Items tagged with ICANN
The United States government has crossed off one item on its endless to-do list. On Saturday the government ceded its oversight responsibilities of the internet to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a global non-profit organization. ICANN will now have control over the internet’s “root zone” where new online domains and addresses are born. The United States government contract with ICANN expired after nearly twenty years. The expiration is part of the government’s plan to “privatize” the internet. Stephen Crocker, ICANN's board chairman, remarked, “This transition was envisioned 18 years ago, yet it was the tireless work of the global internet community, which drafted...
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ICANN, a non-profit organization that is responsible for looking after the names and domains of the Internet, announced that it has suffered a serious phishing attack that compromised its data. An investigation is underway, but ICANN believes that it was the victim of a “spear phishing” attack that was first initiated last month. Fake email messages that appeared to come from the company’s own domain had been sent to employees. As a result of the attack, the email credentials of several ICANN staff members were compromised. In addition, ICANN stated that its Centralized Zone Data System, which includes personal user detail information such as names and addresses, was compromised...
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Ownership of the Internet is about to undergo a massive change, as the U.S. is planning to cede sole control of Internet governance to the global private sector. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it will fulfill the mandate outlined back in the late 1990s that the agency would eventually phase out its administrative role over the DNS (Domain Name Server) and its interest in ICANN and place it in the hands of “global stakeholders”. “The timing is right to start the transition process,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Lawrence E. Strickling in a...
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It didn't take long after NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed his employer's nefarious deeds for other nations to begin reevaluating how they go about working with the US. As a side-effect, some now wonder if the US has a little too much influence on certain matters that affect the entire world, such as with the overseeing of the basic design of the Internet. ICANN is the "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers", and its responsibilities include assigning new top-level domains (.com, .eu, .co.uk, et cetera), managing DNS at its root, assigning IP addresses, and more. Simply put, ICANN has quite a bit of control over the Internet, and as the agency is based in the US and supposedly...
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As the Internet evolves, so too has the domain name. For years, everything was a .com, .net, .org, .edu, and so on, but now the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has enabled a greater variety of top-level domains (TLDs). Amazon, which has been accused of hoarding the new TLDs, was obviously hoping to snag .amazon, but it won’t be so; according to the New York Times, a group of Latin American countries including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay has succeeded in persuading ICANN to keep CEO Jeff Bezos’ (pictured) juggernaut of a company to use the suffix. The actual Amazon (credit: New York Times) The group made its case by effectively saying that...
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Oh no! Sound the alarm! Alert the neighbors! The sky is falling! Or is it? We've heard before that the Internet may eventually run out of bandwidth and/or IP addresses, but none of those horror stories ever came to light. But now, another End of the World scenario is presenting itself: the world could soon run out of Internet addresses, despite the fact that ICANN just recently enabled the use of non-Latin domain names. That's according to Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of ICANN, who is worried that the explosion of connected devices could eat up the 8% or 9% of remaining IPV4 addresses, and that if companies didn't switch over to IPV6 soon, we could all be in a big mess when that wall is hit....
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Talk about Google Translate gaining a whole new level of importance. The Internet as we know has officially changed today. For well over a decade, every single URL registered through ICANN has used Latin numbers, letters and characters. Even foreign language sites have been forced to use characters found on a typical Western/U.S. keyboard in the URL. But in October of last year, ICANN (the Internet regulator over URL name registrations) decided that the barrier should be torn down, and non-Latin characters should be allowed in URL names. This week, the world's first domain name using all non-Latin characters went live, and it's an Arabic URL that is getting loads of clicks simply for being "first."...
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The domination of the Latin alphabet on the Internet is expected to come to an end this week.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is meeting this week in Seoul, South Korea, and is all but sure to approve international domain names - i.e., domain names that can be written in alphabets other than the one English uses. ICANN is the "not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world ... [that] develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers." In other words, it's the closest thing the lawless Internet has to a governing body. Formed in 1998, ICANN coordinates the creation of ISPs and domains so that people can actually find what they're...
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