New Net domains near approval
633822
com October 29, 2004, 10:41 AM PT. This priority retains its ranking at number five as more and more companies deploy Web Services to share business logic, data and processes with each other and with clients.
410599
The U.S. Commerce Department said on  Wednesday it would renew its authority over the company that  manages Internet domain names beyond September 30, when the  U.S. government had been expected to permanently cede control.
234057
Domain registrars are getting ready for what they hope is a high-demand, frantic "landrush" of domain registrations, beginning today as .asia moves toward becoming the Internet's second regional top-level domain.
443298
com December 13, 2004, 3:26 PM PT. The Internet may soon see two new top-level domains: .jobs and .mobi. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN ) said
459086
(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.
247701
In preparation for the capacity of the entire Internet to double to 1.8 billion users in just three years' time, VeriSign -- which manages the registry for the .com and .net top-level domain names, as well as the root servers for the entire domain name system -- announced this morning it will commit three years' worth of humanpower and $100 million in resources to the overhaul and expansion of DNS.
31095
Network Solutions is standing by its controversial policy of automatically registering some domain names that are the subject of searches on the companyâs Web site.
572391
New Internet addresses, including those entirely in foreign languages, are under review by a key oversight agency, although meetings this week in Puerto Rico are likely to conclude with more questions.
154332
(InfoWorld) - A U.K. governance organization will review The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as it tries to increase transparency afterÂ criticism of its close U.S. government ties. The report from One World Trust will be made public when it's completed next year, said Paul Levins, ICANN's executive officer and vice president of corporate affairs. ICANN, a private, nonprofit organization that controls the administration of the DNS (domain name system), is reworking its accountability practices, Levins said. "Frankly, the community has told us this is an issue we need to deal with," Levins said. In October, ICANN started a consultation toÂ develop new management operating principles, Levins said. ICANN also plans to document its board meetings better and revamp its Web site to make its 12,000 pages more accessible. The organization, based in Marina del Ray, California, falls under theÂ oversight of the U.S. Commerce Department, which has led to criticism that the U.S. government wielded too much influence over the Internet's development. In September, an existing agreement between the department and ICANN was extended for three years, although the U.S. government could grant ICANN total autonomy after 18 months.
738897
Applications for domain names under the new ".asia" top-level domain will be accepted in October.
584063
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.
321660
New guidelines to bring order to the global Internet domain name market and enhance the flow of electronic commerce came into effect on Friday.
184566
Unlike dot-com and dot-net internet addresses, which are open to all comers, a proposed dot-post address might be restricted to entities that provide actual postal services. The point would be to instill trust, proponents of the plan say.
521404
The internet could soon have two new domain names, aimed at mobile services and the jobs market. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has given preliminary approval to two new addresses - .
644510
(InfoWorld) - Participants made good progress discussing changes to Internet governance during an ICANN meeting in Puerto Rico that closed on Friday, leaders of the organization said. One topic that leaders worked on was the future enablement of non-Latin characters in domain names. ICANN hopes to support Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, and other characters in the future, but that's easier said than done. In 2003, ICANN made an attempt to widen the acceptable characters but found that its rules were too permissive, said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman. "There could be confusion between similar registrations that might mislead users," he said during a conference call to discuss the meeting. One potential source of confusion is that some characters in different alphabets might look similar but mean different things. For example, in Cyrillic, the word for "restaurant" looks in the Latin alphabet like "pectopaht." That opens the door for users to register domains in different languages in a way that could confuse users. ICANN hopes to develop rules that will prevent such confusion. ICANN plans to be able to test the use of international domain names live on the Internet by November. The test will include a mechanism to take them out instantly if they create a problem, Cerf said. The group has already tested the process in the lab. "We are confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter problems, but you never really know until it's in that live environment," he said. The meeting also included a discussion on continuing to encourage IPv6 use. That's particularly important now because ICANN has determined the current system, supported by IPv4, for allocating the numerical address space will exhaust available numbers around 2011 or 2012, Cerf said. The wide adoption of IPv6 will support the continued addition of new numerical addresses. Cerf said there was significant progress in efforts to enable digital signatures to help authenticate the match between domain names and Internet addresses. The digital signature would validate that the Internet address associated with a domain name wasn't corrupted, either maliciously or accidentally. "This is a significant change in the core architecture of DNS," he said. The group also worked on developing a more regular process for allowing the introduction of additional generic top-level domains. ICANN worked on such policies in 2000 and 2003 and will take those experiences and try to establish a more regular practice for making additional domain names available, Cerf said. ICANN is on track for the introduction of new domains by the middle of 2008.
214684
(InfoWorld) - VeriSign plans to invest $100 million over three years to expand tenfold the DNS (domain name system) infrastructure it operates for the .com and .net top-level domains. The DNS is a multitier system that translates the names given to Internet hosts, such as www.infoworld.com, into numerical addresses. The part VeriSign plans to expand, the top tier, indicates where to find answers for addresses in the .com and .net domains. If it fails, or slows, many Internet services break or falter. This happened on Tuesday, whenÂ attackers disruptedÂ the operations of root DNS servers operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. Department of Defense. "We're going to make that kind of attack harder against our services," said Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer, on Thursday. Although VeriSign's investment will make the DNS more resistant to such attacks, "This isn't just about the attacks, this is about keeping ahead of the pace of network growth," he added. Services such as Internet telephony or video delivery rely heavily on the DNS infrastructure, and are more susceptible to variations in its performance than applications such as Web browsing. An additional 40 millisecond delay in providing an address might not be noticeable to Web surfers, but it can have a big effect on VOIP (voice over Internet Protcol) operators, Silva said. Through a project known as Titan, VeriSign will reinforce its DNS infrastructure in two ways. The first will be to increase server and bandwidth capacity tenfold at around 20 existing sites, taking bandwidth from 20GbpsÂ to over 200Gbps. The changes will allow VeriSign to respond to over 4 trillion DNS queries a day, from 400 billion today. VeriSign will also expand the number of sites where it operates DNS servers to around 100, Silva said. Those extra sites will bring the DNS closer to regional network operators in countries such as Ireland, one of the trial sites for VeriSign's new infrastructure. There, it has peered with many of the local network operators, so the DNS requests of Irish Internet users don't have to travel halfway across Europe to be resolved: they are dealt with on the spot. VeriSign already operates regional sites in Brazil, China, Egypt, Kenya and South Korea, and plans to open sites in Chile, Germany, India and South Africa, among others. In addition to improving performance, these changes will make the system more secure by restricting the effects of attacks such as the one seen Tuesday to a smaller geographic area, Silva said. VeriSign expects the number of attacks launched over the Internet to increase in size and scope by 50 percent a year over the next two years. Even without an increase in the number of attacks, VeriSign faces a significant challenge in keeping all its DNS servers up to date and in step with one another. Much of the theoretical work on that was begun in another project, Atlas, in 2002, Silva said. "It has gotten to the point where we can now go for scalability," he added. VeriSign has developed new "zone push" techniques to distribute database changes, and will use a VPN (virtual private network) and dedicated data connections to ensure server updates are not disrupted, Silva said. Stratton Sclavos, VeriSign's CEO, is due to provide more details on the company's Titan project in a keynote address at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco at 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. Â
40085
Global internet watchdog, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), at the weekend announced the commencement of its new inter-registrar domain name transfer (DNT) policy, just as it has settled over 10,000 domain name disputes