The Race to ‘Do Good’ on the Internet

By Tom Tovar, Nominum

Google’s motto of “do no evil” is widely publicized and accepted as the baseline standard in the Internet marketplace. But it’s time to raise the bar and rise above “do no evil” — it’s time to “do good.”

Let’s start with cleaning up the darker corners of the Internet. Community standards around the world have rejected all forms of content that involve child exploitation. Yet the Internet is rife with such insidious material.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s efforts to pressure Internet service providers to fight child exploitation content became easier with a recent law approved unanimously by Congress and President Bush. Additional legislation from Vice President Joe Biden would require the Justice Department to develop a national strategy to fight child exploitation. This kind of legislation is a great start, but the real proof lies in execution, which sometimes falls short of intended goals.

Today, protecting the Internet experience largely is left up to end users. But the hodgepodge of solutions available to them suffers from many problems: lack of universal adoption, consumer confusion about their effectiveness, failure to upgrade on a timely basis, limited support for newer devices, and more. To complicate the picture, many search and application vendors demand service providers stay out of the way of their services to their customers. All of this leaves end users to surf the Internet with a certain amount of exposure — to identity theft, malicious code that can steal and secretly forward confidential information, accidental stumbles into truly horrible content, spam, phishing and pharming.

Technology is a critical part of solving these problems. Every Internet user, every device, every application, and every Internet transaction starts with a Domain Name System (DNS) query, making DNS a logical place to “do good.” DNS is the workhorse that daily translates billions and billions of domains to IP addresses so people can reach their destinations quickly and easily. But today, DNS servers just happily resolve any query, to any kind of content: legal or illegal, benign or malicious, mainstream or illicit. This facilitates the evil-doers’ goals, leaving the task of protecting the Internet to users themselves.

It’s time for carriers, enterprises, government and vendors to work together to transform DNS from the diligent but not so smart workhorse it is today into an intelligent race horse that can actively and effectively “do good” for all Internet users.

As Nominum's CEO, Tom Tovar brings a proven track record of achieving objectives and expanding markets, including revenue growth, product innovation, and organizational transformation and execution of strategic partnerships. Tovar came to his current role after serving as Nominum's president and COO. Previously, he was the vice president of worldwide sales and business development at Nominum. In these positions, he was responsible for growing the company's sales revenue, defining new product initiatives, and defining and executing worldwide partnership and alliances. Before joining Nominum, Tovar was vice president in charge of corporate development at NetScreen Technologies, where he led NetScreen's alliances, strategic partnering and M&A activities. He also served as NetScreen's vice president of legal affairs. Before NetScreen, as a lawyer at Cooley Godward LLP, he led private financings, IPOs, strategic alliance and licensing transactions as well as M&A efforts for numerous successful technology companies. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in finance from the University of Houston and a J.D. from Stanford University.