Stories about: Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

The sky is falling on the number of global IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, and IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is the solution, executives from major technology companies said Wednesday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is starting to look at how the organization might function after its current memorandum of understanding with the US Department of Commerce expires in September 2009.

An antiphishing bill that was introduced in the US Senate last week could end up being used by large holders of trademarks to unfairly wrest legitimate domain names away from small businesses and individuals, according to a trade group that represents domain name investors and so-called direct search companies.

Phishers, cyber-squatters, and other online fraudsters continued their assault on well-known corporate brands over the last 12 months, increasing the burden on the companies being targeted and further frustrating consumers.

Internet policymakers are considering sweeping changes to the way they distribute IP addresses that could allow network operators to make money by transferring unused blocks of IPv4 address space to others in need. One result could be lessened incentive to move to IPv6 any time soon.

Who's afraid of IPv4 address depletion? Not IT professionals, according to a new survey due this week by BT INS, a Californian consulting firm.

A civil suit filed in Florida by Dell and its Alienware subsidiary is giving insight into the enormous sums of money that can be made by creating Web pages full of advertising links.

It's likely that the Internet will soon experience a catastrophic failure, a multi­day outage that will cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars."

Somewhere at the beginning of the 2nd century the poet Juvenal posed the question, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", which is Latin for "Who will watch the watchers?" Juvenal was actually riffing on Plato's "Republic" and with a good reason: The question was, and still is, profound because it concerns a basic problem with the machineries of government and governance and, by extension, applies to any authority that has little or no oversight.

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:

Verizon is standing by its program of redirecting typo traffic to their company's own search page, and claims that the redirects are valuable ways to help their users search the Internet.