Afilias : Consumers Prefer the .ORGANIC Web Address for True-Organic Goods
Afilias, the registry for .Organic ,announced thre results of the new research that provides important insights regarding U.K. and U.S. Internet users’ experience finding organic products and services online.
You can read the press release after the jump:
“.ORGANIC domain operator Afilias today announced the results of new research that provides important insights regarding U.K. and U.S. Internet users’ experience finding organic products and services online. Nearly 70% of respondents believe that some companies are misrepresenting themselves as “organic” to command a premium price, and 60% would like a reliable way to distinguish real organic providers online from the pretenders. That’s why almost 60% of respondents claimed they would be more inclined to visit a site on .ORGANIC, which is restricted to verified organic entities, than legacy .COM sites when searching for organic products.
The research showed the depth of confusion consumers feel when searching for organic products online: 43% of respondents acknowledge that they can’t easily differentiate who’s truly organic and who’s not when they are researching or shopping online; whereas only 5% claim they don’t have such a problem. 69% think companies should stop associating themselves with the term “organic” if they are not.
1 in 4 consumers believe that true organic companies and products SHOULD have a .ORGANIC web address, as only verified organic entities are allowed to have one.
“In traditional .COM or .CO.UK addresses, any site can have the word ‘organic’ in its web address and content because no one checks,” said Roland LaPlante, CMO of Afilias. “.ORGANIC addresses are different. We DO check every applicant to be sure they are certified organic or otherwise meet stringent eligibility requirements. Consumers have asked for help identifying real organic online, and .ORGANIC sites make it easy: if it’s in .ORGANIC, it’s organic!”
Beyond a preference to visit sites on .ORGANIC, consumers now EXPECT to see their favorite organic brands with a .ORGANIC web address. The most mentioned brands include:
• U.K. – Abel & Cole, Biona, Green and Black’s, Green People Organic Beauty, Lush, Planet Organic, Organix, Riverford, Planet Organic, Waitrose/Duchy Original’s, Wholefoods, Yeo Valley, and more.
• U.S. – Amy’s Kitchen, Annie’s Homegrown, Applegate, Clif Bar, Dole, Horizon Organic, Kashi, Nature’s Path, Newman’s Own, Organic Valley, Stonyfield, Trader Joe’s, Wholefoods/365 Everyday Value, and more.
It’s easy to understand why: traditional .COM and .CO.UK addresses are where the pretenders are; only .ORGANIC addresses are restricted to qualified products and services, and consumers have a right to expect the most trustworthy organic brands in the safest space.”
Legitimacy and Expertise in Global Internet Governance by Olivier Sylvain, Fordham University School of Law
Abstract: Over the course of the past decade or so, attention among Internet policymakers and scholars has shifted gradually from substantive design principles to the structure of Internet governance. ICANN in particular now faces a new skepticism about its legitimacy to administer the essential Internet Assigned Numbers Authority function.
ICANN has responded to these doubts by proposing a series of major governance reforms that would bring nation-states more into the organization’s decisionmaking. After all, transnational governance institutions in other substantive areas privilege nation-states as a matter of course. This Symposium Essay shows that these changes reflect a new era in which ICANN and other Internet policymakers no longer view the Internet as uniquely immune from the geopolitics of the physical world.
This paper is available for download from the Social Science Research Network website at:
ssrn.com/abstract=2534424
Over One Third Of .NL’s 5.5 Million Domains Secured By DNSSEC
[news release] 
The number of signed .nl domains today reached the two million mark. That means that 36 per cent of .nl’s 5.5 million-plus domains are now secured by DNSSEC. The Netherlands’ global lead in this field is largely down to our biggest registrars, who have signed their clients’ domains in bulk.
It is only a few months since we proudly announced that one third of all .nl domains were signed. The latest jump is thanks mainly to the activities of two registrars: Yourhosting and Antagonist.
Yourhosting
“This week, our subsidiary Yourhosting started signing domains,” explains Bart Carlier, Yourholding’s General Manager. “We’re now up to more than a hundred thousand. Over the next few weeks, the remainder of the .nl domains that we manage for our clients will follow. Security is one of our main focuses. DNSSEC is a vital part of the protection that we provide and something that the market is pushing strongly for.”
“The main challenge was the complexity of integrating DNSSEC into our backend processes. We worked closely with the people at PowerDNS to get everything sorted.”
Antagonist
“We are currently signing all our domains,” says Wouter de Vries, Antagonist’s founder. “We have nearly 65,000 .nl domains, the majority of which we also manage. All those names are going to be signed.”
“Here at Antagonist, we are very security-minded. Our new Patchman service is a good example of that. DNSSEC is another important feature of our security strategy. It’s good that the Netherlands is leading the way when it comes to the application of DNSSEC. But we are pressing ahead with the signing of domains under other TLDs as well, in parallel with what we’re doing under .nl.”
Like Yourhosting, Antagonist uses PowerDNS. “We switched from Bind to PowerDNS quite some time ago. It’s a really good package, especially for large-scale applications. We’ve been using it for some years and we’re very satisfied with it.”
