The Danish Internet Forum (DIFO) behind DK-Hostmaster has now reverted to pure psychological terrorism in a battle to the last blood-drop not to loose the several millions of crowns that every year make their pockets bigger without giving any real benefit to the “Danish internet community” at-large. While i.e. in Sweden a large chunk of the money made on .se domains is invested in outreach IT projects, afaik there is no record of money ever being invested in similar outreach projects in Denmark, and important organizations like the Danish Unix Users Group (DKUUG) have been consistently denied membership by DIFO for no reason (talk about striving to represent the interest of the whole Danish internet community!).

For what it concerns pricing, a simple “economy of scale” calculation together with a more efficient usage of resources thanks to the Registry-Registrar model suggests that prices are more likely to go down than up. On the other side, .DK domains are already today quite cheap, and unless Denmark wants to go the Chinese way and give domains away almost for free, I think it would be more useful and interesting to focus on how the money .dk makes should be used to the benefit of the community.

What I find truly amazing is that, after defying any attempt to dialogue before and during the period before the decision, and consistently refusing to discuss any part of its bid with the registrars and the general public, DIFO has now suddenly decided to release all the material regarding its bid, together with a memorandum full of wrong assumptions and misinformation on why “giving up the management of .dk to the Americans is a bad idea”.

It is obviously in the interest of DIFO to depict a nightmare-scenario with raising prices and loss of control by the end-users that will become hostages of rogue registrars, and it is easier for some people to hide their head in the sand than to see the possibilities that this change brings to the development of the Danish internet.

Peter Larsen from GratisDNS.dk (a well-known and respected IT personality in Denmark) provides a pretty good overview on why having a new Registry Operator is the best thing that could happen to Denmark, and answers to a lot of the rumors and misinformation that circulated in the past 2 months, and that are now been reproposed by a very surprised and disappointed DK-Hostmaster.

With the introduction of the new model, all parts of the Danish internet community will have a way to affect how .dk should be run and how the money it brings in should be spent: in other words, there is a whole new democratic dimension in this that goes beyond simple speculation on pricing, and the fact of being able to count on Afilias’ technical infrastructure is just added-value that allows to face the threats of the Internet much better than ever before, rather than simply “selling-off to the americans” as some people like to think.

Unfortunately for these people (and fortunately for the rest of us), Denmark does not have its own private and safe internet where problems never happen. I honestly smile a bit at DIFO’s claims of 9 years of uninterrupted service: while running an anycast DNS system is not exactly rocket science, the fire that affected DK-Hostmaster’s only server a few weeks ago tells a totally different story, and shows how typosquatting and phishing attacks are not the only problems in running a Registry service worth the name.

Furthermore, it will now be possible for Registrars to provide a more efficient and quick service to their customers: today people are bounced around between registrars and DK-Hostmaster for different issues, including invoicing. In the new system Registrants will only have to deal with their registrar of choice and be able to manage domains, webhosting and emails all in one place.

To those who complain that users might fall in the hands of “rogue registrars”, this possibility is there in every type of business, and it’s part of the job of a strong and representative Registry and of an active and committed Registrar community to sort out the “bad apples” and ensure the interests of the end-users are protected.

Different IT experts (more here and here) have already expressed their support to the new model envisioned by the DotDK Society.

Furthermore, as Stephane reminds us, the fresh air that now blows on Denmark is a reminder for all Registry Operators around the world that if you stop listening to your community, neglect innovation and continue to live in the past, your happy days might be soon coming to an end.

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small legal disclaimer: for completeness I must point out that I am the vice-chairman of the DKRegistrar association, and Peter Larsen of GratisDNS is the chairman. However, this post merely reflects my own personal opinions (and in the end, as Danish tax-payer I think I am entitled to that), and not the ones of the Registrar I work for nor of the DKRegistrar Association. Are we clear on this now?

The news was first published by the Danish IT e-zine Comon.dk, and although it is not officially confirmed yet the source seems reliable (afaik the Danish IT Authority will not publish an official statement, but will only inform the 2 bidders of its decision, and they will then be free to make the result public).

The announcement ends a very interesting period for the Danish internet, protagonist of a public tender which has been followed with a lot of interest from abroad too.

Once the legal formalities and the necessary technical preparations will be completed, DotDK Society should take over the management of .dk in february 2009.

Among the biggest changes we will obviously see the introduction of a proper Registry-Registrar system and the transition to EPP. From an organizational perspective, the obejctive of the DotDK Society is to reach out to the users, the civil society and the registrars and involve them to a higher grade in the management of .dk.

I believe this is a very clever and timely move, and brings up once again an old question I have been mumbling about for a while and even discussed informally with a few friends and colleagues.

In the USA many large Registrars and Registries spend every year millions of dollars in lobbying for their interests, and even ICA itself has quite a large budget to make its voice heard in Washington.

