Today, we released the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief, which showed the internet grew by five million domain names in the first quarter of 2014. The total number of domain names across all top-level domains (TLDs) is now 276 million! This is a 1.7 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2013. [1]
It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the early internet operated on the scale of kilobytes, with all spoken languages represented using a single character encoding – ASCII. Today’s global internet, so fundamental to society and the world’s economy, now enables access to orders of magnitude more information, connecting a speakers of a full spectrum of languages.
The research challenges continue to scale along with data volumes and user diversity.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) March 14, 2014, announcement proposing the transition of its legacy Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship role has presented the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) multi-stakeholder community equal amounts of opportunity and responsibility. We have been handed a singular opportunity to define the terms of any stewardship transition and the fundamental responsibility to get it right.
Getting it right means ensuring, through a bottom-up, multi-stakeholder process, the reform of ICANN’s accountability structures to protect the community and the multi-stakeholder model prior to NTIA’s disengagement from its oversight and stewardship role. It also means acting quickly and efficiently so our window of opportunity is not missed.
Today, Verisign announced five million domain names were added to the internet in the fourth quarter of 2013, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 271 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2013, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief. The increase of five million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.9 percent over the third quarter of 2013. Worldwide registrations have grown by 18.5 million, or 7.3 percent, year over year.
On Dec. 12, 2013, the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced the formation of a new working group, Extensible Provisioning Protocol Extensions (eppext). The working group was formed to create an internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) registry of Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) extensions and to review specifications of extensions for inclusion in the registry. EPP is the standard domain name provisioning protocol for generic top-level domain (gTLD) name registries that operate under the auspices of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It is also used by a number of country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registries.
The “E” in EPP has been both a blessing and a curse. EPP uses features of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) that provide “hooks” for protocol extensions. These hooks make it easy to specify new functionality without having to modify EPP itself. That’s the blessing. The curse has been that easy extensibility has led to multiple independent specifications that describe similar functionality. In a 2010 presentation, Patrick Mevzek (developer of the Net::DRI Perl library that implements EPP) described XML namespaces used in 68 distinct extensions. He further described three different extensions created by different registry operators to provide domain “undelete” functionality. This duplicity of effort makes implementation much more complicated for anyone developing EPP clients.
Some background information will help explain how we got here.
At each of our Verisign Labs’ Distinguished Speaker Series events I learn something new that stays with me and helps shape my thinking about technology and its impact on the world. The most recent brought the benefit of three insights, as the expanded event, Advancing Internet Technologies in the Developing World, featured a keynote speaker as well as two recipients of Verisign’s Infrastructure Grants.
Bitcoin, the crypto-currency that has captured the imaginations of technologists and economists around the world, has received a considerable amount of attention over the past couple of weeks.
Recently we have seen how domain name registrations tend to surge in the immediate aftermath of global phenomena. The rise of Bitcoin also presents an opportunity to track global interest and investment by way of .com and.net domain name registrations.
One of the greatest strengths of the internet is seen when a customer in one country engages with a brand in another. The internet has enabled companies to grow in influence and reach customers far beyond national boundaries in ways that could not have been foreseen even a decade ago.
One of the few places where national boundaries are still apparent online though is in a brand’s domain name. By using a domain name tied to a country, such as one ending in .uk, .ru, or another country code top-level domain (ccTLD), a brand can signal to the world its country of origin.
This is great for a company that only wants to engage with customers in their home country. However, for a person attempting to access content from abroad, a domain name ending in a ccTLD may be difficult to remember due to its unfamiliar syntax. Companies seeking to connect with a global audience can’t afford to have the address for their digital storefronts be limiting in any way. For this reason, it is usually best to select a domain name extension that people are globally familiar with, like .com and .net.
It’s a privilege for Verisign to welcome this week the recipients of our 2012 Internet Infrastructure Grant program, who will be presenting the results of research their teams have conducted over the past year and a half. The results will be the focus of our fourth and final Verisign Labs Distinguished Speaker Series event for the year.
The event will open with a keynote talk by Prof. Ellen Zegura of Georgia Tech (United States), who will give an overview of the field these two projects explore, “Intermittent and Low-Resource Networks: Theory and Practice.” It’s an honor to have Prof. Zegura with us to describe both the academic and hands-on work she’s conducted in this important area.
Fascinating tour of C compiler evolution by David Chisnall http://vrsn.cc/1dUb5rY @Verisign‘s #vBSDcon. Compatible with DOS or VAX?
— Burt Kaliski Jr. (@modulomathy) October 26, 2013
I began my journey into computer science as a high school freshman coding on a TI-59 calculator. Later in my high school years, I wrote computer chess games on a PDP-11/34 minicomputer in BASIC and, for speed, in assembly language. I might have contributed inadvertently to the Y2K problem with some FORTRAN and COBOL programs I wrote in the early 1980s. In college, I learned LISP and CLU on a MULTICS operating system, and had a part-time job where I programmed on a VAX-11/750. But eventually I did get around to coding in C on a Unix box.
So this is a little more information than 140 characters would allow, which may explain why I found David Chisnall’s opening talk at the recent vBSDcon so fascinating. DOS and VAX are to computer professionals what the classics are to the liberal arts: our Iliad and Odyssey. And C and Unix, in their various forms, are the living languages that preserve the connection to the early days – the contemporary variants of Koine Greek. The art of building C compilers as well as operating systems continues to advance skillfully.