Stories about: Internet Architecture Board

Internet security gurus and leading vendors are urging the US federal government to rapidly deploy security and authentication mechanisms at the top level of the DNS hierarchy, which is known as the root zone.

Thirty years have passed since the Internet Protocol was first described in a series of technical documents written by early experimenters. Since then, countless engineers have created systems and applications that rely on IP as the communications link between people and their computers.

The Internet engineering community is grappling with what to do about a serious flaw in the DNS discovered mid-year, and the ongoing debate brings to mind a famous quotation from Voltaire: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that's not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group's staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Olaf Kolkman, a Dutch DNS expert, is the new chair of the Internet Architecture Board, a panel of 13 leading network engineers who provide technical oversight to the IETF, the Internet's premier standards-setting body. He's also CEO of NLnet Labs, an Amsterdam research group focused on DNS security.

The Internet Architecture Board has a new leader: Olaf Kolkman, a DNS expert from the Netherlands.

From the corporate boardroom to the enterprise data center, the 50 men and women on this list exercise power within the network industry to one degree or another. Some have the clout to sway the world's technology decisions, while others command attention within vertical industries, particular market segments or simply -- though not inconsequentially -- within their own organizational domains. We have ranked each of our 2004 power-brokers based on such stature, as well as on the person's visibility and the ways in which the person functions as a role model. To see how these 50 fit together, we've aligned them by category as well, from the titans to the standards-setters.

Eighteen months after acknowledging pervasive organizational and productivity problems, the Internet Engineering Task Force continues to search for remedies designed to bring important network standards to market sooner.

VeriSign went on the offensive against critics of its Site Finder service Tuesday, issuing a lengthy rebuttal to the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) complaints about the new service, designed to direct users who mistype an Internet domain name towards a legitimate Web site.

VeriSign said last Friday it will suspend its controversial Site Finder service after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) threatened legal action.