ICANN had previously given the domain the go ahead in 2005, but reversed the decision two years later amidst protests from US conservative groups. An independent review recently concluded that decision was unfair and that the plan should be reconsidered.

Read full story: BBC

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Top-Level Domains

ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, urges African leaders to "shatter" telecommunications monopolies in their nations in order to help lower the price of Internet access to their citizens during his opening remarks at the start of the 37th ICANN meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. Beckstrom noted that while 15 percent of the world's population lives in Africa, Africans make up less than 7 percent of all Internet users.

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After a series of board meetings on whether to cancel or not due to security issues, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting kicked off in Nairobi. The meeting was overshadowed by security concerns and some ICANN members reportedly boycotted the meeting, choosing to hold parallel sessions in New York and Washington, D.C., instead of risking coming to Nairobi.

Read full story: Computerworld

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Nobody doubts that some time in the near future there will be Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in Chinese, Russian or Arabic scripts. The Chinese, Russian and Arabic-character-using worlds are large—encompassing hundreds of millions of current and potential users. They are politically influential blocs, with the ability to demand action in international meetings. And perhaps most importantly, they are—at least when taken together—rich. Everybody knows that access on the web in these languages is not a matter of if, but simply a question of when…

But what about the poorer nations of the world that use scripts other than the largest IDNs and the typical Latin character set currently available on the net? What about Amharic, or Georgian, Azeri or Thai, Burmese or Cambodian? Doesn't the internet community have a goal of reaching out to them in their own languages too? The answer is yes, but I fear that despite the rhetoric, some of ICANN's policies may actually end up creating disincentives for companies wishing to fully build out the IDN space.

To listen to the words of Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new-ish leader, the community's goal is to help make the internet available to anyone in their own language—and in their own character set or script. And, as we heard during the Seoul ICANN meeting last year—there was actually a celebratory cocktail to usher in the new IDN age—IDNs are the future. Still, work on Chinese, Korean and the like is only the beginning. There are dozens of scripts out there.

However, there is potentially a real flaw in ICANN's planning that threatens to upend this vision of universal IDN access, effectively leaving some scripts "out in the cold". Under ICANN's new gTLD implementation plan as presently proposed, registries operating existing gTLDs (or those hoping to operate new ones) will be required to apply for each IDN version separately… and pay full fees for each one. This directly impacts the go/no go decision for registry operators who need to make a reasonable "business case" for each script that they apply for, in order to justify the high application costs. And, while these costs might seem trivial for gTLDs in, say, Chinese or Arabic, this policy pretty much ensures that registry operators (new or old) will leave some scripts undeveloped.

The likely upshot is that the gTLD revolution going on around the world will bypass Georgian, Burmese, and Amharic entirely… furthering the digital divide.

There may be a solution, if ICANN has the flexibility to adjust its policies. Many of the evaluation costs in the new gTLD process are duplicated. As just one example, if a potential registry operator applies for multiple gTLDs, it is likely that most technical qualifications will only have to be evaluated once. This would lower ICANN's evaluation costs, and should lead to reduced application costs as well, leading to more competition for (and interest in) smaller scripts. And there may be other ways to lower the barriers to entry so that companies large and small will be able to make the business case for a truly, fully IDN-friendly internet.

At every ICANN and Internet Governance Forum meeting we hear about the need to make the internet an equal- (or at least more equal-) access platform, one that respects language and culture diversity. Lowering the costs for companies wanting to provide IDN access in less popular scripts is one obvious, tangible way to make this happen. A little flexibility could go a long way to providing a real internet future for the millions that speak and write Armenian or Burmese or a host of other languages.

Written by Andrew Mack, Principal at AMGlobal Consulting

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Multilinguism, Top-Level Domains, Web

I recently participated in two Comverse events, and once again the message was driven home to me about the enormous opportunities that lie ahead of the industry in the field of new telecoms applications.

The middleware and cloud applications that are now appearing at the edge of the network will of course, be further developed once high-speed broadband becomes available, but already they are having an enormous impact on the telecoms market. The new user experiences that can be obtainable through these applications will enrich fast broadband networks beyond recognition.

What we now have is, on the one hand, the Over-The-Top (OTT) applications that have conquered the world thanks to companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, YouTube and so on; and, on the other, the attempts by the telcos to develop these apps though their broadband and mobile portals.

By using the OTT route one can avoid many of the problems that the telco industry has been dealing with for decades. I remember as far back as the early 1990s, when both Telstra and Optus launched their impressive new billing reforms; but today, more than twenty years later, their billing and operational support systems (BSS/OSS) are as far from completion as they were in the 1990s. In fact it is likely that they are even further behind now, since many new applications have become available since that time—applications that are making those telco systems look like dinosaurs. In the mobile market we can also refer to decade old failed strategy of introducing IMS.

While fast broadband is the essential infrastructure of the digital economy the real action will take place on the layer above the infrastructure. This is where for many years I have envisaged the future of the telcos—facilitating the development of the digital economy, rather than concentrating on end-user products like telephone calls, mobile portals or broadband applications.

This is the world of value-added infrastructure, middleware and cloud services. However the old infrastructure with its legacy of BSS and OSS systems has failed to make the transition to the new Internet-based ICT infrastructure, let alone being able to facilitate Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 services.

