International – Registrants get the ‘.club’, but are brand owners outside looking in?

With heavyweight endorser 50 Cent throwing his weight behind the ‘.club’ gTLD, the string has shot to the top of the gTLD registrations table. However, new research suggests that brand owners are shying away from making wholesale defensive registrations. At time of writing, ntldstats.com’s list of the top 10 gTLDs consists of:  ‘.club’ (61,713   domains …

Filipino hackers wage cyberwar on Chinese Web sites

Attention this week has centered on the covert cyberwar taking place between the United States and China. Chinese authorities pointed to the supposed hypocrisy of Washington leveling cyberspying charges against China, even while the United States maintains its own vast network of clandestine surveillance and monitoring. There are myriad other stealth attacks launched from the …

Senators Seek Hearing On ICANN Hand-off, Say they are concerned about transitioning oversight of domain name functions

Led by Senate Commerce Committee members Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), nine Republican senators have asked the chairman and ranking member of the committee to hold a hearing on the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s planned transition of some Internet domain name (ICANN) functions to a multistakeholder model. That came the same day that the …

CISCO to Obama, Stop NSA from hacking my equipment

(Reuters) – Cisco Systems Inc’s chief executive officer has written a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to curtail government surveillance after evidence circulated showing the National Security Agency had intercepted Cisco equipment, a company spokesman said on Sunday. In a letter dated May 15, John Chambers, chief executive officer and chairman of the …

Chairman Crocker’s Self Defense on ICANN’s Lack of Accountability and Transition

ICANN accountability has come into question more than any other issue in the transitional discussions that led to the NETMundial conference. Under President Clinton in 1998, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) entered into a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to manage core functions of the …

Secret September ICANN Board Resolution sanctions Fadi’s Internet Governance Initiatives

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade told members of its GNSO Council in Buenos Aires this morning that his recent initiatives resulting in the recent Montevideo Statement on Internet governance and the spring 2014 meeting on this subject to be held in Brazil were sanctioned by a September 15th ICANN Board resolution that has been withheld from …