Featured Blogs

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

Governments Should Promote Cultural Diversity on the Internet

The entire new gTLD applicant community is awaiting, patiently, the forthcoming Brussels meeting between the ICANN Board and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to take place from February 28th. After years of delays to the new gTLD process, ICANN and the GAC will try to reach an agreement on how and when to launch the new Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) programme. The expectations for the outcome of the Brussels meeting is huge among potential new gTLD applicants. Despite this, the media attention will be negligible when compared to the news coverage that the next ICANN public meeting in March will receive. more

New gTLD Program to Be Finalized After June ICANN Meeting

Today, in a presentation made to attendees of the McCarthy Institute Symposium, Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN Chair, announced that the Final New generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Applicant Guidebook would be completed after the ICANN Meeting in Amman, Jordan which is scheduled for June 19 - 24, 2011. more

AT Kearney Takes Side With Incumbent Telcos to Defend the Old World

In my job as part of a consultancy company, I know there are two types of reports our clients are interested in - those that are written for the customer to be used internally and those that are to be used externally. Quite often, instead of well thought out and researched pieces, these last-mentioned reports are created simply to underscore the opinion of the party paying for them. So when I received research by AT Kearney on A Viable Future Model for the Internet, I immediately checked who had paid for that report. more

Recent Enhancements to ARIN’s whoIS-RWS Service

ARIN deployed a series of enhancements to its Whois-RWS service today. This includes enabling CIDR support and IPv6 lookups in the search box on the web page, provided plain text rendering of lists of ASNs and networks on the web - plus enhanced CIDR query matching on WHOIS port 43. more

Super Bust: Due Process and Domain Name Seizure

With the same made-for PR timing that prompted a previous seizure of domain names just before shopping's "Cyber Monday," Immigration and Customs Enforcement struck again, this time days before the Super Bowl, against "10 websites that illegally streamed live sporting telecasts and pay-per-view events over the Internet." ICE executed seizure warrants against the 10 by demanding that registries redirect nameserver requests for the domains to 74.81.170.110, where a colorful "This domain name has been seized by ICE" graphic is displayed. more

Is Internet Part of the Curriculum of Universities?

Recently I joined my son, who is in his final high school year, to visit the open day of the newly founded Leiden University College in The Hague. The school focuses on Liberal Arts & Science and offers a broad education on (international) politics, philosophy and economy. The idea is to prepare the next generation internationally oriented public servants and leaders of the future. Among others they have former Dutch Minister of Foreign affairs and Secretary General of NATO Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as a college professor. more

Goodmail Shutting Down

Yesterday Goodmail sent out mail to all their customers announcing they are ceasing operations and taking all their token generators offline as of 5pm pacific on February 8th. While this is a bit of a surprise on one level, I'm not that shocked. Ken Magill mentioned in August that Goodmail was on the sales block and rumors have been circulating for weeks about significant changes coming to Goodmail. ... Despite the free service, people at some of those ESPs told me they were having difficulty getting customers to adopt Goodmail. more

The U.S. “Scorecard” for Brussels: Draconian Trademark Rules & The End of Private-Sector Leaders

The U.S. "Scorecard" for Brussels Proposes Draconian Trademark Rules - And May Mean the End of Unlimited New gTLDs and/or the ICANN Experiment in Private Sector-Led Internet Governance... On Friday, January 28th the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) circulated its submission to ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) containing suggestions for what positions the GAC should push for at its February 28 - March 1 meeting with ICANN's Board to air disagreements over provisions of the Proposed Final Applicant Guidebook (AG) for new gTLDs. more

The Central IPv4 Pool is Gone

Yesterday, the Asia-Pacific registry got the last two blocks in the central IPv4 pool. The IANA has been sitting on five /8s (one per regional registry), and these will be handed out (along with the fragments from the legacy class B space), one to each registry. The IANA IPv4 registry doesn't yet reflect this. more

Where High Speed Internet Meets Smart Grid

Advanced internet technologies, energy management and the smart grid are coming together in a mid-sized city in South Tennessee. Tennessee based utility EPB has completed one of the fastest internet pipelines in the world and has activated the first automated switches on its electricity network. The combination constitutes the backbone for a DOE-funded smart grid network that is expected to save the utility and businesses tens of millions of dollars annually. more

Lessons from Egypt: We Need to Protect Our Connected Minds

We need to protect the power that allows us to connect our collective intelligence, as described a few weeks ago in my blog on connected minds. I argued that in order to address some of our global challenges we have to start looking at a radically new way to address them. The events in Egypt brought home the fact that if it comes to the crunch any government can disconnect us simply by bringing the Internet and other communications systems down at will... more