In the meantime it is the new digital media companies that are building not national but international middleware networks. While telcos fail to service customer bases that consist of millions of users the digital media companies are able to serve hundreds of millions of customers.

Therefore NBNs could be a godsend, since this will, potentially at least, give telcos the opportunity to build a value-added layer on top of the infrastructure that will be capable of delivering Next Generation Network (NGN) service such as Web 3.0+ services.

However, while the digital media companies are progressing in this field on a monthly basis, telcos still measure their progress in years, so at present the gap is still growing, but not in favour of the telcos.

So the sooner the telcos start their transformation the better.

However, after well over a decade of calling for change time is now running out. They have now also lost the mobile portal battle against the apps market (that happened so fast they never knew what hit them). If the telcos miss this last opportunity it is indeed highly likely that they will be relegated to being basic infrastructure operators—and that market is also under threat as construction companies are better-positioned to do this job after most telcos went out of this business one or two decades ago.

On a more positive note, while customers might not like their dinosaur telcos they do, at the same time, trust them. They have built robust systems with enormous reliability and sound security based on proper standards and availability everywhere.

So the telcos could use this advantage to offer that same level of trust in an Internet world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to know who is trustworthy and who is not. I have made this argument for many years, trying to get the telcos to move. Again, the opportunity is still there—but for how long?

Banks are in a similar position, but they have far more valuable data they can use to help customers navigate the digital economy. So they could easily compete in this market as well. Customer knowledge is the key element of the digital economy.

However, more immediate competition is coming from the social media sites, which are quickly becoming the new powerhouses of the digital economy; also, they already have far more information about their customers and can use this to expand their services.

So it is two minutes to twelve for the telcos here as well.

Looking at some of those fantastic applications from Comverse we see a range of enriched voice and messaging services with superior user experience, complete with visualisation, personalisation, location, multi-channel applications and an openness to social networks, UGC-sites and RSS feeds.

I can see the digital media companies offering these communications applications immediately, but the telcos may not move so fast. This would hurt the telcos right at the very core of their communications business and I can now quite easily see these products being offered by companies other than the telcos.

Some of the mobile companies are better-positioned than the fixed operators; however if we look at the mobile portals market versus the applications market we see that the mobile operators also have largely failed to make the transition to the new open web-based world.

Perhaps the telcos should start looking more at OTT services themselves. There are great applications with unified communication applications in relation to social sites, location-based activities, etc. If the telcos were smart they could offer voice free and allow customers to choose from a whole range of value-added voice services and to make incremental changes to the applications they really value.

Over and again I have argued that, rather than concentrating on their retail customers, the telcos should supply their middleware and cloud services to the content and services providers. They should be the key providers to the organisations that are going to drive the digital economy.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

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More under: Broadband, Cloud Computing, Data Center, Telecom

Mobile operators are counting on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology to handle surging demand for mobile data access. But LTE developers made some poor choices, cutting spectral efficiency and thus driving up operator costs.

LTE was envisioned as an all IP system, but the RF allocations follow the voice-centric approach of earlier generations. While LTE standards allow for either Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) or Time Division Duplexing (TDD), all initial LTE equipment uses FDD. FDD requires two separate blocks of spectrum—one for each direction. FDD makes perfect sense for bi-directional voice traffic. It makes no sense for data. With the exception of peer-to-peer file sharing (which most mobile operators block), data traffic is very asymmetric. Sending data via FDD means one block of spectrum is fully utilized and the other, equal sized block, is dramatically under utilized. Result: the operator pays for almost twice the spectrum they actually use.

Verizon is deploying LTE in the 700 MHz C block which means they are using 746 MHz to 756 MHz (a 10 MHz channel) for their downlink (to the mobile device) and wasting most of 777 MHz to 787 MHz (another 10 MHz channel) for the uplink. If Verizon could deploy TDD (as used by WiMAX and as defined for LTE but not implemented), they could fully utilize both 10 MHz blocks for data transfers, almost doubling their data capacity.

I don't know the actual capacity Verizon will realize on average with their first generation LTE infrastructure. But suppose Peter Rysavy is correct (as implied by Gigaom) that Verizon will initially average 15 Mbps per 10 MHz channel. That's 15/15 Mbps, symmetric, even though average traffic is likely to be 15/2 Mbps. No single user is likely to see 15 Mbps; rather that 15 Mbps is shared among all users in that sector. With TDD (the default for WiMAX and an unimplemented option for LTE), the Verizon spectrum could support two channels of perhaps 13/2 Mbps each in that same sector. Again, no single user will see 13 Mbps, but all the users in the cell will be sharing 30 Mbps of capacity that can be dynamically divided between up and down—mostly like averaging 26/4 Mbps but able to allocate 15/15 or 28/2 as the traffic mix changes.

It's ironic the LTE implementors got this wrong when you consider their decision to use only IP in the rest of the LTE design, thereby dropping support for traditional voice or SMS services. That's right, initial LTE deployments won't support voice telephony or SMS messages, only data services, and yet LTE spectrum assignments were made as if voice comes first.

That's ironic.

