Featured Blogs

SpaceX’s Rural Development Project in India

Sanjay Bhargava, Starlink Country Director for India at SpaceX (source)SpaceX Starlink is moving quickly in India. Last April, they said they would be offering service in 2022 and began accepting pre-orders. In July, SpaceX committed to manufacturing antenna systems and terminals in India and, at the end of September, Sanjay Bhargava, who had been with Elon Musk at Paypal, was selected to head Starlink in India. In the last week or two, they set up a wholly-owned subsidiary that will apply for licenses, seek Indian distribution partners, and attempt to sell 200,000 units - 80% in rural districts - in 2022. more

Potential Impacts of Large-Scale Metaverses on Internet Governance: Bandwidth

Neal Stephenson’s foundational cyberpunk novel Snow Crash brought to the public the concept of a metaverse, a virtual reality in which people interact using avatars in a manufactured ecosystem, eschewing the limitations of human existence. More recently, Ready Player One capitalized on that idea and brought it back to prominence with a bestselling novel and subsequent film adaptation. Amid rebranding efforts and seeking a new way forward, Mark Zuckerberg has made it Facebook’s (now Meta Platforms) priority to build a platform that could enable the metaverse to become a mainstream technology with the sort of reach that their social networks and WhatsApp have. more

Predicting Future Broadband Prices

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to the long-term trajectory of broadband prices. This is something that should be considered by anybody who is thinking about competing in a market against a big cable company. It's not an easy question to get your hands around since many factors might affect future rates. The following are some of the major trends that I think must be considered. First is pressure on the big ISPs from Wall Street. more

Content Blocking at the DNS Level in Germany

For those who follow the issue of blocking illegal content from the Internet, there is an interesting development in relation to this issue here in Germany, and I will tell you a little about it. One way to make it difficult to access illegal content is to block it directly in the DNS. But what is DNS for? Basically, it serves to translate the domain name into the IP of the server that is hosting the content. By blocking directly at the DNS level, a query to a domain will no longer bring the server's IP number, and with that, the user no longer accesses that content. more

Interplanetary Internet

We had a very interesting presentation and discussion regarding the topic of interplanetary internet with my international colleagues, of which Vint Cerf – one of the “fathers of the internet” – is also a member. As a partner of the Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group (IPNSIG), he took us on a journey that he has been involved with over the last 20 years regarding communication networks in space. A true mind-broadening experience. more

Searching for the Meaning of “Registers” in the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA)

Where outcomes depend on a word’s meaning, the first task is to define it. “Registers” which is one of the keywords in the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), is still in the process of definition. Its statutory context provides that a domain name registrant is liable to the owner of a mark if “it has a bad faith intent to profit from that mark … and (ii) registers, traffics in, or uses a domain name [corresponding to a mark] that … is distinctive at the time of registration of the domain name [and] is identical or confusingly similar to that mark. more

Another Year, Another ICANN NomCom

Another challenging year due to the Corona pandemic is coming to a close, and ICANN has held another virtual annual general meeting (AGM) -- the 6th in a row. Unlike last year, today, we can hope for a better next year. In many regions of the world, the figures look better, and the opening is progressing. That at least gives us hope that ICANN will hold face-to-face meetings again next year -- at least they are planning it so. That should also make it easier for the new Nominating Committee (NomCom). more

Registrar Influence on the Domain Security Posture of the Forbes Global 2000

In the 2021 Domain Security Report, we analyzed the trend of domain security adoption with respect to the type of domain registrar used, and found that 57% of Global 2000 organizations use consumer-grade registrars with limited protection against domain and DNS hijacking, distributed denial of service (DDoS), man-in-the-middle attacks (MitM), or DNS cache poisoning. On average, the adoption of domain security controls is two times higher for enterprise-class registrars than for those using consumer-grade registrars. more

Meet the Metaverse

I had already written this blog before Facebook announced it would be hiring at least 10,000 programmers to start moving the company towards the metaverse. I see the metaverse as one of the next big drivers of increased bandwidth usage. Wikipedia defines the metaverse as a collective virtual shared space created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual reality worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. In the most basic sense, the metaverse consists of online worlds where people interact through avatars. more

A Three-Step Process to Chase Compulsive Domain Brand Squatters

Domain brand squatting can be defined as the unauthorized or dishonest use of a brand or company identifiers in domain names. It is often linked to the use of look-alike domains in bad faith, and we see it all the time. The threat actors behind these domains are called different names, though a prevalent one would be “typosquatters.” The Hot on the Trail of Compulsive Brand Squatters webinar showcased how these people are infiltrating the Internet. The first page of PhishTank’s valid phish search alone as of this writing tells us that domain brand squatting is a real and present danger. more

On DNS Openness

When we deregulated the telephone industry, we replaced these national monopolies and their vertically bundled structures with a collection of separate enterprises whose actions are orchestrated by market forces rather than by the dictates of the incumbent monopoly telco. This was a comprehensive upheaval to the telecommunications industry, and one aspect of this broad sweep of changes was in the role of the regulator. Previously it was a rule-based framework: Is the incumbent playing by the rules we imposed on them? more

Cryptocurrency and DNS: Phishing Domains, Cryptomining and More

When we look at the intersection of cryptocurrency and domain data, we see something insidious: The prevalence of crypto-related threats. And it's not just cryptojacking. It's not even the use of cryptocurrency which has made ransomware attacks easier for threat actors to commit and all the more widespread. As with nearly every trend, there is always someone looking to capitalize on it and use it for their own, personal gain. Ever since cryptocurrency became the pandemic hobby of choice, threat actors have begun to target crypto novices for their schemes. more

Regulating Magic: Why We Need to Establish a Regulatory Framework for Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence

The promises of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and other advancing technologies sound like magic. However, even magic is subject to the laws of economics. And even quantum computers are “legal things…technological tools that are bound to affect our lives in a tangible manner,” as Valentin Jeutner explains in The Quantum Imperative: Addressing the Legal Dimension of Quantum Computers. Analogous to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, Professor Jeutner proposes a three-part “quantum imperative,” which “provides that regulators and developers must ensure that the development of quantum computers. more

WHOIS Policy at ICANN Continues to Fail

ICANN has once again acceded to the wants of contracted parties and is at risk of abdicating its duty to act in the global public interest when it comes to WHOIS policy. Its inability or unwillingness to date to reign in bad WHOIS policy, driven by contracted party interests, flies in the face of its previously-expressed policy goal “to ensure the continued availability of WHOIS to the greatest extent possible while maintaining the security and stability of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers.” more

Fixing the Supply Chain

Almost everybody in the broadband industry is now aware that the industry is suffering supply chain issues. ISPs are having problems obtaining many of the components needed to build a fiber network in a timely manner, which is causing havoc with fiber construction projects. I've been doing a lot of investigation into supply chain issues, and it turns out the supply chain is a lot more complex than I ever suspected, which means it's not going to be easy to get the supply chain back to normal. more