Specific IP address to provide warning of potential name collisions

01/09/2014

Rodrigo de la Parra, ICANN Regional Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean.

On August 1st, ICANN announced the approval of the Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework. This framework has been designed to help mitigate the impact of name collisions within the Domain Name System (DNS).

This framework encourages registry operators to apply a technique known as “Controlled Interruption,” which can alert system administrators of potential problems within their networks. Specifically, an IPv4 address (127.0.53.53) will appear in system logs, allowing administrators to quickly troubleshoot any issues.

“Collisions often appear when a conflict occurs between a full domain name and a similar domain name which is being used within a private network. When this happens, users might be directed to a website they did not wish to visit, or they might be presented with an error message.”

Akram Atallah, ICANN Generic Domains Division President, noted that we now have a well-specified methodology to mitigate name collisions affecting delegated top level domain names, including a procedure that will allow registries to unblock selected second level domain names included on their lists. Developed with the multistakeholder community, these operational processes will help guarantee Domain Name System security.

ICANN will provide information to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), and it will continue to work with this organization to determine whether a new policy dealing with long term name collision management should be developed.

For more information on name collisions, please visit: https://www.icann.org/namecollision.

About ICANN

ICANN’s mission is to guarantee an open, global, unique, stable, and secure Internet. In order to contact another person over the Internet, users must enter an address on their computer. This address can be a name or a number, but it needs to be unique so that computers will know where to find it. ICANN is in charge of the global coordination of these unique identifiers. Without this coordination, a global Internet would not be possible. ICANN was established in 1998. It is a public non-profit corporation made up by people from all over the world and devoted to maintaining Internet security, stability and interoperability. It promotes competition and develops policies relating to unique Internet identifiers. ICANN does not regulate the content available on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and is not involved with Internet access. Despite all of this, its role as coordinator of the public Internet name system means that ICANN has a strong impact on Internet expansion and evolution. For more information, please visit www.icann.org.

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