Written by Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at Ashtonbrooke; Chief Strategy Officer at Dialogic

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News reports say that the Israeli government is close to passing a law that requires portable e-mail addresses, similar to portable phone numbers. Number portability has been a success, making it much easier to switch from one provider to another, and address portability might ease switching among ISPs. But e-mail is not phone calls. Is it even possible?

The bill's sponsors apparently assume that e-mail messages work enough like phone calls that whatever they do to make phone numbers portable can work the same way for mail. Unfortunately, they're wrong.

Every time you make a phone call, software in the phone system checks to see if the number you're calling has been ported. Since phone numbers are geographically assigned, there is a shared porting database for each calling area in which the calling switch looks up the dialed number (DN) to get the routing number (RN). If the number hasn't been ported the DN is the same as the RN, but if it has, RN is a number assigned to the switch to which the number has been ported. Then the call is routed based on the RN, but it also sends along the DN so the target switch knows who the call is for. The shared databases are run by a neutral party (Neustar in the US) and every telco pays to support it. The system was designed this way so that numbers that have been ported away don't put an extra load on the "donor" system from which it was ported.

Email doesn't work like that. There is a DNS lookup for the domain name, the part of the address after the @ sign. but all mail within the same domain is routed to the same place. For the small minority of Internet users who have their own domains, they can change the domain's DNS records to change where the mail goes, but for users who get their addresses from their ISP or their employer, it's tied to the ISP or the employer. You can imagine a system in which every mail delivery did a DNS lookup of the e-mail address first, but that's not how the mail system works.

But since this is a government mandate, is there any way to make this sort of work?

There were two other approaches for phone number portability proposed and discarded, call release and call forwarding. In call release, the call first goes to the original switch, which sends back a status message saying the number has been ported to another switch, and the calling switch then reconnects to the other switch. Call forwarding should be familiar to everyone--the called switch places a call to the real destination switch and connects the incoming call to it.

E-mail has analogs to both of these. For something like call release, the SMTP standard has always had a status code that a recipient system can send back to a sending system to say that the recipient has moved, and giving a new address. As far as anyone can tell, nobody has ever used that code, but it's there if anyone wants to give it a try. Mail forwarding, on the other hand, is very common.

The least awful way I can think of to make something like this work for email is that the user's new provider can contact the old provider on the user's behalf, and request the address be forwarded. So long as it's forwarded, the new provider pays the old one a modest monthly fee, mostly to give the providers an incentive to cancel the forward when the user leaves. The fees would probably net out in most cases so the costs would be mostly administrative.

Mechanically, that kind of setup would not be very hard. Administratively, it would be a nightmare. If the forwarded mail starts to bounce are they allowed to turn it off? Does the old provider do its usual spam filtering? (What if the user left because the filtering was lousy and lost a lot of real mail?)

Another possibility would be for the old provider to keep mail accounts active even though the account is otherwise turned off, and let people pick up mail from its mail server. This is surprisingly common now, often by accident. For example, I cancelled my BT broadband account in July when I left England, but the associated mail account still works, seven months later. Mechanically this still isn't hard, but if it's a required service, now each ISP now has a permanent obligation to provide mail service to people from whom they no longer get any income, and with whom they have no other relationship. How do they know when to turn off the mail? If the user doesn't pick up the mail for a month? Six months? A year?

So my main advice is to forget it, since there's little evidence that this is a service so important it needs to be mandated. On the other hand, ISPs might find a small new income stream by selling forwarding service, like many post offices do. If the user is willing to pay $20/yr, that'd probably cover the cost of keeping a mailbox open, and would solve the problem without having to invent new rules and mechanisms.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

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More under: Email

There are a number of sources talking about the takedown of the Mariposa botnet, here are a few of the good ones:

• The Associated Press details the story and talks about the technical aspects of the takedown.

• Boing Boing only has an excerpt. Nothing too detailed.

• Panda Labs, who assisted in the disruption, has their own blog about their participation and the actions that they took.

• Symantec adds something to the discussion with their analysis on the chief piece of malware in the botnets (W32.Pilleuz, aka Win32/Rimecud.R)

• Gary Warner, over at the University of Alabama, has a great discussion on botnets. He urges the anti-botnet community to move from a model of taking botnets with technology to taking down spammers within the legal framework.

In case you haven't been reading through the security space lately, here's the 411 rundown: Spanish authorities, working with researchers from Panda Labs, Defence Intelligence and a couple of other educational institutions, took down the Mariposa botnet (Mariposa is the Spanish word for "butterfly"). The Mariposa botnet is an absolutely enormous with around 12 million (!) nodes doing its bidding. It was involved in things like credit card phishing and identity fraud.

Yet the thing about the Mariposa botnet was not its sophistication, but rather its lack of sophistication of the people running it. It wasn't a bunch of cybercrooks in Eastern Europe running it, but everyday ham-and-eggers like you and me. To be sure, the infrastructure of Mariposa was sophisticated with VPN traffic and hiding behind other drones, but what ultimately led to its downfall was one of its operators making a mistake. In December, the botnet was knocked offline and the people running it weren't making money. Driven by hubris, one operator attempted to regain control of it—by connecting to it via his home computer. That was his critical mistake; he sent a flood of DOS traffic to Defence Intelligence, the Canada-based organization responsible for assisting in taking it offline. However, it was this direct connection that left a trail to him and allowed authorities in Spain the chance to move in and make the arrest.

