VeriSign, critics gear up for ICANN hearing
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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.
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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;VeriSign&#39;s contentions are deficient,&quot; Judge Howard Matz wrote in the 16-page decision setting aside the antitrust claims against ICANN.
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Website head said he expects contributors claiming certain credentials will soon have to prove their identity.
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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, 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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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.
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(Source: Verisign)  Protect your site with SSL from VeriSign to ensure your company and customers are secure. Learn how to get the strongest SSL encryption and increase customer confidence with Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates, which trigger the green address bar in high security browsers, allowing your customers to feel safe online.
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Justices are expected to hear arguments Tuesday in a case that could have broad implications for the tech industry.
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Company weighs idea after thousands of users vote for it online.
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is meeting this week to address critical issues like new generic top level domains, internationalized domain names, and other subjects.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened a week-long meeting on Monday where it will address critical issues like new generic top level domains, internationalized domain names and the organization's efforts to become more accountable and transparent. The international public meeting, the second of three of its kind ICANN has planned for this year, will also include discussions about a major expansion of available Internet Protocol addresses, as well as about the process for accrediting registrars. Taking advantage of the meeting's venue in San Juan, Puerto Rico , the agenda also includes the first General Assembly of the Latin American and Caribbean Regional At Large Organization, formed in March. "We're very pleased to be in Puerto Rico," said Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and CEO, during a press conference at the Caribe Hilton hotel, adding that the meeting's agenda is full of significant issues and efforts. ICANN oversees the Internet's address system and as such carries the critical responsibility of ensuring the overall security and stability of the Internet. A key effort ICANN is involved with is improving the transparency of its operations and the accountability of its decisions, areas critics regularly complain about. "We must ensure we're in the leading edge of transparency and accountability," Twomey said. ICANN commissioned an independent study about its transparency and accountability in December from London's One World Trust, which reported its findings in March. It concluded that ICANN is a very transparent organization but that it can improve certain areas, including explaining better how it uses input from stakeholders when making decisions. ICANN has been taking steps to address these issues and, earlier this month, issued a response to the report. On Saturday, ICANN released for discussion at the San Juan meeting online a set of draft principles and frameworks for accountability . ICANN wants to improve making it easier for people to find the vast amount of information on its Web site, Twomey said. ICANN also wants to be faster in posting information online about its meetings and initiatives, he said. However, the transparency and accountability issue will likely remain on the table until ICANN removes its special ties to the U.S. government. Since its creation in 1998 to progressively absorb Internet management functions until then handled fully by the U.S. government, ICANN has been criticized for lacking transparency in its decision-making process and for responding disproportionately to U.S. interests. In September, the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. Commerce Department and ICANN was renewed for three additional years, a disappointment for those who had hoped for ICANN's full autonomy. Also in this week's agenda is the Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) initiative, which aims to revamp the DNS (domain name system) so that it can support domain names in a broad range of languages and alphabets that can't be represented via the ASCII character set. "You'd think this would be simple. It has turned out to be really hard, technically," said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman. Another initiative on deck for discussion is the drafting of a policy to introduce new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to add to the well-known ones like .com and .net. Like the IDN effort, this gTLD project has run into technical challenges. The meeting will also feature a tutorial on the IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) effort to expand significantly the amount of IP addresses, because of the expected shortage under the current IPv4, Cerf said. The San Juan meeting, ICANN's 29th International Public Meeting, ends Friday and will feature more than 30 sessions and workshops.
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Net overseer moves toward approving industry-specific .post, .travel.
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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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New York-based Internet service provider Panix is working to recover from an apparent domain-name hijacking.
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(InfoWorld) - VeriSign plans to invest $100 million over three years to expand tenfold the DNS (domain name system) infrastructure it operates for the .com and .net top-level domains. The DNS is a multitier system that translates the names given to Internet hosts, such as www.infoworld.com, into numerical addresses. The part VeriSign plans to expand, the top tier, indicates where to find answers for addresses in the .com and .net domains. If it fails, or slows, many Internet services break or falter. This happened on Tuesday, whenÂ attackers disruptedÂ the operations of root DNS servers operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. Department of Defense. "We're going to make that kind of attack harder against our services," said Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer, on Thursday. Although VeriSign's investment will make the DNS more resistant to such attacks, "This isn't just about the attacks, this is about keeping ahead of the pace of network growth," he added. Services such as Internet telephony or video delivery rely heavily on the DNS infrastructure, and are more susceptible to variations in its performance than applications such as Web browsing. An additional 40 millisecond delay in providing an address might not be noticeable to Web surfers, but it can have a big effect on VOIP (voice over Internet Protcol) operators, Silva said. Through a project known as Titan, VeriSign will reinforce its DNS infrastructure in two ways. The first will be to increase server and bandwidth capacity tenfold at around 20 existing sites, taking bandwidth from 20GbpsÂ to over 200Gbps. The changes will allow VeriSign to respond to over 4 trillion DNS queries a day, from 400 billion today. VeriSign will also expand the number of sites where it operates DNS servers to around 100, Silva said. Those extra sites will bring the DNS closer to regional network operators in countries such as Ireland, one of the trial sites for VeriSign's new infrastructure. There, it has peered with many of the local network operators, so the DNS requests of Irish Internet users don't have to travel halfway across Europe to be resolved: they are dealt with on the spot. VeriSign already operates regional sites in Brazil, China, Egypt, Kenya and South Korea, and plans to open sites in Chile, Germany, India and South Africa, among others. In addition to improving performance, these changes will make the system more secure by restricting the effects of attacks such as the one seen Tuesday to a smaller geographic area, Silva said. VeriSign expects the number of attacks launched over the Internet to increase in size and scope by 50 percent a year over the next two years. Even without an increase in the number of attacks, VeriSign faces a significant challenge in keeping all its DNS servers up to date and in step with one another. Much of the theoretical work on that was begun in another project, Atlas, in 2002, Silva said. "It has gotten to the point where we can now go for scalability," he added. VeriSign has developed new "zone push" techniques to distribute database changes, and will use a VPN (virtual private network) and dedicated data connections to ensure server updates are not disrupted, Silva said. Stratton Sclavos, VeriSign's CEO, is due to provide more details on the company's Titan project in a keynote address at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco at 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. Â
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InfoWorld - VeriSign, a vendor of cybersecurity products and operator of the .com and .net top-level domains, has replaced CEO Stratton Sclavos with a member of its board of directors.