ICANN seeks comments on Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions

DigitalSENSE Business News:

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is seeking public comments on ‘Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions’ till April 21, 2014.

DigitalSENSE Business News reports that following the proclamation of an independent report which maps possible ways forward in mitigating domain name collisions, ICANN has offered a set of concrete recommendations on how to mitigate potential risks of domain name collisions.

ICANN officials explained that a name collision occurs when an attempt to resolve a name used in a private name space results in a query to the public Domain Name System (DNS).

Akram Atallah, President of ICANN's Global Domains Division told DigitalSENSE Business News that this report took an in-depth look at the collision issue and the potential risks and impacts, and gives some very clear advice aimed at how to help system operators detect and mitigate those risks.

"The next step is to seek input from our community on the report's findings," he said.

The report, DigitalSENSE Business News gathered stressed that name collisions are nothing new and that any issues that arise from expansion of the Top-Level Domains (TLDs) under ICANN's New gTLD programme which would resemble those that occur in other parts of the DNS.

“But the report noted that expanding the number of TLDs will not fundamentally or significantly increase the risks of name collisions,” he underscored.

Specifically, the study, he pointed out, outlined a set of recommendations on how ICANN and the TLD operators should handle the issue of name collisions in the expanding TLD space.

Based on the foregoing, ICANN would require new TLD registries to implement and publish a 120-day controlled interruption zone monitored by ICANN immediately upon delegation in the root zone.

DigitalSENSE Business News learnt that after the 120-day period, there shall be no further collision-related restrictions on the TLD. While ICANN should have emergency response processes to analyze and act upon reported problems that present ‘clear and present danger to human life.’

Just as ICANN and others in the community should continue to collect and analyze data relating to the root servers and to the controlled interruption, even as the Top-Level Domains such as .corp, .home and .mail would be permanently reserved.

RN/GEE

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