Featured Blogs

To Serve the Public Interest You First Have to Define ‘Public Interest’

In the ancient parable, six blind men are asked to describe an elephant, with each coming up with wildly different answers, depending on which part of the animal they touched. Now, while I would hesitate to call participants in the ICANN process "blind men," I am starting to think that "public interest" is their elephant. ICANN is on the threshold of completing its first major obligation under the Affirmation of Commitments it signed with the U.S. Government in 2009. more

On the Introduction of new Top Level Domains into the Domain Name System

The introduction of new top level domains (TLDs) has been the subject of debate and action in the ICANN arena since 1999 (just a year after the organization was founded). Herein are some thoughts about some of the issues associated with increasing the top level domain name space. more

Foreign Hackers Attack Canadian Government

An unprecedented cyberattack on the Canadian government also targeted Defence Research and Development Canada, making it the third key department compromised by hackers, CBC News has learned. ... While there is no definitive proof, of course, that China was behind these attacks, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that points in that direction. China (allegedly) has a long history of engaging in espionage activities in order to gain access to information. In the United States, this is sometimes referred to as cyber warfare, but I think that cyber espionage is a better choice of terms. more

Big Business Has Been Using the New TLD Concept for Years

By now we've all had a chance to digest the concept around the new TLD program and in some cases even come up with our own amazing ideas for the next .com or a niche TLD that will make us millionaires overnight! Well maybe some of us have... Others are taking a far more practical approach to the exciting new changes to the Internet and how it will be adopted and used, in particular within the corporate arena. more

Is Amazon Playing Chicken With Mailbox Providers?

It's easy to look at Amazon SES and sigh. Thousands of low-end customers sending mail from a shared IP pool? Amazon already knows that trick never works! Just one spammer will ruin the reputation of those IP addresses, resulting in ongoing delivery problems for everyone who uses the service. It is possible that Amazon can build the systems and human processes to keep spammers out; certainly sounds like they want to. more

Collecting Cybercrime Data: Can Signal Spam Be a Piece of the Puzzle?

The gathering of coherent data on cybercrime is a problem most countries haven't found a solution for. So far. In 2011 it is a well known fact that spam, cybercrime and botnets are all interrelated. The French database Signal Spam may be a significant part of the solution to gather, analyse and distribute data on spam, phishing, cybercrimes and botnets, but also be a forum in which commercial mass e-mail senders and ISPs can work on trust. more

Good is Better than Perfect in ICANN Accountability

In the next few months, ICANN will have a concrete opportunity to improve its accountability and transparency by enacting the recommendations of the Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT). Those recommendations may not be perfect, but if the history of the ICANN process is any indication, we can't afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the very good. more

The Global Internet Through a Local Lens

As the Internet grows, those countries and societies with mature systems of content development, innovation and entrepreneurism will continue to be better positioned to meet these needs. At the same time, such countries are also better positioned to take advantage of the efficiency, and capacity of the Internet to amplify and extend their cultural reach and economic capacity. The implication of this amplification and extension of cultural reach and economic capacity from developed markets, is that it can drown out indigenous content and restrict local economic opportunities in developing and under-developed markets. more

IPv6: The High VoLTEage Telephony Generator

According to IDC, smartphones outsold personal computers, laptops included in Q4 2010! Nokia just announced the demise of the Venerable Symbian in favour of Windows 7 phone and Microsoft's bing search engine! Tectonic shifts are under way to adapt to the rise of wireless broadband, an all IP world, and the growing weight of Apple and Google Android. It is also time to head once again for Barcelona with the Mobile World Congress starting on the 14th. Highlights this year? more

How a Routing Prefix Travels Through the Internet

What happens when an IP address prefix gets announced or withdrawn. How does this information propagate through the Internet? And how does it affect the amount of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) traffic across the Internet when a single prefix is freshly announced or withdrawn from the global routing table? The following short analysis shows the detailed effects of these two events. more

Rise of the Caribbean Mobile Market

It is no secret that in the Caribbean people are crazy about their cell phones. In fact, the Caribbean has one of the highest levels of mobile phone penetration in the world. According to a report from BuddeComm, an Australia-based telecom research firm, mobile phone penetration in Latin America and the Caribbean reached an estimated 80% in early 2009, well above the world average which was about 58%. The report stated that Latin America and the Caribbean together now account for an estimated 12% of the world's 3.97 billion mobile subscribers. more

Obama’s Broadband Plan Will Fail

We stand by our analysis from March 2010, in which we indicated that a national wireless broadband plan remains a second-class option as the infrastructure for the emerging digital economy in America. In his State of the Union address President Obama set the goal of enabling businesses to provide high-speed wireless services to at least 98% of all Americans within five years. To pay for this the government hopes to raise nearly $28 billion from spectrum auctions. more

New TLDs Are Coming, and They Are Coming Fast

Despite what you may have read about possible delays to the rollout of the new Top-Level Domain (TLD) program, all the available evidence points to ICANN approving the applicant guidebook shortly after its San Francisco conference in March. My feelings about the timing of the new TLD program were further buoyed by Kurt Pritz, ICANN's Senior Vice President of Stakeholder Relations, who gave a presentation at the .nxt conference I attended in San Francisco this week. Mr Pritz said the applicant guidebook is currently in a "proposed final" version and should be approved after ICANN's San Francisco conference in March. more

Unlicensed Wireless Broadcasting Spectrum in the USA

New developments that have been announced by the FCC in the United States have rekindled the decade-old debate on the use of the so-called 'white spaces' in broadcast spectrum that are to be used for telecoms purposes. In September 2010, the FCC adopted a Second Memorandum Opinion and Order that updated the rules for unlicensed wireless devices that can operate in broadcast television spectrum at locations where that spectrum is unused by licensed services. This unused TV spectrum is commonly referred to as television 'white spaces'. The rules allow for the use of unlicensed TV devices in the unused spectrum to provide broadband data and other services for consumers and businesses. more

How the End of IPv4 Affects Email and Hosting

Anyone who has been watching the technology industry for more than a couple of years quickly learns to recognize FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. FUD is (apparently) widely believed to be an effective marketing technique, especially when it comes to security, privacy, or scarcity. But the FUD often falls flat. Scarcity, in particular, is rare on the internet -- even rarer than privacy or security. There's constant FUD about scarcity of bandwidth, but the pipes get upgraded. Attempts to impose artificial scarcity through paywalls or other devices inevitably fail in the face of free alternatives. Even the scarcity of IPv4 addresses, which have indeed run out at the top, hasn't affected end users at the bottom yet -- and probably won't, for a long time. more