Today is the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) awareness day.  It’s a day when the Internet community and others come together to raise awareness of the IWF and the work they do to minimise the availability of illegal content, specifically, child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

They are reporting latest research which indicates that over three quarters (77%) of UK adult internet users who have stumbled across images of children being sexually abused are unsure how to report them. In addition, 71% of those surveyed ranked the availability of online child sexual abuse images as their top concern about the internet.

Nominet supports the IWF and wishes them continued success with their awareness raising.

Recently we were pleased to be a part of the release of Unbound, a new open source alternative to the BIND domain name system (DNS) server, which we helped to develop.

Released by NLnet Labs, VeriSign Inc, Nominet and Kirei, Unbound is a recursive DNS server, which is used by Internet Service Providers to support DNS look-ups by Internet users. DNS is the feature of the Internet that matches domain names (such as www.nominet.org.uk) with IP addresses and is used for web browsing, email, messaging, and Internet-based telephony.

From its first prototype in 2004 Unbound was designed to be a faster, more secure alternative to BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) which has been the most popular choice for DNS servers since the 1980s.

One of the main advantages of Unbound is that it is high performing and very fast. It also supports DNSSEC, a security enhancement that is essential to help protect DNS transactions. By making the software freely available to developers (at http://unbound.net/) we hope to spread the deployment of DNSSEC. This in turn will enable Internet Service Providers to provide a faster, safer Internet experience for their customers.

Recently, the UK Internet Governance Forum was launched at an event in Parliament attended by over 100 people from industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society. The launch event featured a report from the Internet Governance Forum in Rio last November; a plan of action up until the next IGF meeting in India and beyond; the launch of Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge 2008 and a debate on the future of the Internet.

UK Internet Governance Forum

The UK Internet Governance Forum is a collaborative partnership between Nominet, the UK Department for Business and key parliamentarians. Its aim is to provide a local forum in the UK to engage industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society in debate on Internet Governance issues, stimulating partnerships and coalitions to deliver solutions and demonstrating best practice for others to learn from.

Other influential stakeholder groups that are taking part include the London Internet Exchange, the Coalition on Internet Safety and Amnesty International.

One of the key messages to emerge from the first UK IGF meeting is that the UK is taking a leading role in Internet governance, and that other countries are seeing what we are doing and beginning to start running their own processes at the national level. Brazil, France and Finland are among the first countries to follow the UK’s ‘best practice’ model. The UK is proving to the rest of the world that the Internet Governance Forum works, as a collaborative partnership between Government, business, civil society and academia, because it is not subject to Government legislation and is free from bureaucracy.

The UK IGF will concentrate on developing examples of UK best practice and serve as a potential prototype model for other national IGFs. Rt Hon Alun Michael MP commented that Tanya Byron’s recent review of the online child protection sphere has highlighted successful partnership initiatives in that area, particularly between the Internet Watch Foundation and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit. They have successfully combined resources and expertise from law enforcement, Industry and the third sector, while working closely with the Home Office’s Online Child Protection Task Force.

This kind of precedent paves the way for a cooperative template to be applied in the field of Internet governance. The key projects for the UK IGF going forwards will be to explore UK concerns around the IGF themes of security, diversity, access and openness at a seminar in May, and then to identify the UK’s best practice agenda for the IGF in Hydrabad at the awards ceremony for Nominet’s Best Practice Challenge in July.

Best Practice Challenge 2008

The Nominet Best Practice Challenge will recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse and open Internet experience.

This year there are six categories, as follows:

· Best development project award
· Best security initiative award
· Raising industry standards award
· Personal safety online award
· Internet for all award
· Open Internet award

You can find out more about these categories and how to enter by reading our Best Practice Challenge leaflet and this page of our web site.

We would encourage UK companies and organisations to send us their entries – the closing date is 25 April 2008. Winning entries will be announced at an awards ceremony in July 2008 and invited to a leading role in the UK preparatory meeting for the Internet Governance Forum meeting in India.

