Over the last few months much has been made of the digitally signing the root as a critical step in widely deploying DNSSEC. At our May Symposium on Internet Governance and Security, one panelist wondered aloud if ICANN/IANA would ever sign the root like they agreed to do in 2006. Similarly, RIPE's recent letter urged ICANN/IANA publicly to act, lest RIPE go ahead and create its own trust anchor repository as one large European ISP suggested. And finally, the FIPS requirement to deploy DNSSEC technology within medium and high impact federal IT systems is bearing down, with the effort taking on a new sense of urgency with the launch of the NIST/SPARTA/DHS SNIP testbed early this month.

Well, it now seems that some of the pressure has started to work. At the informal IEPG gathering prior to the 69th IETF being held in Chicago this week, an IANA representative explained some technical specs and operational details behind its recent deployment of a DNSSEC testbed that includes a signed root zone.   more »

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is now moving through its second year and two institutional issues have emerged in the open-ended consultations and in the discussions among stakeholders: how is the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) that is supposed to provide advice on management of the IGF to be structured and how is stable, long-term financing of the IGF Secretariat to be arranged. Given the innovative status of the IGF, resolving these issues will set important precedents for similar initiatives, as well as for the long-term success of the IGF.

The attached paper suggests approaches to both, by showing how the MAG is consistent with past practice and its composition can be adapted. It argues that the funding for the IGF Secretariat should be built into the assessed budget of the United Nations in order to ensure continuity and permit medium-term planning.

In the process of drafting its revised charter (which came about because it is now largely finished with the DNSSEC standard), the IETF's DNS Extensions Working Group (DNSEXT) has identified the Domain Name System as "a critical Internet infrastructure." Given that the DNS handles billions of queries mapping human readable domain names to IP adresses of network hosts daily, it only makes sense that it be considered critical to the function of the Internet. Without the DNS protocol, much of the value of the Internet to humans would not exist.   more »