The US government has taken the extraordinary step of dangling the contract for control of the internet above the heads of the world.

The Register

Eight of the world's largest domain registrars have sent an open letter to ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf, stating their formal opposition to the revised proposition with VeriSign for continued control of the Internet registry.

internetnews.com

ICANN Board Chair Vint Cerf now works for a company whose motto is, "Do No Evil." So how could Vint and his fellow board members be engaged in a massive capitulation to the enterprise greed of dot-com operator VeriSign?

CircleID

Malicious hackers who are able to hijack an organization's Web domain may be able to steal traffic from the legitimate Web site long after the domain has been restored to its owner, according to a recent report.

eWEEK

Public consultations on the new "Internet Governance Forum" being created by the United Nations will be held in Geneva February 16-17. The Internet Governance Project has released a new discussion paper explaining how the Forum could work.

CircleID

A couple of days ago the BBC reported that a document called the Information Operations Roadmap had been declassified and that it contained some pretty interesting stuff.

CircleID

Warner Brothers Entertainment, which owns the rights to The Dukes of Hazzard and related characters, including DAISY DUKE, failed in its UDRP case against the registrant of the domain name DaisyDukes.com.

CircleID

Most of us would be put off if a court issued a press release cheering the number of prisoners its judges had put behind bars or the number of tenants it had helped landlords to evict. That seems antithetical to the neutral adjudication of disputes, and ethical rules regularly decry such "appearance of bias." Yet WIPO seems to think it perfectly natural to crow about its arbitrators' favoritism for complainants against "cybersquatters" in UDRP proceedings. It issued a release that reads like a solicitation for trademark claimants' business, not a promotion of neutral arbitration services:

CircleID

ICANN today posted a newly revised proposed set of agreements which, if approved, will settle all pending litigation with VeriSign. The proposed agreement documents are being posted for public comment in order to inform the Board's deliberations; the proposed settlement remains subject to final approval or disapproval of the ICANN Board.

CircleID

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) saw a 20% increase in the number of cybersquatting (abusive registration of trademarks as domain names) cases filed in 2005 as compared to 2004. In 2005, a total of 1,456 cybersquatting cases were filed with WIPO’s Arbitration and Mediation Center. This increase represents the highest number of cybersquatting cases handled by the WIPO Center since 2001.

WIPO

He may just have sold it for $14m, but the owner of the world's most valuable domain name, Gary Kremen, now intends to spend his time recovering the $65m he is still owed by the con-man who stole the domain 10 years ago.

The Register

Dispatch from the future:
FROM: Carter Kohl, 34 inches, 30 pounds, 17 months.
TO: Friends and family.
MESSAGE: Feel free to contact me. Even though I cannot read just yet, you can still send me e-mail. My parents will read it to me and will help me respond to all your messages. In advance, thanks for getting in touch. I'll be reading and replying back to you before you know it!

CNET News.com

The infamous and controversial domain Sex.com has officially been sold to Boston-based Escom LLC for a reported $14 million, XBiz has learned.

XBiz [Editor's Note: Warning, some content on the XBiz site may be NSFW (not safe for work), but the article itself is SFW.]

Interesting WIPO case (D2005-1085): Complainant (Saint-Exupery estate) owns "Le Petit Prince" in EU, US, and other countries. The translation of "Le Petit Prince" is "The little prince". Respondent registered 'thelittleprince.com'. Is such a domain name confusingly similar to the trademark? Yes said the panel:

CircleID

Ambitious plans to connect not just phones and TVs but kettles and fridges to the Net will come to fruition this year.

Deccan Herald

Are politicians who don't know the first thing about registering domain names fit to govern?

Domain Name Wire

The first steps toward the new Internet Governance Forum, which will take a lead role in how the internet will be run now and in the future, have been taken.

The Register

For some years now the general uptake of IPv6 has appeared to be "just around the corner". Yet the Internet industry has so far failed to pick up and run with this message, and it continues to be strongly reluctant to make any substantial widespread commitment to deploy IPv6. Some carriers are now making some initial moves in terms of migrating their internet infrastructure over to a dual protocol network, but for many others it's a case of still watching and waiting for what they think is the optimum time to make a move.

CircleID

Private investors have invested tens of billions of dollars over the past decade in Internet-related businesses partly because such investments would help to build an international communications system and because the Internet would remain beyond the regulatory reach of ordinary governments. Most governments would now beg to differ with both assumptions.

The New York Sun

2005 will be forever seen as the year in which the US government managed to keep unilateral control of the internet, despite widespread opposition by the rest of the world.

The Register

Commerce Department blocks .xxx domain: Around 300 top-level domains are running on the net. But when ICANN decided to carve out a new one for adult content, a Christian group called the Family Research Council saw red, predicting the move would double the amount of smut available online, and, in the words of council attorney Patrick Trueman, "the porn industry would become twice the menace it is today."

Wired News

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet. But if you're a poetry group with a lawyer, it can be grounds for a lawsuit.

DesMoinesRegister.com

Internet domain names are truly bizarre. There is nothing especially remarkable about them from a technical perspective, but from a social and political perspective they are all sorts of fun. We can have arguments over control of the DNS root, arguments over whether names are property, arguments over innate rights to specific names, arguments over a registrar's right (or lack thereof) to exploit unregistered names for private gain, and many more arguments besides. In this article, I'd like to explore the argument-space rather than defend any particular position in it. In so doing, I hope to illuminate some novel (or under-emphasised) perspectives on the matter.