Implementation
“For registrars, the key question is how to implement DNSSEC in their environments,” explains Michiel Henneke, Marketing Manager at SIDN. “The best way to go about it very much depends on which DNS software and control panel you use. The general experience is that it’s easiest to concentrate on the DNS software first. Once that is working the way you want, you can turn your attention to the control panel. The Netherlands is very much ahead of the game where DNSSEC is concerned, so control panel suppliers are still in the process of integrating DNSSEC support into software.”
“Fortunately, we have a substantial number of registrars who have already introduced DNSSEC and are willing to share their experience with others. (cases of dnssec ) As a result, registrars who already use PowerDNS have a good idea of how long implementation should take and what the risks are.”
Software support
“SIDN’s incentive scheme has certainly been an important driver for the introduction of DNSSEC,” continues Henneke. “We benefited from seeing how the Czech Republic and Sweden had incentivised registrars. It’s been so successful that we have recently extended our scheme to run until the end of 2018. The growth of DNSSEC has also been fuelled by the requirement that new gTLDs must support DNSSEC right from the start.”
“We are now looking at how we can make it easier for registrars who work with resellers to implement DNSSEC. How do you enable a reseller who manages maybe a couple of thousand domains to easily sign domains registered through a registrar that supports DNSSEC? Small businesses can’t easily afford to develop their own solutions and consequently tend to be dependent on the software suppliers. We are therefore pressing the software houses to integrate DNSSEC support into their products. Full adoption of DNSSEC depends on them.”
This SIDN news release was sourced from:
https://www.sidn.nl/a/internet-security/two-million-nl-domains-now-signed
Norwegian DNS Becomes More Secure
From 9 December Norwegian domain names can be secured with DNSSEC. This means that an end user can know for sure that he arrives at the correct web page when he looks up a domain name.
DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) is a security extension to the domain name system (DNS). DNSSEC protected domains are cryptographically signed, and this makes it possible to check that the reply to a domain lookup comes from the correct source of origin, and that the lookup remains unchanged. The purpose is among other things to prevent a scammer to falsify an answer in order to send an end user to a fake web page.
In addition to making it more secure to use domain names, extensive use of DNSSEC in the domain name system will prepare the grounds for new services that have to trust safety critical data in DNS.
&nash; DNSSEC increases the security, but at the same time it demands more competence from the people running the name service for a domain. We still think that the technology now is mature enough to be used as an upgrade of the infrastructure, says Hilde Thunem, Managing Director in Norid.
Norid is now offering DNSSEC, and encourages registrars to use the service, but the mechanism will not be activated autmatically for all Norwegian domains. So far 16 registrars offer DNSSEC.
This Norid news release was sourced from:
www.norid.no/nytt/dnssec-lansering.en.html
Vanishing evidence online or “LinkRot” may put stability of precedent in legal system at risk, according to new research from the University of Ottawa
Project funded through CIRA’s Community Investment Program aims to help judges and lawyers ensure that information found online is stable and reliable
[news release]Recent cases of cyber-bullying and cybercrime have put the importance of evidence produced and stored with social media tools at the centre of high-profile legal debates and decisions.
“As evidence gleaned online is more commonly used, it is critical to ensure that courts have the skills and resources to evaluate and preserve information,” said Professor Karen Eltis “The stability and reliability of precedent is absolutely fundamental to our legal system and a dead link or a changing Wikipedia entry can fundamentally disrupt a case.”
Recently, at the Canadian Bar Association’s 15th Annual Administrative Law, Labour and Employment Law Conference in Ottawa, Karen Eltis, Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa presented a body of research, funded through the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)’s Community Investment Program.
Eltis emphasizes the importance of training for judges and attorneys on how to deal with the emerging influx of digital and social media evidence.
In a related talk last month, Eltis presented at a conference hosted by Georgetown Law School in Washington D.C. focusing exclusively on this problematic phenomenon known as “LinkRot” (when online information goes missing) and its implications for the justice system.
“There is so much focus on how the Internet never forgets, but when it comes to complex chains of evidence, my concern is that we are overlooking the increasingly thorny problem of unwanted deleting or erasure” said Eltis. “Paradoxically, where we need the Internet to be more permanent and its information more durable, the medium is letting us down.”
When cases require evidence from social media sites or information scraped from digital videos, the risk that these sources of information will change is particularly high.
“Understanding how technology is affecting our court system is critical to the administration of justice and Professor Eltis has taken on the important role of ensuring that judges and lawyers are informed and prepared,” said David Fowler, Director of Communications and Marketing at CIRA. “Our community investment program was designed to help support researchers as they work through these emerging areas of national concern.”
Eltis is available for interviews and further discussion of her research.
About CIRA and the Community Investment Program
Through the CIRA Community Investment Program, CIRA funds projects that demonstrate the capacity to improve the Internet for all Canadians. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) manages the .CA top-level domain, Canada’s online identifier, on behalf of all Canadians. A Member-driven organization, CIRA represents the .CA registry internationally.
This CIRA news release was sourced from:
www.cira.ca/news/news-releases/cyber-bullying-cybercrime/