The people behind it were not tech-heavy hackers, but instead were cyber criminals who outsourced most of the work in an attempt to move to crime online.

Is such a takedown effective? Here's Gary Warner's take:

Those of you have heard me speak in person know that I believe the answer to these botnets and their continued survival must be the Criminal Justice process. When McColo was shut down (see Analyzing the Aftermath of the McColo Shutdown or Brian Krebs' Major Source of Online Scams and Spams Knocked Offline) spam had a significant world-wide drop in volume, but it rebounded. Why? Because no bad guys went to jail.

Our friends at FireEye are doing amazing botnet work (see their blog @ FireEye Malware Intelligence Lab, but without convictions, even the successful botnet takedowns, like their work on Smashing the Mega-D/Ozdok Botnet eventually rebound.

Cautions are already being expressed as a result of the Waledac take-down, that by using TECHNOLOGY to do the takedowns instead of CRIMINAL JUSTICE APPROACHES that we are just helping to rapidly evolve the capabilities of the various cyber criminals who make their living through spam.

We have to move from DISABLING the C&C networks, to MONITORING the C&C networks. Bad guys need to stop worrying about having to lease new servers, and start worrying about the long arm of the law knocking at their door.

My own approach is that the fight against spammers is a multi-pronged approach. No one company really has a handle on it and instead a combination of techniques is required. In no particular order:

1. Vendors must build software that is secure.
2. Users must make sure that their software is up to date with latest patches.
3. Users must use security software.
4. Anti-abuse technology (spam filters, corporate firewalls) must be effective to disrupt the spammers' cost models.
5. Law enforcement must move to take down cyber criminals.
6. Governments must pass laws clearly defining and/or updating laws surrounding electronic abuse.
7. Spammer infrastructure must be disrupted.
8. Organizations need to monitor and mitigate abuse, reactively and proactively.

So, realistically, advocating one solution over another has its merits but we are still a long ways away from stamping out abuse. If spammers can hit users with different types of threats (Black SEO, rogue A/V, spam, DOS attacks, etc), then anti-abuse proponents must similarly have a large arrow full of quivers with which they can use to strike back.

Written by Terry Zink, Program Manager

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More under: Cybercrime, Security, Spam

The ICANN meeting in Nairobi starts officially next Monday. However, as is normally the case, by the time Monday rolls around people will already have been working since Saturday morning (if not earlier).

All ICANN meetings seem to be surrounded by some bit of controversy and excitement, but the Nairobi meeting is possibly more dramatic than many others. The last attempt to hold a meeting in Nairobi failed, with ICANN opting to hold the meeting near LA's airport, LAX, instead. This time round there was quite a bit of controversy and tension surrounding the meeting's location.

The end result of the tension, security worries and everything else is that quite a large number of people who would normally attend the meeting will be staying at home.

Others will be traveling to Reston, VA, where Neustar has organised a US offsite location. Though with the time difference between VA and Nairobi anyone in attendance will end up working through the night!

So what's on the agenda?

New TLDs—this time round the focus will be on "EOI"—the concept of "expressions of interest" that was mooted at the last meeting in Seoul.

DNS SEC will be on the agenda again, but getting excited about it is far from easy - sorry!

IPv4 depletion will probably get a look in, but it's still a "hard sell". Until ISPs "buy in" and start deploying v6 on their public networks it's going to be nigh on impossible to make any tangible or meaningful movement in this area.

IDN ccTLDs. You can expect updates from the various countries that have applied using the "fast track". There might be more applications from other countries, as the meeting will have attracted its usual media circus.

But the real "hot potato" for ICANN is going to be .xxx

Following on from the recent decision which found that ICANN had "dropped the ball", the ICANN board will be voting on the Friday of the public meeting.

In reality you can expect to see board members being canvassed / briefed / harassed by interested parties pretty much all week. How will they vote?

Will the US government try to intervene?

If ICANN do move ahead with .xxx, will that have any impact on new TLDs?

If ICANN's board doesn't move ahead with .xxx this time round there is little or no chance that Stuart Lawley and ICM Registry are going to throw in the towel.

To start with they've no reason to. They have just won a legal battle that shows that ICANN was in the wrong. Sure, it may not be "binding", but any decision that so much as casts a doubt on ICANN's processes and procedures is a "win" for ICM—and rightly so.

So how would ICANN fare if ICM were to pursue this through to the next level?

ICANN stakeholders probably don't want to see their money being poured down a legal drain ... I know I don't.

Written by Michele Neylon, MD of Blacknight Solutions

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More under: Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Top-Level Domains

The Regional Internet Registries are conducting a Internet community consultation process regarding the recent ITU IPv6 Country Internet Registry (CIR) proposal. In collaboration with the other Regional Internet Registries, APNIC hosted a special session at APNIC 29 / APRICOT 2010 to give the global Internet Community an opportunity to discuss the issues and ramifications of the alternative model proposed by the ITU.

