ICANN

NTIA issues statement on JPA mid-term review

NTIAThe United States Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has issued a statement following the mid-term review of its Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
The essence of the statement, in keeping with ISOC’s own position, – ‘Steady as she goes. More work to be done.’ Continue reading

ISOC New Delhi minutes posted

ISOC logo The Internet Society has posted the minutes from two meetings held during the recent ICANN event in New Delhi. At the first, the theme was ISOC involvement in ICANN. Topics included chapter involvement in constituencies, the midterm JPA review, and a possible At-Large summit in Paris.. At the second, chapters discussed ISOC’s membership structure and their involvement with OneWebDay, the IGF, and the proposed Internet Bill of Rights. Continue reading

ICANN announces June Paris meeting

icann logoICANN’s 32nd International Public Meeting will be held 22 – 27 June 2008 in Paris, France. The meeting is free to attend, and open to any interested person. ICANN encourages broad participation in its bottom-up consensus-development processes. You can participate in these meetings in person, through the webcast or other remote participation opportunities, and/or by joining one of the various ICANN-related mailing lists. Continue reading

ISOC position on the ICANN Joint Project

ISOC logoAs noted earlier, The Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the United States government and ICANN will have a mid-term review in March. As part of this review, the US government put out a Notice of Inquiry asking for comments on the continued transition to the private sector.

ISOC has issued a draft statement that recommends, contrary to ICANN’s desire to complete the process forthwith, that the agreement be allowed to run its full course. Continue reading

Will there really be a new Russian Internet?

There have been some reports in the past few days about possible “division” of the Internet in Russia, tied in with speculation that the forthcoming Cyrillic domain names will be used to grant the Russian government more control over its citizens. The source of this speculation appears to be an article published in UK newspaper The Guardian. That article was then reproduced in a number of Russian news articles, most of them quoting a direct translation published by SecurityLab.

There was another article, also published by several Russian sources and based on a press-conference given by the Russian country-code top-level domain administration (.ru ccTLDA). Right now ICANN is running tests on TLDs, including one in Russian – http://пример.испытание – and the article made clear that the desire of the Russian Internet community would be, if the tests are successful, to have a new IDN – .РФ (from Russian Federation, in Cyrillic).

Continue reading

IPv6 finally coming to root DNS servers

The current IPv4 protocol used on the Internet is running out of the addresses needed to accommodate the growing number of users online.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the organization responsible for giving out IP addresses in North America, says that 19 percent of the IPv4 addresses are still available, while 68 percent have been allocated and 13 percent are “unavailable,” whatever that could mean. There are 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, or 2^32. IPv6 has 2^128 addresses, or 16 billion-billion.

There have been efforts to get more mileage out of IPv4 by using tricks like conversions to IPv6 or using duplicate IPv4 addresses within a firewall. This has helped extend the lifespan of IPv4 but it only prolonged the inevitable.

Until now the biggest obstacle to IPv6 has been the fact that IPv6 address information is not included in most of the root DNS servers that power the Internet. DNS (Domain Name Service) is the Internet service that translates domain names such www.example.com into the numeric IP (Internet Protocol) addresses such as 198.105.232.4 that are actually used to connect computers on the Internet.

Starting on February 4th, at least one of those adoption barriers will be addressed as records for IPv6 addresses are added to four of the key root DNS servers. The inclusion of the IPv6 records could make the adoption and operation of IPv6 a more viable option for network operators.