Month: July 2002

This interesting notice sent by Verisign to a “valued customer” who wants to leave made it to Declan McCullagh’s politech list and to a variety of other mailing lists. Just in time to provide even more illustration to Bret Fausett’s excellent essay: If I Were Stratton Sclavos.

George Kirikos has sent a pointer to a report about the OECD’s activities with respect to WHOIS accuracy: The organization’s secretary-general has sent a letter to Stuart Lynn (and a copy to the GAC’s chair). In that letter, the OECD points ICANN to Ben Edelman’s study of invalid WHOIS entries, and to its own experience with losing ocde.org. ICANN is urged to require the registrars in question, in particular NameScout, to cease sponsoring patently false registrations which they maintain.

In the subsequent discussion on the GA list, Rick Wesson pointed out that [i]t is a completely valid reaction to use inaccurate information in a whois entry to avoid spam/uce and other marketing liturature, I get at lease on peace of junk mail per day sent to addresses listed in a whois database. In a different branch of the discussion, Karl Auerbach suggested that [t]he interests of a few trademark owners is hardly a reason to use a system – DNS whois – that is highly susceptable to false or erroneous data and, when accurate, is a major violation of privacy. In response to this, George Kirikos suggested a “Legal Contact” role (which could be the ISP, Technical Contact, the Registrant, or someone else the Registrant chooses to use) who is held legally responsible for problems originating from a domain, with accurate info that IS in the WHOIS for that contact? I think that’s all people ultimately need to reach, someone who is responsible.

Allan Liska, in response, suggested to just use the domain’s technical contact field for this function. In a follow-up to this message, George Kirikos suggests DMCA-like safe harbour provisions for the person taking this role.

The presentations from ISOC.lu’s July 4 conference are available in PowerPoint format: Vint Cerf, Latif Ladid.

Yesterday, I attended ISOC.LU‘s afternoon event with Vint Cerf. Actually, Vint was the second speaker: First, Latif Ladid gave a highly entertaining advocacy talk on the need for a transition to IPv6. One of the key points of that talk was the emphasis on an open, end-to-end Internet, as opposed to today’s online world with with dynamic IP addresses, NAT, and similar evils. Vint’s talk (the first part of which was not “corrupted” by Powerpoint slides 😉 began with a short run-down of the Internet’s history, starting in the early ARPANET days. Besides lots of nice anecdotes, his key point was once again openness: Keep the standards open, keep the uses open. Since this was an event organized by ISOC, he also elaborated on the things ISOC chapters could do. In particular, Vint mentioned policy development for the Internet, given that many governments and legislatures are currently making policy for an Internet they may not understand. ICANN and today’s hard policy issues were only touched, though – they did not play a key role in either the talks, or the subsequent panel discussion.

Notes on the other event of the day, the Domain Name summit in Paris, can be found in Robert Shaw’s blog.

It seems like July 4 is packed with Internet-related events in Europe: In Paris, the first ﾉtats g駭駻aux europ馥ns du nommage Internet will happen, with talks by Alejandro Pisanty and Philip Sheppard. I’m just wondering who’s the Tiers-ﾉtat this time?

Some more material on the Bucharest meetings has become available: The GAC has made its agenda, a Media Communiqué, and its statement on ICANN Reform available. The statement is the communiqué read during the public forum. Still, you should really read the original version: The GAC is, for instance, suggesting a number of subtle, but important changes to ICANN’s proposed mission statement I didn’t catch during the public forum session.

Also, some more archived webcasts are available from the official remote participation page: the press event on Tuesday, and the board meeting wrap-up on Friday. It’s, of course, also all linked from the Bucharest summary page.

I’m continuing to make an attempt at following the Berkman center’s ILAW event, as far as that’s possible through the excellent notes in the Copyfight blog and by Dan Gillmor. Must be a fascinating event.

Yesterday’s session included talks by Lessig on architecture as regulation [exercise for the reader: apply this to whois policy, privacy protection, and the architectural question of thin vs. thick registries], and by Zittrain on ICANN: What brought us to the point where ICANNwatch is a site you might need to watch? One note I found particularly interesting was a dialogue during the final discussion, as reported in the Copyfight blog: Charlie [Nesson] asks JZ [Zittrain]: “Jonathan, you follow Larry [Lessig] and tell story of ICANN. The message is that the effort was all miscast from the beginning. Stuart Lynn says the government must come in. So are you as pessimistic about the Net as Larry?” JZ: “No, definitely not. But I remember that we threw a meeting here, about ICANN membership; we were looking for a good, fair system, as disinterested academics. We had [inaudible] come in, from Common Cause. He said ‘We tried membership; it failed.’ I think the board runs it, now. And this is Common Cause. There’s sort of a lesson in that.”

Today, things focus on the evolution of copyright law in the US.

ISOC.lu has sent out a reminder about their July 4 conference with Vint Cerf. They are at 250 booked attendees, now. The conference will also be webcast, at 14:30 CEST. (The message translates that as 13:30 GMT, but I suppose they just got the daylight saving time wrong.)

Dan Gillmor is participating in the Berkman Center‘s Internet Law Program this week, and taking notes. More notes are in Donna Wentworth’s Copyfight blog.

Ben Edelman has done another study: This time, he has taken names (100 each, from the following categories: top brand names, random brand names, Boston Yellow Page entries, and selective and random colleges and universities in the US), and investigated how successful (1) domain name guessing, (2) Google’s I’m feeling lucky button, (3) RealNames were as strategies to find the web sites in question. The objective of the study was to help to understand the extent to which DNS is already used as or already functions as a directory. I find the first part of this a bit misleading, by the way: The study can at most show how usable the DNS is as a directory. It cannot demonstrate whether users actually use it as one – to quantify that, you’d have to actually observe user behavior.

The study’s results: Google is best across all categories in matching Ben’s hypothetical user expectation. Ben further writes on the DNSO’s GA list: I first find that DNS is nearly as accurate as Google among a sample of the world’s largest brands. However, for smaller brands, smaller companies, and less selective educational institutions, DNS’s accuracy is substantially worse than Google’s. These results suggest that while DNS well serves the needs of the largest companies, it is less successful in providing intuitive naming services to small businesses and other smaller organizations.

William Walsh responded to Ben’s statement, and suggested that just because something CAN be used for some in a fashion, does not mean that it is, was, or should be intended to work that way, or that it should work that way for all people. Search engines and other directory services are the way to go for that.