Afilias gets Guinness record for .au migration

Afilias has got its recent takeover of .au recognized by Guinness as an official world record.

The company was given the title of “Largest Migration of an Internet Top-Level Domain in a Single Transition” at an event in New York today, according to a company press release.

It relates to its migration of .au from former registry provider Neustar to its own back-end a few months ago.

Australia’s .au ccTLD had about 3.1 million names under management at the time, about 400,000 names more than the previous record — the 2003 .org transition Afilias also handled.

I understand there’s a licensing fee due to Guinness for this kind of (let’s face it) shameless-but-effective PR stunt, but no guarantee the record will actually be printed in future editions of the annual Guinness Book of World Records.

I hope the fresh salt in Neustar’s wounds isn’t stinging too badly this evening.

Comment Tagged: .au, afilias, auda, guinness, migration, neustar

KSK vote was NOT unanimous

ICANN’s board of directors on Sunday voted to approve the forthcoming security key change at the DNS root, but there was some dissent.

Director Avri Doria, a Nominating Committee appointee, said today that she provided the lone vote against the DNSSEC KSK rollover, which is expected to cause temporary internet access problems for potentially a couple million people next month.

I understand there was also a single abstention to Sunday’s vote.

Doria has released a dissenting statement, in which she said the absence of an external, peer-reviewed study of the risks could prove a problem.

The greatest risk is that out of the millions that will fail after the roll over, some that are serious and may even be critical, may occur; if this happens the lack of peer reviewed studies may be a liability for ICANN, perhaps not legal, but in terms of our reputation as protectors of the stability & security of internet system of names.

She added that she was concerned about the extent that the public has been notified of the rollover plan, and questioned whether the current risk mitigation plan is sufficient.

Doria said she found comments filed by Verisign (pdf) particularly informative to her eventual vote, as well as comments from the At-Large Advisory Committee (pdf), Business Constituency (pdf) and Registries Stakeholder Group (pdf).

These groups had called for more study and data, better outreach, more clearly defined success/failure benchmarks, and more delay.

Doria noted in her dissenting statement that the ICANN board did not have a chance to quiz any of the minority of the members of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee who had called for further delay.

The board’s resolution, apparently arrived at after two hours of formal in-person discussions in Brussels at the weekend, is expected to be published shortly.

The rollover, which has already been delayed a year, is now scheduled to go ahead October 11.

Any impact is expected to be felt within a couple of days, as the change ripples out across the DNS.

ICANN says that any network operator impacted by the change has a simple fix: turn off DNSSEC. Then, if they want, they can update their keys and turn it back on again.

Comment Tagged: board, dns, DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover, root, security, verisign

ICANN turns 20 today (or maybe not)

ICANN is expected to celebrate its 20th anniversary at its Barcelona meeting next month, but by some measures it has already had its birthday.

If you ask Wikipedia, it asserts that ICANN was “created” on September 18, 1998, 20 years ago today.

But that claim, which has been on Wikipedia since 2003, is unsourced and probably incorrect.

While it’s been repeated elsewhere online for the last 15 years, I’ve been unable to figure out why September 18 has any significance to ICANN’s formation.

I think it’s probably the wrong date.

It seems that September 16, 1998 was the day that IANA’s Jon Postel and Network Solutions jointly published the organization’s original bylaws and articles of incorporation, and first unveiled the name “ICANN”.

That’s according to my former colleague and spiritual predecessor Nick Patience (probably the most obsessive journalist following DNS politics in the pre-ICANN days), writing in now-defunct Computergram International on September 17, 1998.

The Computergram headline, helpfully for the purposes of the post you are reading, is “IANA & NSI PUBLISH PLAN FOR DNS ENTITY: ICANN IS BORN”.

Back then, before the invention of the paragraph and when ALL CAPS HEADLINES were considered acceptable, Computergram was published daily, so Patience undoubtedly wrote the story September 16, the same day the ICANN proposal was published.

A joint Postel/NetSol statement on the proposal was also published September 17.

The organization was not formally incorporated until September 30, which is probably a better candidate date for ICANN’s official birthday, archived records show.

Birthday meriments are expected to commence during ICANN 63, which runs from October 20 to 25. There’s probably free booze in it, for those on-site in Barcelona.

As an aside that amused me, the Computergram article notes that Jones Day lawyer Joe Sims very kindly provided Postel with his services during ICANN’s creation on a “pro bono basis”.

Jones Day has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of ICANN cash over the intervening two decades, billing over $8.7 million in fees in ICANN’s most recently reported tax year alone.

6 Comments Tagged: barcelona, iana, ICANN, icann 63, jon postel, jones day, network solutions

Van der Laan to leave ICANN board

Former Dutch politician Lousewies van der Laan is to leave the ICANN board of directors next month and be replaced with the former CEO of the Serbian ccTLD.

ICANN said yesterday that Danko Jevtovic, who headed RNIDS from 2013 until July last year, has been selected to occupy van der Laan’s seat following the Annual General Meeting in Barcelona.

Van der Laan, who had been selected by the Nominating Committee for a second term, has had to decline the offer “due to unforeseen family obligations”, ICANN said.

Jevtovic will take his seat at the same time as fellow NomCom appointee, Tripti Sinha of the University of Maryland, who oversees management of the DNS D-root server and replaces term-limited George Sadowsky.

El Salvadorean ccTLD founder Rafael “Lito” Ibarra is the third NomCom appointee this year, starting his second term next month.

Comment Tagged: board, ICANN, nomcom

Set buttocks to clench! ICANN approves risky KSK rollover

ICANN has approved the first rollover of the domain name system’s master security key, setting the clock ticking on a change that could cause internet access issues for millions.

The so-called KSK rollover, when ICANN deletes the key-signing key that has been used as the trust anchor for the DNSSEC ecosystem since 2011 and replaces it with the new one — will now go ahead as planned on October 11.

The decision was made yesterday at the ICANN board of directors’ retreat in Brussels.

ICANN chief technology officer David Conrad posted this to an ICANN mailing list this morning:

The Board voted to approve the resolution for ICANN org to move forward with the revised KSK rollover plan. So barring unforeseen circumstances, the KSK-2017-signed ZSK will be used to sign the root zone on 11 October 2018.

The rollover was due to happen October 11 last year, but ICANN delayed it when it emerged that many DNS resolvers weren’t yet configured to use the new key.

That’s still a problem, and nobody knows for sure how many endpoints will stop functioning properly when the new KSK goes solo.

While most experts weighing in on the rollover, including Conrad, agreed that the risk of more delay outweighed the risk of rolling now, that feeling was not unanimous.

Five members of the 22-member Security and Stability Advisory Committee — including top guys from Google and Verisign — last month dissented from the majority view and said ICANN should delay again.

The question now is not whether internet users will see a disruption in the days following October 11, but how many users will be affected and how serious their disruptions will be.

Based on current information, as many as two million internet users could be affected.

ICANN is likely to take flak for even relatively minor disruptions, but the alternative was to continue with the delays and risk an even bigger impact, and even more flak, in future.

The text of ICANN’s resolution and the rationale behind it will be published in the next day or so.

1 Comment Tagged: DNSSEC, ICANN, ksk, ksk rollover, rollover, ssac