For those interested in the outcome of the recent face-to-face session, a raw transcript and session summary statement are available here:

http://meetings.apnic.net/29/program/consultation

I'd like to thank APNIC for hosting this session as it is important to discuss these issues publicly in timely manner so that input can be brought to the the March 15-16 ITU IPv6 study group meeting in Geneva. By having a public discussion of these important issues, APNIC (as an ITU-D sector member) can submit the outcome for further consideration in this process.

While the ITU IPv6 study group is a closed meeting, I have received an invitation to participate on March 15-16 in Geneva on ARIN's behalf as an "invited expert", and at that session I will focus on the comments covered in the public consultation that was just held. If you have additional input on this topic that you would like to have considered, please review session materials and then contact your regional internet registry, or your organization/company/government ITU representative if you are aware of one. I will also take comments on the CIR proposal until the ITU IPv6 study group meeting start on 15 March, and will try to do my best to convey the input received.

As you can tell, we're attempting to be as accommodating as possible to the ITU as they explore the issues in this area, and their processes are significantly different than Internet Registry System regarding how input is received and considered. At this point, ARIN considers it very important to support these educational efforts, and hope that it will result in better overall understanding of the success that is today's Internet Registry System.

I hope this post helps the Internet community understand where we are in this interesting process.

Thank you for your feedback and support!

Written by John Curran, President and CEO at American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)

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More under: Internet Governance, IP Addressing, IPv6, Regional Registries

The tremendous demand for, and profitability of mobile telephony supports legislative and regulatory efforts to refarm spectrum with an eye toward reallocating as much as possible for wireless telephony and data services. But there is a downside that no one seems to acknowledge.

In light of past FCC practice and the behavior of incumbent wireless carriers I expect two anticompetitive outcomes to occur with the onset of any more spectrum. To maximize current contributions to the national treasury the FCC won't likely encumber any spectrum with open access requirements much less reserve some of the new spectrum for new bidders. Years ago the FCC removed a spectrum cap on any single carrier ostensibly to enable to improve service and accrue scale economies. We can expect the Big Four incumbent wireless carriers, now sharing over 90% market share, to acquire most of the spectrum.

In the 700 MHz spectrum auction (reallocation of UHF television spectrum) AT&T and Verizon spent $16 billion of the $19.6 billion collected by the U.S. government:

"According to an analysis by The Associated Press, the two telecom companies bid more than $16 billion, constituting the vast majority of the overall $19.6 billion that was bid in the FCC auction. With Verizon Wireless and AT&T dominating the auction so completely, hopes that the auction would allow for the creation of a new nationwide wireless service provider were dashed." W. David Gardner, Verizon, AT&T Big Winners in 700 MHz Auction, Information Week (March 20, 2008, Link); see also, Saul Hansell, Verizon and AT&T Win Big in Auction of Spectrum, The New York Times (March 21, 2008, Link); FCC, Auction 73, 700 MHz Band, Fact Sheet (Link)

Can anyone refute the conclusion that as incumbent carriers control more spectrum, the prospects for market entry and commensurately greater competition wanes? Regardless whether incumbent carriers warehouse the spectrum, or put it to immediate use, their opportunity to consolidate market control grows. Who would have the financial and management resources to take on the incumbents?

So 4 is the highest number of facilities-based carriers we can expect for many markets. If you think a regional carrier or pre-paid reseller can match the expanding service wingspan from the Big Four, think again.

Written by Rob Frieden, Pioneers Chair and Professor of Telecommunications and Law

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More under: Broadband, Policy & Regulation, White Space, Wireless

There's a scene in the Steven Soderbergh movie, Traffic, where the widow of a drug dealer brings a doll to the Columbian drug kingpin. "The doll is stuffed with cocaine. Big deal, we've been doing that for years," he says dismissively. "No," she answers, "the doll is cocaine." The whole toy is a heat-treated, compression-molded block of cocaine, undetectable to sniffing dogs. The drug lord becomes very interested.

The Internet is like that doll… and not because it's used by some for smuggling drugs! Rather, the Internet is seen as a thing filled with interconnection relationships, when in fact the Internet is interconnection. The relationships make the internetwork. They are more significant than the TCP/IP protocol, the end-to-end design philosophy, the bandwidth, or the routing algorithms, as important as all those things are. Kill interconnection, and a network disappears from the Internet. Kill the culture of interconnection, and the Internet dies. Another analogy is Arthur Koestler's concept of a holon—something that is both a whole and a part of the whole. (Thanks to Miko Matsumura for the pointer at a recent retreat.)

The value of interconnection is often missed, because it's the space between networks. It's much easier to grasp the impacts of those individual networks on their customers. Every piece of the Internet, however, must interconnect to serve its users, which means its internal policies and practices are never the whole story. Interconnection is generally reciprocal, so if you want to benefit from a link with a network, you take on some obligations in return. The details get complicated, and network interconnection is constantly evolving, but that's the core magic.