CircleID

Despite the significant traffic that comes from typed-in domain names, the public harumphing and clucking about type-in traffic is climbing in volume as it becomes clear how much money is involved. Articles this week show that domain names, and the people who make money on them, are making some commentators uncomfortable.

CircleID

TWO internet geeks who made a fortune by misleading net users must pay $2.3million, after a court found they flagrantly broke copyright laws in an elaborate scam.

The Australian

The Intellectual Property Constituency, meeting at the ICANN conference in Vancouver, was interested in increasing ICANN's budget not because they thought they deserved it, but because they wanted ICANN to actually enforce the rules on the books about fake registrations. Now there's some evidence about how prevalent that is. If there's any surprise here, it's that the numbers are so low.

CircleID

More than 8 percent of all Internet domain names are registered with false or incomplete information, according to a U.S. government study into the prevalence of phony Web sites.

CNET News.com

Every delegate at the last week's ICANN conference in Vancouver was handed a free bag with an enormous sponsorship logo for an organisation called CFIT.

The Register

The quasi-governmental organization that oversees the Internet has tentatively approved a ".asia" Web domain to unify the Asia-Pacific community, but the group has delayed a decision on whether to move forward with a ".xxx" zone for pornography sites.

USATODAY.com

A new lobbying body calling itself itself the Campaign for ICANN Transparency (CFIT) has expanded its investigation into the Internet overseeing organisation with a freedom of information request served on the US Department of Commerce.

The Register

The continued control of the internet's organisational structure by the US government - in particular the Bush administration - could result in the splitting of the Net, one of the leading Arab internet voices has warned.

The Register

The World Summit in Tunis last month was overshadowed by the global argument over internet governance.

The Register

It is now clear that by sending its letter of August 12 blocking approval of the .XXX domain, the US Government has done more to undermine ICANN's status as a non-governmental, multi-stakeholder policy body than any of its Internet governance "enemies" in the ITU, China, Brazil, or Iran. And despite all the calls for a government role that would ensure "rule of law" and "accountability" of ICANN, the interventions of governments are making this aspect of Internet governance more arbitrary and less accountable.

CircleID

One of the consistent chants we've always heard from ICANN is that there has to be a single DNS root, so everyone sees the same set of names on the net, a sentiment with which I agree. Unfortunately, I discovered at this week's ICANN meeting that due to ICANN's inaction, it's already too late.

CircleID

The company distributing many of the world's Internet addresses is taking more steps this week to fend off criticism that it gives the U.S. government too much control over its operations.

eWEEK

Controversial plans to create the Internet domain .xxx purely for pornography have been dropped just days before they were due to receive approval.

Times Online

The deployment of DNSsec, an enhancement to the domain name system that could protect against certain types of phishing and pharming attacks, is still facing skepticism and resistance from those who would be involved in implementing it.

Computer Business Review

Consortium Standards Bulletin

[Editor's Note: A collection of articles dedicated to the run-up and aftermath of WSIS.]

Unfortunately I cannot be in Vancouver for the conference. I write this from Cape Town, venue of last years fall ICANN.

CircleID

Sega better get those interns in check. Someone forgot to renew the Shenmue.com domain, which expired on the 19th.

Joystiq

A Dutch technology company has breathed life into a project to rid the Internet of suffixes such as .com, and instead offer single names which can be countries, company names or fantasy words.

Yahoo! News

Although Internet domain names may be getting longer or more complex as websites creatively squeeze into the crowded ".com" address space, most single-letter names like "a.com" and "b.com" remain unused.

Globetechnology

A trade group of Internet businesses challenged a proposed settlement over control of the ".com" domain as a violation of U.S. antitrust laws in a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in California.

eWEEK

Vinton Cerf has been dubbed the father of the Internet, a label the 62-year-old Connecticut native rejects. "There are lots of fathers of the Internet," says the legendary computer scientist who worked on the original Department of Defense project in 1973. He now holds the title of Google's chief Internet evangelist and chairs ICANN—the main organization responsible for assigning Internet domain names. ICANN, which is overseen by the U.S. Commerce Department, was subject to much debate at last week's U.N. World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, during which several nations pushed to take control away from the United States. NEWSWEEK's Michael Hastings asked Cerf for his thoughts on where the Web is headed.

Newsweek

It's business as usual for the international and local organisations that manage the internet domain name system as ICANN meets in Vancouver, Canada, to thrash out a range of technical issues.

The Sydney Morning Herald

They came, they saw, they coveted. But since delegates to last week's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia couldn't agree on how to wrest control of the Internet from a U.S.- based private group, they put off further discussion until next year.

Rocky Mountain News

It looks like sparks will be flying at the upcoming ICANN meeting November 30-December 4 in Vancouver, Canada. A number of individuals, organizations and domain industry companies are planning to attend to voice their opposition to the ICANN-Verisign .com agreement announced Oct. 24. The agreement (if signed by ICANN after their public comment period ends Dec. 4) will end all pending litigation between ICANN and Verisign, but opponents of the deal argue that the settlement would come at an unacceptable cost to both consumers and companies operating in this industry.

Domain Name Journal

The U.N.'s war on Internet freedom isn't over.

OpinionJournal

ICANN has welcomed the Tunis Declaration adopted during the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in relation to the Internet's ongoing technical coordination. The decision by the WSIS to recognize ICANN's existing multi-stakeholder model ensures that the stability and integrity of the Internet's naming and addressing system will be preserved.

CircleID