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Telecoms, Internet and Convergence

daily link  05 June 2002

Mozilla 1.0 Available

Slashdot is reporting that the open source web browser, Mozilla 1.0, has been officially released.

 9:18:24 PM  permalink  Google It!    

America's Technology Industry Increasingly Intertwined with Government

The Economist has a good piece on how the US high-tech industry is getting cosier with government and notes that the "free-wheeling, libertarian stance of the industry, always somewhat hypocritical, has been changing since the mid-1990s". Eli Noam pointed this out back in July 1997 in his wonderful opinion piece in the New York Times: An Unfettered Internet? Keep Dreaming.

 5:33:50 PM  permalink  Google It!    

KPNQwest Crisis and a lesson about Critical Network Infrastructure

Is there a bottom in the telecoms onslaught? The sudden collapse of KPNQwest, who operated a large pan-European data network carrying an estimated 25-30% of Europe's IP traffic is a hot topic of discussion on Total Telecom. The collapse is going to have an unknown impact on Internet infrastructure and connectivity within Europe and internationally. Ebone and GTS, who KPNQwest acquired only in March 2002, appear to be casualties.

The rapid collapse of KPNQwest provides an interesting lesson vis-à-vis contingency planning of critical network infrastructure. Besides the large numbers of customers who'll be left stranded or scrambling for new providers, KPNQwest's infrastructure provided DNS services (secondaries through ns.eu.net*) for a number of Internet country code top level domains (ccTLDs). Those ccTLDs may need to rapidly find out whether they have enough distributed secondaries if ns.eu.net vanishes. Update: RIPE NCC has made an agreement with KPNQwest to temporarily take over the hosting of ns.eu.net.

This reminds me that less than a year ago there was a partial unavailability of one of the Internet's master root name servers, namely c.root-servers.net, located in PSInet’s network infrastructure, when a large backbone provider, Cable & Wireless, disconnected PSINet's peering connections because they no longer met C&W’s requirements. The result was that C&W customers were unable to reach that root name server until the peering arrangement was reinstated.

*EUnet was acquired by Qwest in 1999 before KPNQwest was created.

 4:08:43 PM  permalink  Google It!    

Many .Name Registrations Violate Regulations

Thousands of recently registered "dot-name" domains violate regulations governing the new Web addresses, according to a study released by Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center For Internet & Society. Also see the related article in the Washington Post.

 2:00:36 PM  permalink  Google It!    

Last Call on Technical Standards for Internationalized Domain Names

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) started last week its last call for comments on the results of the Internationalized Domain Name working group standardization activities. There are three related Internet drafts:

The thrust of the working group's hotly debated approach is to maintain an underlying ASCII representation, based on using "Punycode": an encoding technique that uniquely and reversibly transforms Unicode (an encoding of the world's language scripts) into ASCII strings. For an overview on why this particular approach was taken and how it works, see the ITU's briefing paper from its December 2001 joint seminar with WIPO on multilingual domain names. It should be emphasized that even when a technical standard emerges, it will be the beginning of a very long process. In fact, the policy and coordination issues are likely to be even more daunting than the already contentious technical work. ICANN's IDN committee has produced a related discussion paper but I think if anything, they've greatly underestimated the issues that are likely to arise. Update: It didn't take long to confirm that last statement: see follow-up Chinese Domain Name Consortium Reject IETF Approach.

 12:31:44 PM  permalink  Google It!    

 
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Last update: 03/04/2003; 11:35:35.