Today, John Markoff published a New York Times article on how Internet interconnection may be changing. (The short version is that private peering is short-circuiting the major backbones, with unpredictable consequences.) Markoff deserves credit for giving a serious summary of academic network science research that bears on Internet structure. You usually don't see these concepts in the popular press. It matters whether or not the Internet is a scale-free network, however, as esoteric as that may sound. As Markoff notes, even the experts can't agree on what the Internet looks like today, raising serious questions about its performance going forward. They just know that it's changing. One reason is the lack of public traffic data on Internet-connected networks, which KC Claffy of CAIDA has been warning about for years.

I wrote three law review articles about interconnection over the past three years. I didn't realize it, but they form a trilogy. Only Connect argues that interconnection, not non-discrimination, should be the central focus of telecommunications policy today. The Centripetal Network delves into the network science that Markoff's article summarizes, raising the concern that the Internet's interconnectivity may not be as robust as it seems. And in Off the Hook, coming out shortly, I develop a detailed legal theory for an interconnection-based policy regime under the Communications Act.

Interconnection is poised to become even more important, because it's not just a factor at the network layer. Internet applications and content are increasingly becoming interconnected, moving toward the syndication model of business I proposed a decade ago. Twitter interconnects with Google for real-time search, while YouTube interconnects with blogs for content distribution. Everyone's a platform, and virtually everyone is both a consumer and a producer of external information. I'm firmly convinced that the dynamics of interconnection will keep policy-makers and business executives busy for years to come. All the more reason to make it a focal point now.

Written by Kevin Werbach, Professor at the Wharton School and Organizer of the Supernova Conference

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Web

John Yunker co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of The Web Globalization Report Card writes: "The big story this year is that Facebook and Google finished in a numerical tie. But because Google supports more languages (for now), it edged out as the winner. ... Even as we look across all 225 web sites, the number of languages continues to increase. Although the rate of language growth slowed over the past two years—due in large part to the global recession—growth continues. This year, the average number of languages increased to 22, up from 20 languages in 2008."

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More under: Multilinguism, Web

The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling in Office Depot v. Zuccarini [Scribd link], agreeing that a creditor may levy against a domain name in the jurisdiction where the domain name registry is located. The decision is significant for two reasons. First, it affirms (or reaffirms) that domain names are property subject to the claims of creditors. Second, it allows creditors to proceed against domain names where the registry is located, thus allowing creditors to proceed against domain names in one proceeding and more importantly levy against domain names located abroad (where the registry is located in the United States). Overall, this makes getting at a domain name much easier for creditors.

Background: Office Depot originally obtained a judgment against frequent cybersquatting defendant John Zuccarini. Office Depot then assigned the judgment to DS Holdings. Office Depot obtained the judgment in 2000 and it's surprising that 10 years later the judgment is finally being enforced against something. Although Zuccarini is proceeding pro se, it seems like he was or became well versed in putting up roadblocks and delaying resolution of the litigation.

DS went after 190 .com domain names that were registered in Zuccarini's name. DS originally tried unsuccessfully to have the domain names transferred directly to it. (This was the technique successfully used by the plaintiff in Bosh v. Zavala.) Later, DS sought to have a receiver appointed over the domain names. The district court granted DS's request to have the receiver appointed, and Zuccarini appealed. Zuccarini's appeal focused on whether it was proper to appoint the receiver in the Northern District of California, since the domain names were not necessarily "located" there.

The court's ruling: The court runs through basic principles of in rem jurisdiction and what rules apply. The court then looks to federal rules to determine where the receiver should be appointed in this case. Finding no applicable federal rule, the court looks to California law. California law provides that a writ of execution may be issued "in the county where the levy is to be made." With this in the background, the two questions presented by the court are: (1) "are domain names property that is subject to execution?" and (2) "if so, where are the domain names located for purposes of execution?"

With respect to the first question, the court cites to Kremen v. Cohen, and easily concludes that (under California law) "domain names are intangible property subject to a writ of execution." Kremen undermined Network Solutions, Inc. v. Umbro Int'l, Inc., 259 Va. 759, 770 (Va. 2000), a Virginia case widely cited for the proposition that creditors cannot get at domain names because domain names are contract rights rather then property. To the extent Kremen did not refute Umbro, this decision definitely provides the necessary ammunition to creditors. (Again, collection is state-specific, and apart from the analysis of the nature of domain names, the outcome in these cases turns on the statute in question, which vary from state to state. That said, I think given the robust marketplace in domain names, Umbro's conception of the domain name as a personal services agreement seems outdated, and most courts will easily recognize this.)

With respect to the second question, the court acknowledges that "attaching a situs to intangible property is ... a legal fiction," and the determination must be made in a "context-specific" manner. Fairness was relevant to the court's determination of the appropriate situs, and the court was understandably not receptive to Zuccarini's policy arguments that allowing a court to issue an order directed to the registry would mean that every .com and .net domain name could be levied through courts in the Northern District of California. The court also looked to the ACPA, which provides for in rem jurisdiction over certain cases where the "registrar, registry, or other domain name authority" is located. Although this was not an ACPA case, the court found the structure set up by the statute persuasive and that the writ was appropriately issued from Northern District of California since VeriSign (the registry for .com domains) is located there.

