VeriSign, critics gear up for ICANN hearing
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(InfoWorld) - A VeriSign Inc. official defended its contract to operate the .com domain Monday, after Network Solutions accused the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of not requiring adequate security safeguards in its registry agreements. Network Solutions, a domain-name registrar, released a report last week saying ICANN has "failed" to address security in its latest proposals for the .com, .biz, .info and .org top-level domains. Network Solutions officials also criticized a provision in the proposed contract renewal for the .com domain that would allow VeriSign to raise prices by 7 percent in four of the contract's six years. The current .com contract expires in late 2007. VeriSign shouldn't get near-automatic renewals of the .com contract without more security requirements, said Jonathan Nevett, Network Solutions' vice president and chief policy counsel. "We're facing a contract that provides for ... permanent monopoly, for fee increases without justification and now without adequate security protections," he said. "It's mind-boggling that the contract has gotten this far." But Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer, said some price increases will be necessary to keep the .com domain secure. The contract to operate the .com domain allows ICANN to change the agreement through consensus of its two security committees, and ICANN can cancel the contract if it believes VeriSign hasn't performed adequately, Silva said. VeriSign has warded off several massive attacks on the .com domain, including attacks using more than 30,000 bot-net computers in January, Silva said. Meanwhile, the .com domain has been available 100 percent of the time for the last seven years, he said. Internet attacks continue to evolve and become larger, and it's difficult to set a security road map that stays relevant for any length of time, Silva said. He praised the proposed .com contract renewal for its pricing "flexibility." "The technology we're talking about to keep up with this kind of load is not something you just buy off the shelf," Silva said. "Let's not lose site of the fact that security continues to be the biggest threat to the growth of the Internet. Supporting that security and stability is going to involve a lot of technology, a lot of talent and a lot of equipment." The two companies held briefings about the proposed .com contract as a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has scheduled a hearing Wednesday on ICANN's future. Besides the top-level domain agreements, the subcommittee is likely to focus on the renewal of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN, allowing the nonprofit organization to oversee the Internetâs technical infrastructure. A year ago, countries including China and Brazil proposed a new model for Internet governance, with an international body taking responsibility from the U.S. and ICANN. The U.S. government and many U.S. companies oppose such a move. Network Solutions focused on the top-level domain agreements with its report, "DNS -- A System in Crisis." Among its criticisms: the domain agreements do not allow ICANN to audit security practices of domain operators. "This is the backbone of the Internet," said report author Jerry Archer. "Without this, there are no signposts."
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Vaya con dios, internet ICANN 2007 Los Angeles The ICANN Los Angeles 2007 meeting begins Monday, and it is Vint Cerf's swan song as chairman of the ICANN board of directors. We couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk to the "father of the internet" about the future of the internet and of ICANN itself.â¦
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Some of the high-technology industry&#39;s biggest executives, pontificators and bloggers assembled over three days this week in San Francisco, ending Thursday, to opine about the Web&#39;s future.
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&quot;The US federal court&#39;s decision serves as another important affirmation of ICANN&#39;s multistakeholder participatory model, and reaffirms the ICANN structure,&quot; stated John Jeffrey, ICANN&#39;s General Counsel.
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Internet management groups seeks comment on dealing with domain registrars after recent RegisterFly debacle.
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Hard core for core neutrality ICANN San Juan 2007 The fight over trademark rights got a welcome rematch last week, as the "free expression" contingency took the stage.â¦
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VeriSign (Quote, Chart) has come out on the losing end in its breach of contract and antitrust lawsuit against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
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What needs to be done Comment The scorn heaped upon ICANN recently for its laissez faire attitude toward customer allegations of fraud by its accredited registrar Registerfly - a scandal in which ICANN spent the better part of a year repeatedly referring customers back to Registerfly, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of misconduct - has forced ICANN to acknowledge that it is a responsible for holding its accredited registrars to certain ethical standards. Well, it's a start.â¦
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As part of a series looking at Internet and intellectual property law, Deborah Wilcox, co-chair of a national intellectual property litigation practice, discusses changes in attitudes toward online intellectual property, the challenges courts face in litigating online IP and trademark cases, and consumer confusion over search ads.
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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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VeriSign's proposed deal with ICANN for oversight of the .com domain has received final approval from the US Commerce Department, removing the last hurdle to extending the agreement until 2012.
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VeriSign Inc.  said on Thursday  it plans to spend more than $100 million over three years to  expand the infrastructure that helps direct most of the world's  Internet traffic.
