Robert Shaw: Naming, Numbering and Addressing

Mobile Number Portability: lessons from Hong Kong, China

Wed, 16 Apr 2003 12:21:01 GMT

There's a piece Court Hears Fight Over Numbers Used for Cellphones in today's New York Times about the battle to introduce mobile number portability in the United States. There are perhaps some lessons to draw from Asia, particularly Hong Kong, China. In this "mobile-mad" economy, over 90% of the population has a mobile and it probably has the most highly competitive mobile market in the world with 6 providers for slightly less than 7 million people. A few years ago (March 1999), I happened to be in Hong Kong the day the regulator, OFTA, introduced mobile number portability (MNP). You could barely walk around with huge lines to switch mobile providers flowing out of the shops and stalls (today they also hawk broadband from street stalls but that's another story...). A key reason that no mobile provider has yet been able to dominate the market is due to the high subscriber churn facilitated by MNP. Before implementing MNP, OFTA commissioned a feasibility study and a cost benefit analysis. This study concluded "A wide range of consumers will benefit from the MNP in Hong Kong. Mobile subscribers will be able to switch operators and avoid the costs and inconvenience associated with a number change. Competition in the industry will be heightened as a barrier to switching is removed, further benefiting residential and business users.

ITU Overview and ENUM Presentation

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 07:58:36 GMT

Here's the presentation (PowerPoint, PDF) I made last week to the GAC at the Rio de Janiero ICANN meeting. It gives an overview of the ITU, changes in the telecom sector, its impact on the ITU, and ITU's activities related to IP-based networks and the Internet. I also made a presentation on ITU's perspectives on ENUM (Powerpoint, PDF) in an open ICANN session.

gTLD Auctions?

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 07:45:20 GMT

Lawrence Solum and Karl Manheim of Loyola Law School have established the site gtld-auctions.net, which is intended to be a "Clearinghouse of Information and News on Proposals to Establish gTLD Auctions".

DNS Root server operators presentation

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 07:18:11 GMT

The DNS root server operators have published the presentation (PDF) they recently made to the GAC at the Rio de Janiero ICANN meeting. The presentation (along with the recent CRADA report on root server architecture changes) emphasizes that since November 2002, zone transfers to the set of 13 root servers are not done from a.root-servers.net but rather a hidden master server. As they put it: The "A" server is not special.

Sapphire/Slammer Worm: Impact on Internet Root Server Performance

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 09:53:09 GMT

Sapphire/Slammer Worm: Impact on Internet Performance by James Aldridge, Daniel Karrenberg, Henk Uijterwaal and René Wilhelm, New Projects Group / RIPE NCC, including a report on Internet root server performance. The report shows two root servers (b.root-servers.net at USC Information Sciences Institute in California and g.root-servers.net at the U.S. DOD Network Information Center in Virginia) were significantly affected.

More Mirrors of F Root Server

Tue, 11 Feb 2003 08:47:06 GMT

Internet Software Consortium Press Release: "TELEHOUSE America ...and Internet Software Consortium ...will jointly establish mirrors of the F-root DNS name root server at two TELEHOUSE America locations.... in its New York International Internet Exchange (NYIIX) and Los Angeles International Internet Exchange (LAIIX)." [via icann.Blog]

Impact of Worm on Root Name Service Argues for Anycasting

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 12:49:55 GMT

Daniel Karrenberg on the inpact of the SQL worm on DNS root name service: "A further tentative conclusion is that this data (again) supports the case for distributing root service across the Internet using IP anycasting." For more explanation of anycasting, see here "More anycasting of the F root server", "Anycasting the root name servers" and "Distributing the K-Root Service by Anycast Routing" [via icann.blog.us].

More anycasting of the F root server

Tue, 21 Jan 2003 10:52:39 GMT

The Internet Software Consortium has announced they've come to agreement with the Spain Internet Exchange (EspaNix) to anycast the F root server in Madrid. For more info on anycasting on this site, see "Anycasting the root name servers" and "Distributing the K-Root Service by Anycast Routing". This follows on from their announcement in November 2002 to create F server mirrors in the Asia-Pacific region. Update: APNIC today (January 23, 2003) made a Call for Expressions of Interest for the support of APNIC Points Of Presence in the Asia Pacific region, including potentialhosting of instances of the F root server. APNIC has also provided a root server trial FAQ.