My reaction: The decision clears up two things. Although post Kremen v. Cohen there shouldn't have been much dispute that domain names are property which are subject to the claims of creditors, the case clears up any lingering doubt that may have existed. (Kremen and this case applied California law, but the result shouldn't vary much across other states.) Second, the decision makes clear that a court which has jurisdiction over the registry can issue an order allowing the creditor to get at the domain names. The case also implicitly affirms that getting a receiver appointed to sell the domain names is the appropriate route for the creditor. Getting the name transferred to the creditor is not a remedy allowed under California law (Palacio Del Mar Homeowners Ass'n, Inc. v. McMahon). Additionally, a transfer of domain names from a cybersquatter to a judgment creditor raises some issues around potential infringement of third party rights through sales or other exploitation of the domain names. (See this post on Bosh v. Zavala for some discussion of those issues.) The method ultimately used by DS in this case (a receiver) avoids all of these issues, or at least shifts them over to the receiver rather than the creditor.

Finally, as mentioned above, this ruling makes clear that regardless of whether a domain name is registered through a foreign registrar, a court having jurisdiction over the registry can issue an order directing transfer of the domain names to a receiver. With respect to .com and .net domain names, this means that creditors can try to get at these domain names through proceeding in the Northern District of California (as the court notes, VeriSign is the registry for .com and .net domain names and is headquartered in Mountain View). While the ACPA allows plaintiffs to file in rem suits where the registry is located, it's nice (for creditors) to have a similar ruling in the post-judgment context, and one from the Ninth Circuit as well.

Will this cause a rush of similar claims to be filed in the Northern District of California? It's tough to say, but even post Kremen, it does not seem like there's been a ton of post-judgment collections activity with respect to domain names. From a practitioner's standpoint, it's certainly nice to have this rule on the books.

An odd footnote: Zuccarini is a colorful character whose internet exploits have gotten him in trouble with the law. He was arrested in 2003. (Here's a post at CircleID rounding up reactions to his arrest.) According to his Wikipedia entry which contains a link to a Bureau of Prisons search, he was released in 2005.

Written by Venkat Balasubramani, Tech-Internet Lawyer at Focal PLLC

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More under: Domain Names, Domain Registries, ICANN, Law, Top-Level Domains

The highest court in Germany has ruled against telephone and email data retention used to track criminal networks. Melissa Eddy of the Global and Mail reports: "A law ordering data on calls made from mobile or landline telephones and e-mail exchanges be retained for six months for possible use by criminal authorities violated Germans' constitutional right to private correspondence, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled. In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security."

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More under: Data Center, Email, Law, Policy & Regulation, Privacy, Security, Telecom

Cloud Computing is a hot topic. Some say it is already here, most agree that it will be much bigger in the coming years. It is pushed forward by the economic benefits of virtualization and consolidation. Take a heterogeneous data center, full of many kinds of servers, running a myriad of applications and consolidate it into a uniform farm of virtual machines, where each application is services by one or more VMs and you have a cloud, what is called a private cloud. I can see many companies turning to this model to better utilize their computing resources and lower their IT management expenses. Taking the next step and trusting these functions to an external provider—what we call the public cloud—may come at a later time.

Cloud environment provides compute power and storage. For web applications it also provides bandwidth allocation, both inside the data center and towards the end customers. Virtual servers are prone to performance degradation just like physical servers are, and when the load goes up, user experience goes down. An application Delivery Controller (ADC) can be very useful in such an environment bringing several benefits—It can offload the servers by handling TCP connections, compression and encryption, and it can save bandwidth by compressing the content that is sent to the end customers. The load on the servers and on the internal network can be further reduced by utilizing the caching mechanism in the ADC.

A Cloud Provider needs to support many applications at once. For a private cloud it could be several dozen enterprise applications, and for a public cloud it could mean thousands of web applications that are hosted in the data center. To add ADC capabilities for all these applications, he now has two choices: place an ADC device before each and every application (or at least those that would benefit from it), which can be a CAPEX and OPEX nightmare, or place just a few ADC devices and aggregate many applications on each, hoping that they all live happily together and don't disrupt each other by hogging ADC resources.

One way to tackle this problem is to have a virtual software ADC, running on a VM. This way there can be hundreds or even thousands of virtual ADCs, each serving one application and running under the same Hypervisor as the rest of the data center. I can spot three problems with this approach: one is that the performance of a software ADC is limited and un-predictable, the other is the challenge of managing hundreds and thousands of different instances and the third is the cost associated with running all these extra VMs.

A different approach would be to use a hardware ADC and virtualize it by creating many virtual ADC machines on it. To make it happen one needs to manage its resources in a way that one service does not affect another. There is also a need to afford the cloud provider clients with a way to view and configure their 'Virtual ADC' without knowing or interfering with other clients. Once these technical issues are met, the benefits of such a machine are its superior and predictable performance and its relative ease of management, leading to CAPEX and OPEX saving which are critical for hosting or cloud provider.

An ADC would obviously need to interact with the Hypervisor running the VMs. One direction is mandatory—the ADC needs to know when new VMs are made available so he can add them to his load balancing pool. The other direction is more interesting—when the ADC identifies a breach of SLA on one of the services, it can alert the Hypervisor that more VMs are required. And when the load diminishes, it can instruct the Hypervisor to take down VMs to conserve data center resources.

