icann

Reuters is carrying a piece by Joseph Menn, Key Internet operator VeriSign hit by hackers.

Several paras caught my eye. These two:

"Oh my God," said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and before that the top lawyer at the National Security Agency. "That could allow people to imitate almost any company on the Net."

The VeriSign attacks were revealed in a quarterly U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing in October that followed new guidelines on reporting security breaches to investors. It was the most striking disclosure to emerge in a review by Reuters of more than 2,000 documents mentioning breach risks since the SEC guidance was published.

And this one:

Ken Silva, who was VeriSign's chief technology officer for three years until November 2010, said he had not learned of the intrusion until contacted by Reuters. Given the time elapsed since the attack and the vague language in the SEC filing, he said VeriSign "probably can't draw an accurate assessment" of the damage.

I've met Ken several times while he was CTO of (the whale) VGRS and I was CTO of (a minnow) CORE. I think his assessment (VGRS's inability to draw an accurate assessment at the point in time it disclosed the breach to the SEC) is likely to be correct.

I've no idea if this was disclosed to ICANN and/or the DoC as part of the .net contract renewal. The notion that the duty of disclosure by publicly traded corporations of operational failure extends to SEC, for the protection of investors, and no further, comes as a surprise. This is the dot after all.

The ICANN Bylaws entity, the Address Supporting Organization, will begin public consideration of the candidates for ICANN Board Seat #9, currently held by Ray Plzak. I've offered to serve, as has Martin Levy, Bill Manning, and Ray Plzak.

After granting a blanket half dollar in additional profits to the price capped registries, each beneficiary is rolling out its price hike implementation. Neustar today raised its wholesale price for new registrations, transfers and renewals for its .biz inventory by $0.55 per domain per year. Three weeks ago the Internet Society ran the same plan concerning it's .org inventory.

What justifies the price increase? The triumphant competition narrative has been that since the competitive registrar testbed was introduced in 2000 that prices for domains have fallen from $35 to $6. How is that narrative "enhanced" by a program of price increases for the price capped inventories, and what base costs, or contractions, can support a necessity claim for an increase in end-user costs?

While the price of memory (cache, primary, and secondary), processing, and bandwidths (intra-system fabric and inter-system connect) follow Moore's Law's curve downwards, the Internet Society (ISOC), through its contractual entity, the Public Interest Registry (PIR) will increase it's prices on July 1st by 0.49 USD per domain per year. This follows Verisign's increase in it's .com and .net prices on January 1, 2012 by 0.51USD for .com and 0.46 USD for .net.

These increases in "consumer protection price caps" were approved by the ICANN Board, creating an additional $50m in profit (there are no increased costs, in fact, per-unit registry costs are declining, per Moore, so the profit is understated) for the incumbent for-profit monopoly operator Verisign, and the sole entity (ISOC+Afilias) to which ICANN has made a redelegation as a result of an open, competitive, bidding for renewal of a USG originated government interest contract.

Find any "public interest" in padding the tab, one hundred million times, each year, for as long as this network and its current resources to names mechanism lasts?

Nelly Kroes, a member of the EU Commission, and its current Vice President, comments on her blog:

• she lauds the multi stakeholder model, the attention to conflicts of interest, and the mention of the public interest;
• she does say "The contract is still not perfect; for example, it’s still restricted to US companies, which is a shame given that the Internet is a resource for the whole world";
• and she concludes "this is a big step forward in ensuring a fairer, global, transparently-governed Internet".

Solicitation Number: SA1301-12-RP-IANA
Notice Type: Combined Synopsis/Solicitation
Synopsis: Added: Nov 10, 2011 6:59 pm
November 10, 2011

SUBJECT: Request for Proposal (RFP) SA1301-12-RP-IANA

Dear Interested Offerors:

The United States Department of Commerce (DoC), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) intends to award a contract to maintain the continuity and stability of services related to certain interdependent Internet technical management functions, known collectively as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

The anticipated period of performance of this contract is April 1, 2012 - March 31, 2015.

This solicitation utilizes a Statement of Work (SOW). The SOW describes the work in terms of the required results and reduces the inherent instructions regarding "how" to accomplish the work.

Please send questions regarding the solicitation electronically via email to mdunn@doc.gov. All written questions must be received no later than 4PM Eastern Standard Time, November 18, 2011.

The closing date for receipt of proposals is 4PM Eastern Standard Time, December 12, 2011.

Thank you in advance and we look forward to reviewing your responses to this RFP!

1. SF33 Page 1
2. RFP SA1301-12-RP-IANA Pages 2-34
3. RFP SA1301-12-RP-IANA Pages 35-66

At the Rome ICANN meeting in March 2004 I'd the pleasure of having lunch with the new manager for .ps -- the ccTLD delegated to the Palestinian Authority. The existence of "ps" and "eu" in the ISO 3166-1 table are the odd stories of the two useful "non-country" entries in iso3166-1 (there are lots of uninteresting and marginally useful "non-country" entries in iso3166-1, basically, any place where a "post office" ever existed and a British stamp dirtied with ink, or the equivalent colonial power, has a 3166-1 entry, along with a dozen "intellectual property" non-state entities), and both have been delegated, allowing the ".eu" gTLD registry, and the ".ps" ccTLD registry to exist.

If the US has to unfund UNESCO because of Congressional NeoCon Caucus brain-damage, I suppose all that is protecting the IANA root from being swept overseas is the fact that the contract is a no-cost contract.

Timely reading is Juan Cole's comment on the UNESCO vote, and the consequences of US ... unfunding of bodies that do ... recognized (or resolve) Palestine (or DNS A records in the .ps namespace).

Later: PalTel has been targeted by a distributed system today. A circa 2006 description of the Palestinian IT sector is in this piece from Al Jazeera English link.