<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br><div apple-content-edited="true">
hi all,</div><div apple-content-edited="true"><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true">our very own Christian Dawson on name-collisions. way to go! Registrar SG Chair Michele Neylon is featured as well.</div><div apple-content-edited="true"><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true">mikey</div><div apple-content-edited="true"><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><a href="http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/name-collision-new-gtlds">http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/name-collision-new-gtlds</a></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><header class="article-header"><h1 class="entry-title single-title clearfix" itemprop="headline">Name Collisions Could Pose Potential Problem for Web Hosts</h1>
</header><p class="entry-meta clearfix imageDate">by <a href="http://www.thewhir.com/profile/nicole-henderson" rel="nofollow external"><span class="author">Nicole Henderson</span></a><span class="imageDate"> on </span><time class="entry-date" itemprop="datePublished" datetime="2014-01-13T14:29:21-05:00">January 13, 2014</time></p><p class="comment-count">Much of the coverage on new gTLDs in the hosting
industry has focused on the scope of opportunity it presents for web
hosting providers looking to grow their business. From extensive
marketing campaigns to new tools and platforms to help customers reserve
their top choices, web hosts have been busy over the past few years
preparing for this growth phase of the Internet.</p><div class="entry-content clearfix" itemprop="articleBody"><p dir="ltr">But one issue that perhaps hasn’t seen as much coverage
when it comes to new gTLDs is the concern around name collisions.
According to an<a href="http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-03dec13-en.htm" target="_blank"> ICANN report released at the beginning of December</a>,
called Name Collision Identification and Mitigation for IT
Professionals, “a name collision occurs when users unknowingly access a
name that has been delegated in the public DNS when the user’s intent
was to access a resource identified by the same name in a private
network.”</p><p>In the document, ICANN explains that the “collision occurrences
themselves are not the concern, but whether collisions cause unexpected
behavior or harm, the nature of the unexpected behavior or harm and the
severity of the consequence.”</p><p dir="ltr">Christian Dawson, COO of web hosting company <a href="http://www.servint.net/" target="_blank">ServInt</a> and co-chair of the <a href="http://i2coalition.com/" target="_blank">Internet Infrastructure Coalition</a>,
said that the collisions have the potential to not only break internal
systems, but also create security issues since internal information
could unexpectedly be external.</p><p dir="ltr">“Let’s say you were a mid-nineties systems designer and you
decided you were going to build a system where on your internal network
you were going to call something, let’s say your company was a folders
company, you would call something folders.mail. Well, now there is a
.mail. You may have had a system that for 10 years went to your internal
system, but now it’s going to go out into the world with somebody
else’s folders.mail,” Dawson said. “There are implications there. It’s
breaking internal systems, but also, what are you sending there? Is it
something that should remain private? There are security issues. There
could be financial institutions or medical institutions that are doing
things with internal name designation that are now going to be out in
the public. Those things are going to stop resolving to the internal
places and start resolving to external places, and all of the sudden
some guy who owns that domain is getting everybody’s mail.”</p><p dir="ltr">ICANN released the report to offer recommendations on how
to mitigate name collisions, but it is a complex issue that doesn’t have
a quick fix.</p><p dir="ltr">“There’s not an easy solution because the standard practice
has been, when you’re coding a system, that either you use a domain you
own or use local host,” Dawson said.</p><p dir="ltr">“We know things are still being written that could break,”
he said. “ICANN is trying to fight that but it’s going to take a lot of
visibility. It’s great that ICANN is working on it but there is a
significant part of our industry that doesn’t even know who ICANN is. I
would say about 70 percent of the industry, and we’re in this space,
doesn’t have any idea that the new gTLD process is happening much less
that there could be ramifications of gTLD issuing that needs to be
learned how to be resolved.”</p><p dir="ltr">While ICANN has released information on how to deal with
the potential issues of name collisions, the document is dense and uses
acronyms and jargon that may not be familiar to a less technical
audience.</p><p dir="ltr">Dawson said that the big deal for hosting providers is that
clients are going to call their web host when things break, and if
hosts don’t know what is happening, they won’t have the ability to
troubleshoot.</p><p dir="ltr">“The successful hosting providers out there, they focus on
being two-steps ahead of any issues with their clients so they can build
trusting relationships with them. I feel as though this particular
issue is one that has flown too far under the radar and that in order to
focus on awareness,” Dawson said. “What I want to do is get the word
out that this could be a potential problem, not to say new gTLDs are a
bad thing.”</p><p dir="ltr">Michele Neylon, CEO of <a href="https://www.blacknight.com/" target="_blank">Blacknight Solutions,</a>
a web host and domain registrar in Ireland, has been vocal on the issue
of name collisions, and in a press release last month he urged IT
professionals to correct potential name collision issues sooner rather
than later.</p><p dir="ltr">“It’s that kind of weird scenario where it’s not really
clear what could happen,” Neylon said. “What ICANN has been trying to do
is trying to get the word out and get people to think about it, look at
it, and check how things are set up. From our perspective it’s the
right thing to do.”</p><p dir="ltr">For larger web hosts, name collisions likely won’t pose a
problem because they have the resources and in-house knowledge to be
aware of what is going on and impact of new gTLDs, he said.</p><p dir="ltr">“The reality is if you look at all of the smaller web hosts
out there, they’re one or two man bands, and probably have enough
clients to pay their bills but wouldn’t have the technical know-how,” he
said.</p><p dir="ltr">According to Blacknight’s suggestions, IT professionals
should monitor name services and compile a list of private TLDs used
internally, and compare the list against the list of new TLD strings.
From there they should create a plan to mitigate causes of leakage and
prepare users for the impending change in name usage by notifying them
in advance.</p><p dir="ltr">“The thing is that the new gTLDs are going ahead, that’s
happening, but you could end up with the kind of situation where
somebody’s office could just stop working,” Neylon said. “We don’t
really know what could happen and that’s part of the issue.”</p></div></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important; float: none; ">PHONE: 651-647-6109, FAX: 866-280-2356, WEB: <a href="http://www.haven2.com">www.haven2.com</a>, HANDLE: OConnorStP (ID for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)</span>
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