In summary clouds, both private and public are coming and with them a challenge of managing the load of thousands of web applications. An Application Delivery Controller can greatly help in alleviating these loads but it needs to evolve for this environment. Virtual software ADC and Virtualized hardware ADC are two possible solutions, with the latter probably being more optimized for the task.

Written by Amit Fridman, Vice President Engineering at Crescendo Networks

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More under: Cloud Computing, Data Center

The POPClock tells us that there are 6,807,230,170 of us on this planet when I looked it up at 22:26 UTC (EST+5) Feb 26, 2010. In the meantime we are about to connect the 5 billionth cell phone user this year according to ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona he also mentioned that the current recession hardly put a dent in the subscriber growth. Gartner Research shows 1.2 billion cell phones sold in 2009, down 0.9 from the previous year but a strong growth in smart phones which saw sales of 172.4 million units growing by 23.8 % for the year, 58 % in the fourth quarter only! On the network side a February 26th press release from the GSA association announced that 59 operators in 28 countries are now committed to LTE compared to 39 operators in 19 countries six months ago. A further 16 operators are running technology trials. By the end of 2010 22 LTE networks will have entered commercial service. The first 2 commercial LTE networks were launched last December in Sweden and Norway. And let us not forget Mobile Wimax which is also gaining some momentum.

As Global Insight speculates, we are indeed likely to see the smart phone war starting to get more acrimonious in 2010 as software platforms and manufactures slug it out, hopefully to the benefit of the consumer. Mobile web browsing for the masses should not be that far away as smart phone prices start dropping seriously. On the network side we are likely to witness a titanic battle amongst mobile network operators trying to walk the fine line between the cost of G4 licenses and network upgrades, affordable end-user pricing, growth in market share and EBITDA. The only certainty is a decoupling between the growth in traffic volumes and the growth in revenue.

As markets and technologies evolved so fast it was rather interesting to see the sudden scramble on how to do voice and SMS over LTE. The most basic, and let us admit, most lucrative, services seemed forgotten in the data deluge. Would it be Volga (Voice over LTE with generic access) using existing circuit switched networks or would it be One Voice which is IMS based with real VoIP calls. One Voice now seems to be gaining the upper hand.

IMS implies addressable IP addresses, lots of them, no need to say more.

Time has come for an IPv6 address population clock to complement the IPv4 address exhaustion clock.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy

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More under: IPv6, Mobile

According to recent study conducted by Minds + Machines, historical data analysis suggests brand owners do not necessarily register their brands when it comes to new generic Top-Level Domains. From the report: "A survey of the domain registration behavior of Fortune 100 companies reveals that they have not registered many of their trademarks in recently created generic top-level domains (gTLDs). A sample of 1043 brands were registered in less than 30% of the eight new open gTLDs created after 2001. If historical registration data is a guide, brands are unlikely to undertake many defensive domain name registrations in the proposed new gTLDs, and furthermore are unlikely to be the victims of cybersquatting."

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More under: Cybersquatting, Domain Names, Top-Level Domains

Permission is always a hot topic in email marketing. Permission is key! the experts tell us. Get permission to send email! the ISPs tell us.

Marketers have responded by setting up processes to "get" permission from recipients before adding them to mailing lists. They point to their privacy polices and signup forms and say "Look! the recipient gave us permission."

In many cases, though, the permission isn't given to the sender, permission is taken from the recipient.

Yes, permission is being TAKEN by the sender. At the point of address collection many senders set the default to be the recipient gets mail. These processes take any notion of giving permission out of the equation. The recipient doesn't have to give permission, permission is assumed.

This isn't real permission. No process that requires the user to take action to stop themselves from being opted in is real permission. A default state of yes takes the actual opt-in step away from the recipient.

Permission just isn't about saying "well, we told the user if they gave us an email address we'd send them mail and they gave us an email address anyway." Permission is about giving the recipients a choice in what they want to receive. All too often senders take permission from recipients instead of asking for permission to be given.

Written by Laura Atkins, Founding partner of anti-spam consultancy & software firm Word to the Wise

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More under: Privacy, Spam

Loic Damilaville writes to report:

CENTR is the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries, gathering more than 50 registries such as DENIC for Germany (.de), Nominet for the United Kingdom (.uk) or Switch for Switzerland (.ch).

The election took place during CENTR's General Assembly held in Warsaw on February 25 and 26.

Mathieu Weill, AFNIC's CEO, replaces Andrzej Bartosiewicz, from the Polish registry, NASK, whose term was coming to an end. The other CENTR Board members are:

- Sabine Dolderer, DENIC (.de)

- Alberto Pérez Gomez, Red.es (.es)

- Annebeth Lange (.no)

- Juhani Juselius (.fi), Treasurer

Mathieu Weill declared: "CENTR is a platform for exchange of information and best practices among members, but it is also a lively community, working in the public's interest. I will work both to enhance services provided by CENTR to its members and to raise our industry's profile".

Mathieu Weill joined AFNIC in 2005 after serving the French Ministry of Industry and Telecoms in various positions.

http://www.afnic.fr/data/divers/public/cv-mathieu-weill-dg-afnic.pdf

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More under: Domain Registries, Top-Level Domains