At the launch of the Challenge, our CEO Lesley Cowley commented that last year’s entries proved that the UK has much experience to share and promote in terms of best practice, and much to contribute to Internet Governance discussions. We’re looking forward to seeing more compelling examples of the same this time.

We were interested to see two high profile examples of organisations taking a stand against domain tasting recently.

Domain tasting is the practice of registering domain names, assessing revenue generation potential and, if they create an insufficient return, deleting the domain names before the registry requests payment.

Yesterday ICANN announced that they are proposing to remove their five-day ‘Add Grace Period’ which previously allowed registrars to rectify errors when registering new domain names without cost. Due to serial abuse of this facility by speculators testing the profitability of domain names through advertising revenues, ICANN will instead debit the payment as soon as the domain name is registered.

Although this change will clearly deter tasters from registering high volumes of domains speculatively, it will also make the process of registering less flexible for registrars. It remains to be seen exactly how the new process will work, but it is probably safe to assume that if the registrar has to pay these costs upfront they will ultimately be passed to their customers.

When we took steps against domain tasting in August 2006, we decided to introduce limits on the number of domains a registrar could delete. Our limit for deletions to rectify spelling errors etc is five domains or 5% of the total number of domains registered but not yet invoiced (whichever is higher) but the limit for practices such as domain tasting is zero, and the limits form part of our registrar agreement, the formal contract that all our registrars sign up to. We believe this solution is neater, as it effectively counters the practice of domain tasting but at the same time allows some flexibility for registrars where genuine errors have occurred.

In a separate move, Google announced last week that they will start to monitor domain names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within the current five-day grace period, and exclude them from their AdSense program. Such a move would clearly strike at the heart of the problem. If tasters stop receiving revenues for pay-per-click ads associated with the domains they are testing, they will soon stop trying.

Both proposals have their merits, and it is encouraging to see that concerted efforts are being made from various sectors within the industry that could herald the beginning of the end of this practice.

There has recently been some suggestion of governments attempting to control their citizens’ access to the Internet. In Russia, the government is reportedly planning to create a web that operates in the Cyrillic alphabet and is independent from the rest of the Internet and the Japanese communications ministry is recommending that their government starts regulating the internet by 2010, in response to concerns over libellous flaming on forums.
The situation in Russia illustrates the complex issues surrounding the implementation of internationalised domain names. The transition to the widespread use of non-ASCII domain names combined with a majority of users operating non-ASCII keyboards could result in a situation where citizens find themselves restricted to a single language Internet and cut off from the rest of the world wide web.
There is also speculation that in some territories citizens will need a password authorised by government agencies in order to use the global internet, thus giving governments the ability to control what communication individuals have with the outside world. One of the key arguments in defence of this practice is that it helps monitor cybercrime. However, this stance does not convince security experts who have suggested that such a move would make it very difficult to track cybercrime as it would put a wall between the criminals and their victims.
Elsewhere there have been further moves towards web censorship in response to concern over citizens using the Internet to launch critical attacks. In countries where the media is heavily regulated and subject to a lot of self-censorship, the Internet has represented an oasis of freedom where citizens can openly criticise people without fear of personal reprisal, thanks to the protection provided by anonymous posting. There are however, an increasing number of stories about web sites that have caused sufficient uproar to have been closed down and placed on government lists of sites that are apparently “unacceptable and harmful to Society”. Some see that these heavy-handed shutdowns may be the first step to introducing filtering software to control what appears on the Internet in countries where governments are keen to eradicate vitriolic protests in the public arena. Such powers of censorship would most likely be held by governments alone without the buffer of any independent watchdog to arbitrate on what constitutes ‘unacceptable’ content.
All of this activity seems a world away from the wide-ranging Internet freedom we are used to in the UK. Nevertheless, it is a debate that has been running for some time on a global level at the Internet Governance Forum which has been discussing access and openness as two of its key themes. Whilst progress is being made in some aspects, these recent developments highlight the political complexities involved and give credence to those who espouse the theory that fragmentation of the global Internet is inevitable.