In early April, Public Interest Registry (PIR) submitted a service proposal announcing its intention to begin offering secure DNS extensions in the 4th quarter of 2008, and seeking to amend its registry contract with ICANN. If approved by ICANN, .ORG would likely be the Internet’s first secure production gTLD zone. One interesting wrinkle is PIR's proposed language regarding data escrow of DNSSEC related data, specifically key material. PIR's request is another testament to the strength of a distributed, and not centralized, approach to DNSSEC.   more »

Thursday I spoke in Brussels at a well-attended seminar on "Net Neutrality and the [EU] Reform Proposals for the Electronic Communications Sector." The event had a number of sponsors, including two Belgian Universities (Namur and Leuven) the ISP Association of Belgium and some consultancies. It appears that the neutrality norm for internet governance is becoming widely discussed in Europe and is influencing the European Commission's implementation of its sectoral reform efforts. Indeed there is a Principle proposed in Article 8 that end users should be able to access and distribute content and use the applications of their choice.

Chris Boam of Verizon was there and made some interesting comments. One was that Verizon has no interest in Deep Packet Inspection technologies and has rejected the idea of implementing them. The other was that Verizon's Open Development Initiative, which supposedly loosened up its vertical leverage over wireless handsets on its network, was "not a change in policy" but simply a re-packaging and more aggressive public promotion of its prior policy, which was that any handset manufacturer or developer could approach Verizon and be approved if they met some basic criteria. Hmmm...   more »

The NTIA has released a short announcement about the mid-term review of ICANN. The announcement tells us very little except that the administration hasn't changed its position on anything important regarding its supervisory relationship to ICANN. The US is reasonably comfortable with the status quo and won't move until someone makes them very uncomfortable. Nothing they heard in February did so. Clearly, NTIA was not looking for information about what needs to be done, but seeking confirmation of its prior tendency to do nothing. It will leave to a future Presidential administration the issue of whether to continue to be the unilateral "ruler of the root"   more »