Coming from the very positive personal experience of the local Registrar Associations in Sweden, Italy and Denmark I am involved in, I think it would be a great idea to set up a strong European Registrars Association that would present the point of view of the Registrar community in an organized and coherent manner at a European level, mostly when big issues like privacy and IPv6 are on the table. It would also be a great platform to promote more transparency and harmonization in the European ccTLD market, something I have talked about in the past.

Such an Association would also be able to represent a strong and reliable counterpart for CENTR, the Council of European Registries whose meeting are today rigourously kept “off-limits” to Registrars, and help them shape policies and address problems in a way more respondent to the requirements and the needs of the end-users (which in the end are our customers ).

Who knows, maybe Paris can be the place where all the pieces finally come together…

L’edizione di maggio dell’ICANN Magazine fornisce un’ottima presentazione degli argomenti al centro dell’attenzione. Ovviamente si parlerá abbondamente dei nuovi gTLD che entro un paio di anni rischiano di affollare la rete e sull´introduzione di domini completamente in caratteri non latini (gli IDNs). L´introduzione di IPv6 sará probabilmente un altro argomento interessante, assieme alle discussioni sulla fine del domain tasting e sulle nuove minacce alla sicurezza informatica. Inoltre si parlerá di quale futuro si prospetta per ICANN quando é prevista la scadenza del Contratto che assegna al Dipartimento del Commercio USA il controllo sulla sua attivitá.

Sui nuovi gTLD Anthony Van Couvering ha scritto un paio di posts interessanti, dando un´idea prima della timeline prevista per il lancio e sugli eventuali punti interrogativi, e conducendo un piccolo toto-TLD fra amici e colleghi chiedendo in giro quante richieste riceverá ICANN per nuovi TLD.

La questione é parecchio delicata, visto anche il lungo e infiammato dibattito su eventuali limiti alle stringhe che possono essere richieste e a chi spetti controllare e decidere: ad esempio, stringhe come .hitler o .jihad o .god sono accettabili? Se lo sono, a chi vanno assegnate? E se no, perché no e a chi spetta deciderlo? Ad ICANN? Al Governo USA? Alle Nazioni Unite? Al Vaticano?

Gli interessi economici nella questione sono enormi, visto che gestire un Registro di una buona estensione di dominio equivale piú o meno ad una miniera d’oro (chiedete a Verisign quanto gli piace gestire .com e .net :D). Ovviamente in questa corsa all’oro c’é il grosso rischio che si lasci passare un po’ di tutto e che la Rete finisca sommersa di TLD dall’utilitá e dal valore commerciale piú o meno dubbio. Anche se ICANN ha messo insieme un piano dettagliato per gestire i fallimenti dei Registri (fra gli altri .Travel c’é andato dannatamente vicino qualche mese fa) sarebbe bello poterne fare a meno.

Image via Wikipedia

McAfee decided today to get some free publicity by putting out a press release about a new issue of its report on dangerous TLDs, which however does not seem to be available for download yet.

The data is collected through a browser plugin freely available on McAfee’s website, and compared to last year the most notable piece of news is the fact that Hong Kong and China today lead the “hall of shame” with respectively 20% and 11% of potentially harmful domains registered under their TLD.

It then also seems that Philippines and Spain have all reasons to get worried, since their overall riskiness went up 270% and 91% respectively in only one year.

When it comes to gTLDs, .info is listed as the worst in the league with 11,8%, while .com stops at 5%.

Since I haven’t had the chance of reading the full report yet (thanks to the smart guy in marketing at McAfee that published the PR without checking if the links were working ) I might be a bit out fishing right now, but there are at least a couple of things that I found worth a comment.

The first one is that if one was to put back all these percentages into real numbers, that 5% of .com is actually about 3.8 million potentially dangerous domains, which is almost as much as all the .info currently registered. Since .com is also the most popular object of “direct navigation” (to the great pleasure of the growing domainer community ), I would be personally more concerned about them than of half a million .infos with possible security issues.

As far as China is concerned, this is what happens when you start giving domains away for free to get on top of the ccTLDs rankings as fast as possible (nobody likes a besserwisser, but for the record I did tell them this would happen ).

edit 5/6/08 09:53 CET: The report is now available here. As soon as I have the time I´ll start digging deeper into it.

Then yesterday morning I found an explanation to the strange events of the night before: Computerworld.dk was in fact reporting about a small fire that affected Interxion’s datacenter in the outskirts of Copenhagen, and which caused some downtime to the servers of a large number of big Danish companies hosted there.

Among others, also DK-Hostmaster’s servers were affected: although name resolution kept working (since .dk just like everybody else has nameservers spread around the world), the blackout negatively impacted the capability of DK-Hostmaster to manage new requests, and all orders sent between 19:30 thursday and 3:30 friday morning were lost. DK-Hostmaster said it would send a notification to all Registrars to check the orders submitted in that timeframe, and in case they had not received any receipt from the the Registry’s systems, they would have to resubmit them again.

