is focusing on registrar data retention requirements, while a future audit will verify whether registrars are maintaining the required commercial liability insurance levels, she said. "We want to encourage compliance to enhance ICANN's ability to preserve and enhance the operational stability, reliability, security and global interoperability of the Internet," Burnette said.
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The US government rubber stamps a deal that gives .com administrator control over the domain until 2012.
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BEIJING -- New rules by a Chinese government-backed Internet group maintain strict controls over the country's bloggers, requiring them to register with their real names and identification cards.
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Even Verisign feeling charitable these days The RegisterFly clusterf**ck took a major step towards resolution today with the official announcement by ICANN that GoDaddy will take control of the approximately 850,000 domain names still in the clutches of RegisterFly CEO Kevin Medina. The internet rumors of a GoDaddy takeover turned out to be true, and Medina now can devote himself completely to fending off the angry public with whatever resources he has left.â¦
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But very slowly Analysis The US government has taken a step back from control of the internet with a new contract between it and overseeing organisation ICANN that came into effect yesterday.â¦
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Myanmar's Internet shutdown shows how governments control the Web--and when they can't.
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A move to devise privacy policies for ICANN that might shield information on people who register domains has stalled for now, continuing a long-running stalemate  on reforms to the way the WHOIS database is handled.
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Net safe thanks to technology called Anycast Last month's attack on at least six of the net's root servers was formidable, but thanks to the implementation of a technology designed to protect the infrastructure, only two were affected, according to a factsheet issued today by ICANN.â¦
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given preliminary approval to two new domain names. The &quot;.
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The U.S. Commerce Department said on   Friday it would retain oversight for three more years of the   company that manages Internet domain names, renewing an   agreement that was scheduled to expire this weekend.
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A U.S. State Department official on   Wednesday said that the United States should retain control of   the Internet domain naming system and not relinquish it at the   end of September when the current agreement ends.
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Domain name owners can now choose registrars in much the same way telephone numbers can be moved between carriers, ICANN said.
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The US Interior Department can keep its computers connected to the Internet despite the fact that hackers could manipulate royalty payments owed to American Indians
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InfoWorld - Network Solutions is standing by its controversial policy of automatically registering some domain names that are the subject of searches on the company's Web site.