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Proponents of Net neutrality laws call for a hearing on the issue, arguing reports of peer-to-peer traffic interference support need for rules banning that practice.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) has approved an agreement for VeriSign Inc. to continue to operate the .com domain for six more years,Â despite objections about pricing and security. TheÂ department has approved the .com agreement submitted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internetâs technical infrastructure, VeriSign announced Thursday. The current .com contract expires in late 2007. The approval comes even though domain-name registrarÂ GoDaddy.com criticized the dealÂ in September, saying it should include infrastructure build-out requirements and make the company justify built-in price increases. Also in September, registrar Network Solutions releasedÂ a report saying ICANN has failed to address securityÂ in its latest proposals for the .com, .biz, .info and .org top-level domains. But VeriSign officials noted that the .com domain has never crashed under its control during the last seven years. The ICANN agreement "strengthens the security and stability of the Internet relied on by hundreds of millions of people around the globe," Mark McLaughlin, executive vice president and general manager for VeriSign Information Services, said in a statement. The agreement "holds operators accountable for their performance [and] promotes the continued investment of tens of millions of dollars in the infrastructure." A Network Solutions official said the company was disappointed that the DOC approved the agreement "in the face of widespread opposition." "Unfortunately, the Commerce Department has endorsed an agreement that creates a perpetual de facto monopoly, fails to provide sufficient checks and balances through competition and adequate oversight, and is fundamentally flawed from a national cyber-security perspective," Jon Nevett, the company's vice president for policy, said in a statement. ICANN approved the agreement in February. But GoDaddy.com and Network Solutions criticized the deal for allowing VeriSign to raise prices by 7 percent in four of the contract's six years. The deal also doesn't include enough infrastructure build-out and security requirements, the two companies said. Other critics called for the .com contract to be put up for competitive bids, but VeriSign and ICANN officials argued no other company was in a position to take over the massive .com domain. NetChoice, a coalition of trade associations and e-Commerce businesses, praised the DOC's approval of the contract extension. The approval shows the DOC respects ICANN's decisions even as other countries have criticized the U.S. control of ICANN, said NetChoice, with members including VeriSign itself as well as eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Combined with a September agreement that moves ICANN to independence in three years, the .com approval "should also quell international criticism of the U.S for its oversight role over ICANN," Steve DelBianco, NetChoice's executive director, said in an e-mail. The agreement will also "ensure the long-term availability and integrity of the Internet," he said.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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At a hearing Monday, a top European regulator said that Internet Protocol addresses should be treated as personal information, something Google and other sites have resisted.
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VeriSign Inc. lost another round in its battle against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday when a US federal judge dismissed the
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. government will remain involved with the management of the Internet's domain name system after its current agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) expires on Saturday. The decision comes despiteÂ international pressureÂ advocating for the U.S. government to bow out and make ICANN a totally autonomous entity. The U.S. Commerce Department will retain ICANN oversight for three more years, although there will be a review in 18 months of ICANN's progress toward becoming a more stable, transparent, and accountable organization, the government agency said in a statement Friday. A spokesman for ICANN said that at this 18-month review a decision could be taken to give ICANN total autonomy. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) that has been in place between ICANN and the Commerce Department since 1998 has now been modified in several ways that represent a "dramatic step" towards full autonomy, ICANN said in a separate statement. For example, the MOU had outlined the government's role as "prescriptive," but now, ICANN will determine how it works and what it works on, ICANN said. Furthermore, the requirement for ICANN to submit a progress report to the Commerce Department every six months has been lifted. Instead, ICANN will publish an annual progress report aimed at the entire Internet community, not just the Commerce Department. Duties retained by the Commerce Department include helping ICANN achieve greater transparency and accountability in how it evaluates and adopts policies, the government agency said. In addition, the Commerce Department said it will continue its oversight of the security andÂ operation of root name servers. The Commerce Department remains committed toward eventually giving ICANN full autonomy, it said. However, many observers believe that this full autonomy should have been granted already, because having the U.S. involved in DNS (domain name system) management creates political friction and ultimately slows down the international development of the Internet. On the other hand, others believe that continued U.S. government oversight of ICANN is necessary because ICANN hasn't proven it can handle the entire task of DNS management alone and that if the U.S. government withdraws, the Internet's security and stability could be compromised. ICANN is a private, nonprofit organization based in California. The Commerce Department held a hearing on the matter in July and previously called for written comments, receiving about 700 of them. On Friday, the agency said that consultation process revealed broad support for continuing the transition towards a fully autonomous ICANN but with the Commerce Department's continued involvement. ICANN and the Commerce Department will hold a press conference Friday.