It's no longer merely an academic question. Since 1998, responsibility for overseeing domain names and addresses has rested with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit group based in Marina Del Ray, Calif.

ICANN has enjoyed notable successes in the last six years. It has created a way to resolve domain name disputes, formalized some ad hoc arrangements the U.S. government created and approved a handful of top-level domains like .aero and .museum. In between, ICANN has weathered outbreaks of congressional enmity and, occasionally, outright hostility from foreign governments.

But now, the governance structure of the Internet may have reached an inflection point. ICANN is being assailed domestically by VeriSign, which filed a federal lawsuit last month, complaining that it has been repeatedly thwarted in trying to make money off its government-granted right to run the master .com and .net database. Internationally, ICANN is fending off a power grab from the United Nations, which has wanted more involvement with the Internet, ever since one of its agencies in 1999 proposed a tax of 1 cent per every 100 e-mail messages.

Internet service provider Comcast Corp. is cutting off Internet service for some customers whose computers are being used to relay spam messages, according to a company spokeswoman.

"Comcast is one of the favored networks of spammers, because Comcast customers have a lot of bandwidth and are usually not secured against common (software) vulnerabilities," Ullrich said.

At the same time, Senderbase records show what appear to be the Internet Protocol addresses of more than 40 Comcast customers who have sent out more than 100,000 e-mail messages a day, with many sending close to 1 million daily e-mail messages. ( http://www.senderbase.org/?searchString=comcast.net&searchBy=domain.)

Ullrich said the Internet Storm Center tells Comcast when it finds infected hosts by sending a message to a Comcast e-mail address set up to receive complaints about abuse. Typically the company does not respond directly to such reports, but it has moved to shut down infected hosts after receiving complaints, he said.

NEW YORK (AP) -- If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail.

Many Internet analysts worry, though, that turning e-mail into an economic commodity would undermine its value in democratizing communication. But let's start with the math: At perhaps a penny or less per item, e-mail postage wouldn't significantly dent the pocketbooks of people who send only a few messages a day. Not so for spammers who mail millions at a time.

Goodmail chief executive Richard Gingras said individuals might get to send a limited number for free, while mailing lists and nonprofit organizations might get price breaks.

The most senior officer from the UK's Hi-Tech Crime Unit has called for Web sites devoted to subjects such as cannibalism and necrophilia to be closed down, claiming they contribute to Internet criminality.

Detective chief superintendent Len Hynds, who is the head of Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), said on Tuesday that the most vulnerable people in society need to be protected from corrupting influences.

According to Hynds, Web sites devoted to such extreme material are the online equivalent of graffiti and litter. He believes that taking a zero tolerance on this kind of content could make the Internet a more law-abiding place.

The extremely popular firewall, ZoneAlarm, has been dealt a nasty blow with a "highly critical" security hole that allows system access to remote users - i.e. the worst possible situation. The hole affects the most recent version of ZoneAlarm - version 4 - and users with the software's update facility turned on were this morning warned to upgrade and asked to download a run a 4.8MB patching file. The vulnerability itself is an unchecked buffer in the fundamental e-mail protocol SMTP. ZoneAlarm's creators Zone Labs warned that sufficiently exploited, "a skilled attacker could cause the firewall to stop processing traffic, execute arbitrary code, or elevate malicious code’s privileges".

Unfortunately ZoneLabs is taking this 'golden opportunity' to extort subscription fees out of the end users. Yes... you need to have a "current annual update and support subscription" when you visit ZoneAlarm's download page for this updated version.

Microsoft's Web site disappeared from our Internet radar this morning. The site may have been struck down by attacks by virus writers who threatened to target Microsoft in the way SCO was targeted last week.

According to Netcraft here, Microsoft.com went down at midnight London time. Microsofties are currently beaving away to repair the damage, we understand, though no statement is yet forthcoming from the Vole concerning what the reasons for the outage are.

The BBC has a piece by Bill Thompson suggesting that "control" of the internet should move away from corporate groups(ICANN and the Web Consortium) and to governments. We previously had an article on ICANN and the UN World Summit on the Information Society. One quote: "We allow images of consensual sex in our cinemas, but not images of bestiality or child abuse. Why should the net be any different?" My personal answer: because the internet should not be another TV or cinema, it should be a free, user-as-peer and user-controllable media; a "reversible" media, as Baudrillard would put it; not user-as-consumer.

Figures from mail filtering firm MessageLabs show that the number of copies of the virus being caught everyday are swiftly diminishing.

Despite the slowdown Mydoom has already become the fastest spreading virus ever and looks set to challenge the Sobig.F program for the most active virus of all time.

The virus did not rely on technical tricks to spread so far and wide, instead it played on the gullibility of users to open the e-mail message bearing it and click on the infected attachment.

The MyDoom Internet worm claimed its first scalp Sunday, paralyzing the Web site of American software firm SCO Group with a massive data blitz.

The speed and severity of the attack surprised security officials. "It was spectacularly successful," said Mikko Hypponen, research manager at Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure.

The MyDoom attack trigger was set for 1609 GMT Sunday. But with so many computer clocks incorrectly set, the infected machines began firing off data requests at SCO.com hours earlier, Hypponen said. "It will only get worse for SCO as time goes on," he added.

SCO is not alone. Microsoft Corp has been targeted by a second variant of MyDoom, dubbed MyDoom.B. That attack is timed to kick off Tuesday.

By all accounts, George Nussbaum demands a lot from his Internet connection. He streams video and transfers large files from his office. His family downloads movie trailers and his stepson listens to and buys music online.

Nussbaum subscribes to his cable TV provider's high-speed Internet service, which, he thought, was built for such high-bandwidth activities. Then, in November, he got a letter from the provider, Comcast Corp., ordering him to dial down his usage or face service termination.

Nussbaum, who at first had no idea how many gigabytes he consumed, was willing to cut back. He called to find out by how much, but customer service had no answer. Then he asked how much he used. Again, Comcast wouldn't provide a number.