ITU to hold Workshop on Member States' experiences with ccTLDs

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 11:03:35 GMT

ITU Media Advisory: ITU to hold Workshop on Member States' experiences with ccTLDs. More information and contributions to the meeting can be found here.

More news on National ENUM Trials

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:44:49 GMT

ENUM in the Netherlands: a report ENUM in the Netherlands from the Dutch ENUM group (NLEG) (PDF) and a new Netherlands ENUM site.

New WIPO Report: Intellectual Property on the Internet: A Survey of Issues

Mon, 16 Dec 2002 15:01:00 GMT

WIPO has published a new report: Intellectual Property on the Internet: A Survey of Issues. "The Survey focuses on recent developments in the traditional fields of copyright, trademarks and patents, as well as domain names, and progress in private international law and alternative dispute resolution. It also explores the particular concerns that face developing countries in e-development, and outlines the ways in which WIPO is addressing these various issues."

News on National ENUM Trials

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 10:26:36 GMT

At the recent ITU-T Study Group 2 meeting in Geneva, several countries gave updates on their current national ENUM trials:

Austria: Austrian ENUM Trial Status and Demo (PPT) and Status of the Austrian ENUM Field Trial (Word)
China: ENUM Trial in China (Word)
France: Numérobis – French ENUM field trial (Word)
Sweden: Status of ENUM in Sweden (Word/PPT)
United Kingdom: UK ENUM Group (UKEG) – Status of Trial in the UK (Word/PPT)
United States: ENUM Forum perspective on the status of ENUM implementation in the US (Word)

Toward Lowering the Load on DNS Root Nameservers

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 11:16:18 GMT

Toward Lowering the Load on DNS Root Nameservers (PDF) by Duane Wessels of The Measurement Factory and CAIDA, suggests that over 95% of the roughly 100 million daily queries to each root server are invalid and unnecessary queries.

Distributing the K-Root Service by Anycast Routing

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:57:01 GMT

RIPE NCC operates the K-root server (k.root-servers.net). They have recently published a draft on Distributing the K-Root Service by Anycast Routing of 193.0.14.129. The application of anycasting to providing DNS services was explored in a number of Internet drafts which eventually became the informational RFC 3258: Distributing Authoritative Name Servers via Shared Unicast Addresses. RFC 3258 describes how authoritative name servers with the same IP address could be replicated at different locations. The route to these servers would be advertised for each location and the routing protocols would direct traffic to the topologically nearest server. See my earlier note on this topic.

1st East African Internet Forum, 6-8 August 2002

Fri, 19 Jul 2002 09:57:12 GMT

Nairobi will play host to the first East African Internet Forum, to be held 6-8 August 2002.

Renum

Mon, 08 Jul 2002 15:00:18 GMT

A new Internet draft, The E.164 to URI DDDS Application, has been published. This forms the basis of a document intended to replace RFC 2916, which describes the ENUM protocol.

Anycasting the root name servers

Mon, 08 Jul 2002 13:52:35 GMT

The Internet's root name servers are seen as a possible soft target for distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks (in fact, they already are as described in this paper). A possible method to deal with this vulnerability that's getting some serious consideration is the use of IPv4 anycasting, as first conceptualized in RFC 1546. A recently released primer on anycast from Cisco can be found here (PDF). The application of anycasting to providing DNS services was explored in a number of Internet drafts which eventually became the informational RFC 3258: Distributing Authoritative Name Servers via Shared Unicast Addresses. RFC 3258 describes how authoritative name servers with the same IP address could be replicated at different locations. The route to these servers would be advertised for each location and the routing protocols would direct traffic to the topologically nearest server. As an example of how anycasting for the root name servers could possible work, there's already a project, named AS112, that uses anycast to distribute the load for bogus requests for private address space (as described in RFC 1918, also see description of problem here). A possible benefit of using anycast for the root name service is that it may solve both some technical security issues as well as some political issues (i.e., better geo-political distribution of the root name servers). On the other hand, it may make it much harder to deploy DNSSEC. It'll be interesting to watch this play out...

