ICANN Negotiates New Domains
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Internet users may soon see two new domain name suffixes in their browser window: &quot;.post&quot; to identify the postal community and &quot;.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) met in Sao Paolo this week and made progress on a project to expand domain names to more languages and alphabets. ICANN had a "very, very busy and very productive week," ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf said during a press conference he led Friday with Chief Executive Officer and President Paul Twomey. The group made progress on technical issues related to Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). The IDN project is meant to revamp the DNS (Domain Name System) so that it supports domain names from different languages and alphabets, such as Arabic and Chinese, that can't be rendered in the ASCII character set. The nonprofit group that oversees Internet governance also signed what its officials call a "historic agreement" with 22 Internet user groups in Latin America and Caribbean. The Latin America-Caribbean Regional At-Large Organization, or RALO, has the goal of providing individual user input to ICANN. This is the first RALO agreement ICANN has reached. ICANN further announced that it approved registry agreements for the .biz, .info and .org domains, with a restriction that traffic data cannot be used to disclose domain name registrant, end-user information or other personal data. Traffic data can be used to determine problems with the Internet, including points of failure, attacks on networks, compromised networks and the like. The agreements also put a 10 percent cap on price increases charged by registry operators. ICANN members also agreed to a three-year strategic plan that calls for a focus on "organizational excellence" in operations and policy development, as well as an increase in international participation. Top priorities for action in the plan include improvement and automation of the ICANN-controlled Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA), which manages master domain lists; deployment of the IDNs as top-level domains; and implementing best practices for "accountability, transparency and governance." Also at the meeting, ICANN signed a contract with DotAsia Organisation Ltd., in Hong Kong, to establish a .asia top-level domain. Companies and organizations in Asia looking beyond their local markets, as well as multinationals with subsidiaries that are based in one country but serve all of Asia, would benefit from the regional domain name, the company said. Working with ICANN, DotAsia plans to gradually introduce IDN services in the future. The text of resolutions adopted in Sao Paulo, along with IDN laboratory testing design plans, agreements and matters for which ICANN is seeking public comment can be found at the ICANN Web site.
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Participants made good progress discussing changes to Internet governance during an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting in Puerto Rico that closed on Friday, leaders of the organization said.
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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.
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Despite complaints of secrecy and biased decision making leveled against the organization that handles domain name policies, the U.S. Commerce Department says ICANN works and renews its oversight agreement.
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ICANN has begun commercial and technical negotiations with the applicant registries, bringing the number of domains in this second stage of evaluations to four. The other two are the .post and .travel domains.
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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.
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(InfoWorld) - The European Commission welcomed moves in the U.S. to free ICANN, the Internet domain name manager, from its historic ties to the U.S. government on Monday. The U.S. Commerce Department willÂ retain its oversight of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for three more years under a new agreement that took effect at the beginning of this month. The new agreement grants ICANN more freedom from U.S. government involvement, but stops short of full privatization, which many in the Internet industry want. European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said the Commerce Department had given "clear indications that this three year agreement between ICANN and the U.S. government would be the last." "This is good news. Last year there were doubts about whether the U.S. would privatize ICANN," Selmayr said. The new agreement, which runs until 2009, is subject to a review in 18 months. If in the review the Commerce Department concludes that ICANN is stable, transparent, and accountable enough, it could decide to grant the nonprofit organization full autonomy immediately, the Commerce Department said in a statement Friday. In addition to promising full autonomy, the U.S. government has shaped the new three-year agreement to help pave the way towards independence. From now on ICANN will determine how it works and what it works on, ICANN said. It will no longer have to submit half-yearly progress reports to the Commerce Department. Instead it will publish an annual progress report on the internet for everyone to see. Many observers argue that U.S. government involvement in ICANN is slowing the international development of the Internet down and should pull out without delay. Others warn that ICANN isn't ready to fend for itself. They believe the organization hasn't yet proven that it can handle the entire task of domain name management alone, and if the government withdraws now this could compromise security and stability of the internet. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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(InfoWorld) - A contract for VeriSign Â to operate the .com domain should include infrastructure build-out requirements and make the company justify built-in prices increases, a lawyer for the GoDaddy.com registrar said Wednesday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internetâs technical infrastructure, has not put enough checks in place in a proposed extension of VeriSign's .com contract, said Christine Jones, general counsel for GoDaddy, during a hearing before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. A presumption from ICANN that the .com contract will be renewed when it expires in November 2007 gives VeriSign a "monopoly" on operating the largest generic top-level domain, Jones said. "It's incredible to us that ICANN did not include an infrastructure investment requirement in the proposed .com agreement," she said. "In negotiating that agreement, VeriSign ensured that their revenue would increase, and ICANN ensured that their budget would benefit, but who's going to ensure the benefits of the public interest?" The proposed agreement allows VeriSign to increase wholesale site registration fees by 7 percent in four of the contract's six years. More oversight on pricing is needed, Jones said. "Other legitimate monopolies ... must justify their price increases, and VeriSign, the monopoly provider, should be required to do the same," she said. But VeriSign already spends significant money improving its Internet infrastructure every year, said Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer. The ICANN presumption that it will renew the .com contract encourages VeriSign to continue investing in infrastructure, instead of waiting until it knows it has a new contract, he said. The .com domain has never crashed in the last seven years, but price increases may be necessary as attacks against Internet domains become more complex, Silva added. "We're not talking about commodity hardware here," Silva said. "There's no automatic price increase. What there is, is a possibility of a price increase, based on the security and stability needs we have at the time." ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Twomey also defended the contract, saying his organization is fostering competition in other ways such as creating more top-level domains. There are also nearly 800 site registrars competing for business, he said. But Senator Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, questioned the .com contract. "The question a lot of people are asking is, what's wrong with bidding out .com?" he said. "Why not let VeriSign win it, if they can, with a competitive bid?" Senators also asked whether the U.S. Department of Commerce should renew its memorandum of understanding with ICANN for the organization to continue oversight of the Internet's technical infrastructure. The memorandum expires at the end of this month. GoDaddy's Jones criticized ICANN for too often conducting business, including the proposed .com agreement, "behind closed doors." She called on Congress to require ICANN to create a plan to increase the Internet community's confidence in it. Even though ICANN needs to improve its transparency and accountability to the Internet community, the memorandum should be extended, said John Kneuer, acting assistant secretary for communications and information at the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. ICANN is taking steps to improve support from its constituencies, he said.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is seeking ideas and opinions on ways to modify the agreement terms it enters into with Internet registrars to protect individuals and organizations that do business with them. The effort stems from theÂ recent debacle involving registrar RegisterFly, which ICANN had to strip of its accreditation due to poor quality of service, which prompted massive and loud complaints from many of its tens of thousands of customers. At its 29th International Public Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, ICANN on Monday hosted a workshop to discuss possible changes to its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and steps it is taking to make sure registrars provide good service to their customers. Participants in the workshop, titled "Protection of Registrants," generally agreed that the RAA is due for a makeover to prevent another RegisterFly-like situation and because much has changed since the RAA was last amended about seven years ago. "We need to deal with registrar accreditation and the procedures by which we accommodate registrants," said Susan Crawford, an ICANN board member who moderated the discussion. Among the issues panelists and audience members debated was the need for Internet registrars -- companies ICANN accredits to sell Internet domain names to individuals and organizations -- to escrow their customers' data with ICANN or another third party. That way, in the event of a registrar meltdown, ICANN, which manages and oversees the Internet's domain name system, could access the customer data and help customers switch to another registrar. "This is important to registrants. We want to be able to reconstitute a registrar if it fails so that registrants can continue to have access to their domains and be able to work with them," Crawford said. Ironically, in its current form, the RAA has a data escrow provision but it hasn't been implemented for several reasons. "It put a burden on ICANN to receive data, so the cost was all on ICANN. And until recently, there wasn't a budget item for the registered data escrow program," Crawford said. Details on how this escrow will work need to be established, such as what will constitute a valid trigger for the data release and what data will be stored. Jon Nevett, policy and ethics vice president of Internet registrar Network Solutions, said that ICANN's Registrar Constituency, which he chairs, has worked in recent months on the data escrow program with ICANN, which recently requested proposals to provide escrow services. A key point for registrars is how ICANN will protect their customers' data if it needs to be transferred, Nevett said. "There is a lot of private information in this data," he said. One of the issues ICANN is trying to work through is what data would be put in escrow. Under the current RAA provisions that data includes: registrant, administrative contact, technical contact, billing contact, name servers and expiration dates. "When the provision was drafted, these were the elements that were believed to be critically necessary to restore the functionality of a registrar," said Mike Zupke, ICANN's Registrar Liaison Manager. Changing the data requirements would require amending the RAA, he said. This issue is an interesting one, considering individuals' privacy concerns when registering a domain name, concerns that have prompted the appearance of "proxy" services that let registrants "hide" from the public some of the information they submit to a registrar, Crawford said. Nevett argued that providing data to an escrow party that the registrant wants to keep from public view doesn't compromise privacy, because the escrow data wouldn't be publicly available. Meanwhile, Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports Webwatch, suggested that ICANN provide more information about registrars, including ratings, so that consumers can make better informed decisions when choosing one. There are about 900 registrars currently, according to ICANN. "Measures that increase compliance are good," Brendler said, adding that ICANN might consider setting up a system to rate registrars and hold registrars to best practices guidelines. Stacy Burnette, ICANN's director of contractual compliance, said that starting next month her team will publish a report twice a year with results from their registrar audits. Citing preliminary results, Burnette said that in March her team found that of 881 audited registrars, 19 had non-working Web sites, and that in April, 192 registrars had invoices that were overdue by 30 days or more. Based on these findings, her group is seeking compliance from the offending registrars. Her group is also currently doing a "code of conduct audit" to ensure that registrars are not engaging in conduct that would give "the appearance of impropriety," she said. Meanwhile, a future audit will focus on registrars' back-end systems performance, checking on issues like availability, downtime and outages, to see if they are meeting standards set in their agreements with ICANN. Moreover, an ongoing audit is focusing on registrar data retention requirements, while a future audit will verify whether registrars are maintaining the required commercial liability insurance levels, she said. "We want to encourage compliance to enhance ICANN's ability to preserve and enhance the operational stability, reliability, security and global interoperability of the Internet," Burnette said.
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The search for the next operator of "dot-net" -- the  world's fourth largest Internet domain -- is officially underway, as  bidders from  around the world had until late last night to submit their applications  to the group that oversees the Internet's global addressing system.
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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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ICANN is considering keeping the annual fee it charges registries for a registered domain name, even if the domain name is forfeited during the grace period.
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ICANN officially retires the .yu domain and assigns .rs to Serbia and .me to Montenegro. In this case the delay was political, not technical.
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ICANN, the body responsible for the internetâs domain naming system, has convinced a court to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit filed against it by domain registry VeriSign over its interference with the launch of VeriSign&#39;s Site Finder service.
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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
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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.