At the same time the downtime of the DK-Hostmaster’s homepage affected those Registrant who wanted to pay the invoices for their domains online (DK-Hostmaster is one of those who still sends renewal invoices directly to the customers, rather than letting Registrars handle that too).

The big question now is what would have happened if the fire had broken out during office hours, if it had had a larger extension or caused heavier damages. I am personally very surprised to see how a Registry that manages more than 900k domain names relies on a single datacenter for all its operations, and I then wonder how other ccTLD Registries would handle similar scenarios.

For instance, what would happen to the whois details of the domains (and in particular on who is their Registrant) if suddenly the datacenter of one of these Registries were completely destroyed? I assume that there are backups, but I still wonder whether the backup routines of the various ccTLD Registries are really up to this type of challenges.

GTLD Registries are normally subject to very strict controls from ICANN to make sure they can cope with unexpected events, and all the big Registry Operators have fully functional failover plans and are able to switch all their operations between datacenters in different geographical locations quickly and without any noticeable effect on their performances. Furthermore they are all obliged to escrow their full databases to an external party, and a similar requirement is currently being enforced by ICANN on all its accredited Registrars.

Even DENIC completed a few months ago a large migration project, and today the German Registry can rely on a fully functional backup datacenter in the Netherlands that is perfectly capable of keeping DENIC up and running without disruptions even in case the datacenter in Frankfurt is completely destroyed.

To be honest I am partly responsible for “spicing up” the quest a notch: together with a number of other leading Danish Registrars we decided that we definitely needed a branch organization to voice the interests of the local registrar community and helped promote a management system for .dk more respondent to the needs of the registrars and of the general public.

In about a month of activity DKRegistrar has already managed to gather about 33% of the danish domain market (and counting indirect support of some other major players we are up to around 50%), bringing together on a common platform for some of the most dynamic and active actors of the Danish internet community.

It goes without saying that one of the main objective of the Association is to make sure that the demands and suggestions of those who work with .dk domains every day are properly addressed and get the attention they deserve in the pending tender that will decide who will be our “supplier” for the coming 6 years: regardless of who gets the contract, we do expect serious improvements to how the Danish TLD is managed.

Among other things we have been busy arranging a public meeting at the end of this month here in Copenhagen, where the 2 contestants will have the chance to present their plans and proposals and answer to the question of the registrars, the press and the general Danish public. The hope is obviously to obtain clear and binding answers of what the future will bring in the management of what has with time become a full-fledged “Public Service”.

In the meantime DotDKRegistry today announced some big changes in its leadership. Unfortunately personal reasons have forced Tina Dam to step down and leave the project she had started, but she will be replaced by 4 new founders: although Tina’s decision is a big blow to DotDK, the 4 new representatives are nevertheless all very well-known and respected members of the Danish internet community. Among other things one of them (Nikolaj Nyholm) is actually one of the founders of Ascio, the company where I work and which is Denmark’s largest domain registrar and the only ICANN accredited of the country: however I have actually never met him, as he had sold Ascio long time before I started working there.

This will obviously make it even more interesting to get the chance to hopefully meet the new “DotDK 4″ at DKRegistrar’s public meeting next week, and get a better idea of what their plans for the future are.

The German Registrar United Domains has in fact decided to wander uncharted territories, publishing what to my knowledge is the first song dedicated to domain names (available also as ringtone for mobile phones, recommended only for real hardcore fans!).

The result is - once again - not exactly pleasant, and gets very often dangerously close to being plain embarassing, but I feel that United Domains’ marketing department must at least get the credit for really “thinking outside of the box”… In comparison GoDaddy’s custom Credit Card and NSI’s frequent flyers’ miles program appear now quite dull and boring.

If only now we could get the buzz spread at the next ICANN Meeting we could probably soon arrange a proper Eurovision Domain Song Contest. As far as I am concerned, in Copenhagen we are already negotiating with Danish pop glories Aqua to get a custom version of one of their big hits: we’ll call it “Dr. Cerf“.

The latest meeting obviously lives up to the expectations, and among the highlights from the 30th of April´s session there is also the official confirmation that the last ICANN Meeting for 2008 will be held in Cairo between the 2nd and the 7th of November.

Among the other interesting news I found the redelegation of .KN, which leaves the caring hands of the University of Puerto Rico to be managed by TWNIC on behalf of the government of Saint Kitts and Nevis (am I the only one wondering what the hell does the Taiwanese Registry have to do with a handful of islands in the Caribbean?? ).

Finally, the ICANN Board has also decided to give some oxygen to the miserable cause of .Pro domains (yes, they really exist ), allowing the Registry to make their regulations less restrictive and hope to sell a domain or two thanks to this. (