Nom de Domaine 2002 in Paris

Thu, 04 Jul 2002 18:39:28 GMT

I'm on my flight back from Paris where I participated in Nom de Domaine 2002 (in English, Domain Name 2002), which supposedly will become an annual event. ISOC France and Cigref, the organizers, brought together quite a number of speakers for an interesting programme and workshops. I gave a talk (PowerPoint) this morning in a session on internationalized domain names and ENUM. I'm told that all the presentations and speeches given will eventually become available on the conference web site. Last night, the organizers hosted a dinner in a restaurant near the Champs-Elysées which helped the speakers to get to know each other. It was interesting to see many of the same people in last week's ICANN meeting in Bucharest, the "World Summit on the Information Society preparatory meetings" in Geneva, and at this meeting in Paris.

GAC materials from Bucharest posted

Wed, 03 Jul 2002 17:12:28 GMT

Bret Fausett's icann.Blog notices it first: The ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) secretariat has now posted the materials it presented to the ICANN Board in Bucharest. The Bucharest communique is here, and the GAC's Statement on ICANN Reform is here. We've been asked by a number of people why, in Annex 2 of the GAC statement on Reform, there is the statement "The International Telecommunication Union disassociates itself from portions of this document." The explanation is that based on a number of discussions among Member States within the ITU on ICANN and ICANN reform, there are clearly a wide range of views. Under these circumstances, the ITU Secretariat has to reflect this and disassociate itself from a number of the substantive statements made in the GAC document. These will be later specifically documented for the minutes of this GAC meeting.

PSO General Assembly Meeting

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 20:28:13 GMT

Bret Fausett's reports that that archives of last week's meeting of the ICANN Protocol Supporting Organization's annual General Assembly are now available from the PSO web site. The archives include links to the presentations and an audio recording available in RealAudio format. [icann.Blog] I could also add this includes an update on ENUM from the Chairman of ITU-T Study Group 2.

ICANN GAC Meeting in Bucharest

Mon, 24 Jun 2002 21:41:18 GMT

Bret Fausett, notes today in his [icann.blog.us], that the GAC "met all day in closed session" and "even the ICANN Board members are not allowed to attend most of the GAC meetings". That's entirely correct and, as a participant in the GAC here in Bucharest, even if I may not agree with this policy, I have to respect the GAC operating procedures. That said, I think it's reasonable to give some general gist of the meeting. First, it's clear that the majority of GAC participants were extremely surprised to have to suddenly digest ICANN's Blueprint for Reform, released on June 20th. As most of the delegates had not even seen this document yet, the meeting had to be almost immediately suspended for an hour to allow everyone to read this document which contains some very substantive changes from earlier drafts. Afterwards, we had a session with Stuart Lynn and Alejandro Pisanty, who when directly asked, indicated that their expectations were that this basic Blueprint, perhaps with some changes based on conversations during the week, be adopted by the Board at the end of the week in Bucharest. I, for one, was immediately struck how this seemed to contradict the statement in the Blueprint that the "GAC should receive adequate notice and an opportunity to comment on all ICANN policy decisions before they are taken" as well as the existing provisions in the ICANN Bylaws that "The Board will notify the chairman of the Governmental Advisory Committee of any proposal for which it seeks comments under Article III, Section 3(b) and will consider any response to that notification prior to taking action."

Benumbed

Sun, 23 Jun 2002 21:52:41 GMT

The Internet Protocol Journal has an good article on ENUM by Geoff Huston. He concludes: "It appears that the technical components of ENUM are generally the most straightforward part. The regulatory and social implications of ENUM are more of a concern..."

Independence Day?

Sun, 23 Jun 2002 21:45:09 GMT

Cigref and ISOC France are hosting a conference NOM DE DOMAINE 2002 in Paris on the 4th of July, 2002. I plan to participate on behalf of ITU.

On the road to Bucharest

Sun, 23 Jun 2002 21:02:10 GMT

On my way to Bucharest to participate in ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) meeting. On the plane from Frankfurt, ran into the very nice people from Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology (MCT) who also participate in the GAC. They were very helpful in my preparations of a report I wrote on network infrastructure protection in Brazil. Brazil's a great dynamic country and clearly emerging as a major Internet hub of the Americas.

EU Telecoms Council Issues Guidelines for ICANN Discussions

Fri, 21 Jun 2002 16:16:03 GMT

On 18 June 2002, the EU Telecommunications Council endorsed these guidelines for discussion concerning ICANN reform.