Governments around the world have lodged complaints about a wide variety of proposals for new top-level Internet domains. Australia is the biggest complainer and has issues with proposed domains including "gripe," "fail" and "sucks": It says they are too negative.
After a lawsuit spurred a cadre of volunteers to cede management duties of Internet Time Zone Database, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has assumed control of the master list, which is used to coordinate time across different systems on the internet.
Small botnets available for hire for as little as US$ 10 per hour pose a security threat to the Internet, says ICANN's (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Security and Stability Advisory committee (SSAC). Ram Mohan , a member of SSAC made the comments on Friday at a session titled "Mitigating Domain Name System Cyberattacks" during the ongoing Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Nairobi. The sixth IGF, which comes to a closed its doors on Friday last week had been ongoing since Monday.
The age of .com has been put on notice. After years of wrangling, internet governing body ICANN has finally approved a dramatic expansion of top-level domain suffixes from the current 22.
Former InternetNZ president Keith Davidson has been appointed as a councillor on the ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) ccNSO Council (the Country Code Names Supporting Organisation).
According to a media release from InternentNZ announcing the appointment, "Keith’s new role is as one of the two people representing the country code top level domains (like .nz) in the Asia Pacific region."
The statement reads: InternetNZ chief executive Vikram Kumar says Keith's appointment to the ccNSO underscores InternetNZ's sphere of influence globally and continues the trend of New Zealanders succeeding in international internet governance roles.
"Global relationships are a key part of our work and a significant effort we undertake on behalf of the New Zealand internet community. Ensuring that the right New Zealanders are engaging with the right international people is essential for delivering on our vision of an open and uncaptureable internet.
"Keith is an incredibly successful advocate for InternetNZ and New Zealand. We are delighted with his appointment to the ccNSO. His appointment is another example of the respect that Kiwis are earning for their contribution to various international organisations responsible for the Internet globally."
Davidson was executive director of InternetNZ from 2005 until 2009 and president from 2001 until 2005. He is also chair of the Asia-Pacific Top Level Domain Association, and will continue in that role as a ccNSO Council couuncillor.
Law enforcement officials in the U.K. and U.S. are pushing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to put in place measures that would help reduce abuse of the domain name system.
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) on Tuesday condemned the practice of redirecting Internet users to a third-party Web site or portal when they misspell a Web address and type a domain name that does not exist.
The internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every website, email address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.
One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters.
That could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.
"This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference's final day.
The internet's roots are traced to experiments at a US university in 1969 but it wasn't until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the public.
Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.
Enabling the change, Thrush said, is the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address.
"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."
Of the 1.6 billion internet users worldwide, Beckstrom — a former chief of US cybersecurity — said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.
"So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the internet continues to spread," he said.
Beckstrom, in earlier remarks to conference participants, recalled that many people had said just three to five years ago that using non-Latin scripts for domain names would be impossible to achieve.
"But you the community and the policy groups and staff and board have worked through them, which is absolutely incredible," he said.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has reached a new agreement with the US Department of Commerce allowing the nonprofit greater independence, while giving more countries oversight of the organisation.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is hosting two meetings this week -- one in New York City and the other in London -- to discuss the trademark and cybersecurity issues surrounding its plan to introduce hundreds of new top-level domains into the Internet.
The chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers says the Australian government will “embarrass itself” if it pushes ahead with plans to install a national Internet content filter.
Several US lawmakers and an executive with the world's largest domain-name registrar called on the US government to maintain oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) after a major agreement between two expires in September.
Peter Dengate Thrush will chair the Telecommunications Carriers' Forum’s working party on IP interconnection.
New Zealand MPs united in an informal non-partisan caucus last week were among the first to hear from the new Kiwi chairman of global internet body ICANN, Peter Dengate Thrush.
New Zealand lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush was elected chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and numbers (ICANN), the body that regulates the technical structure of the internet, today.