Featured Blogs

Recognizing ICANN’s Failures

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has failed on a number of fronts, resulting in sub-par products and services in a global monopolistic environment. Failures will continue if not recognized and immediately addressed. Leadership is about the future, a journey into uncharted territory, and it requires vision supported by technical, operational, and mind-changing competencies. ... It does not require a rocket scientist to recognize that ICANN has fallen short because it lacks... more

Why Wouldn’t Skype Want 30 Million Paying Customers?

Skype has cut Nimbuzz off. What that means is that users of Nimbuzz' popular mobile clients will no longer be able to make calls using the SkypeOut network. According to Skype themselves, it was for unspecified violations of the Skype API terms and license... more

AS Path Lengths Over Time - How Interconnected is the Internet?

One way to determine the denseness of the Internet, or its "interconnectedness", is to look at the path length between Autonomous Systems (ASes). The "shortest AS path" is a route selection rule in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that means traffic from one AS will chose the path with the least number of ASes to get to the receiving AS. With IPv6 being deployed in parts of the Internet, we looked at the AS path length to see if the IPv6 portion of the Internet is more or less interconnected than the IPv4 Internet. more

And Then There Was the Issue of Time

Anyone who has been part of the community during its soon-to-be 12-years of existence will be the first to tell you that while ICANN's intentions are good, its execution, time and again, has been lacking. Unfortunately, the global business world does not and cannot accept only good intentions. Businesses require surety, consistency and clear evidence of stability before they can establish the foundation for their enterprises. more

Broken Policies

As an email policy wonk, I think a lot about how specific policy implementations can go wrong. Sure, every policy can go wrong, or not fit a common case. A lot of people only write polices that address common cases and don't worry about the rarer cases. The problem is there are some rare cases that may cause significant harm and those cases should be addressed. Consumerist has a case up about email policy gone wrong with a clear path to harm but no policy for handling the issue. There are a couple places I see where this policy hole can be fixed. more

Google’s Spending Spree: 2.4 Million Servers, and Counting

Google just published its Q3 financial results. So, what is Google spending on IT, and how much servers would that buy? This is one of their best kept secrets. In this post I give ballpark estimates based on back-of-the-envelop calculations, similar to the 'guestimates' I made 5 years ago. more

The Militarization of the Internet

Someone needs to take a good hard look at those Internet surveillance stories being strategically placed on the front page of the New York Times. There's a trail here, I believe, that's worth following. Here are some data points... there appears to be a deep interest in the ability to declare war online, as evidenced by cybersecurity research and public speeches by Herbert Lin, a key player who has worked on several cybersecurity reports for the National Research Council.
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Is the New gTLD Program Approval Even a Chance for This Year?

As I noted in my recent comments on CircleID, the recent resolutions from the Special Meeting of the ICANN Board held in Norway in late September left a few important new gTLD issues up in the air and created a little uncertainty in the marketplace. ... However, whilst sign-off on the program is still not guaranteed to occur in December, a recent interesting post on the GNSO mailing list from ICANN's Senior Vice President... more

Apple’s PR Nightmare: Open and “Fragmented” vs. Closed and “Integrated”

Over the weekend, I opined that closed app stores - meaning app stores, like iTunes, that restrict users from loading software from other sources (known as sideloading) - would not survive in a market where comparable alternatives, such as Google's Android OS, exist in an open ecosystem. In Apple's Q3 earnings call yesterday, Steve Jobs addressed the issue square on. more

Is the UN Assailing Internet Governance?

The coven of UN bodies with a hand in internet governance keeps getting bigger: not only is the General Assembly intending soon to decide the fate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), but if the decision coming out of New York does not give them enough of a role, the UN has a back-up plan. In May of 2011, no less than four specialized UN agencies, UNESCO, UNCTAD, UNDP and (perhaps most legitimately) the ITU, are planning a Conference what will allow them to insert themselves still further into the matter. more

Singapore’s Fiber Infrastructure Beginning to Pay Off

It's still early days, but Singapore's approach to fiber deployment is beginning to pay off. In December 2007, Singapore announced a major program to get fiber deployed throughout their city state. A critical advantage of their approach was government mandated structural separation between the dark fiber layer deployed in the public right-of-way (a natural monopoly) and higher layer services (where competition is possible and highly desirable. more

The Worm and the Wiretap

According to recent news reports, the administration wants new laws to require that all communications systems contain "back doors" in their cryptosystems, ways for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to be able to read messages even though they're encrypted. By chance, there have also been articles on the Stuxnet computer worm, a very sophisticated piece of malware that many people are attributing to an arm of some government. The latter story shows why cryptographic back doors, known generically as "key escrow", are a bad idea. more

United States Is the Most Bot-Infected Country. Right?

A couple of days ago, Threatpost posted an article indicating that the United States is the most bot-infected country... I think that Microsoft's mechanism of measuring bot infections is a good one, not necessarily because it is the most accurate but because it represents the most complete snapshot of botnet statistics. Because Microsoft Windows is installed on so many computers worldwide and because so many users across the world call home to the MSRT, Microsoft is able to collect a very large snapshot of data. more

Scrutinize ICANN’s Thousand New-TLDs Limit

I am skeptical about how ICANN has arrived at a technical limit of a thousand new TLDs per year. The ICANN study driving this number must be made public so that our industry's risk management experts can size up the finding. Why am I skeptical? more

Why App Stores Won’t Survive

The recent news that online retailing giant Amazon.com would open an app store to compete with Google's Android Market has set off a flurry of speculation about the future app store landscape. Within the next few months there will be no fewer than three major Android app stores... Several other major players have announced app store intentions though specifics are lacking. And of course, there are existing independent app stores that publish Android apps, such as GetJar, SlideMe and Appbrain. more