A recent telephone poll conducted by professors at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania concluded, "Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interest." The study's authors claim that their poll is the "the first nationally representative telephone (wireline and cell phone) survey to explore Americans' opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers." ... But what is most surprising about this poll is not that 66% of users said they do not want tailored online ads, but that 34% of users said they did! more
All indications from the ICANN meetings in Seoul are that significant delays for the release of new gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains) are expected. According to Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's CEO, new gTLDs will be made available when, "we've adequately addressed the important issues that are on the table." These important issues include efforts to address malicious conduct, root scaling, economic analysis, trademark protections, and vertical separation as related to the new gTLDs. more
Anyone who knows Kenya knows it is famous for tea. And while I can now get Kenyan tea online from US companies like Starbucks, Caribou Coffee or any number of other re-sellers, like most consumers I would vastly prefer to cut out the middle man and buy my tea direct from Kenyan companies. Why not? But here's the rub... more
What's that we see, waving through the raindrops? Isn't email supposed to be dead? You already know I'm going to say no; as usual, once you see past the refraction and the rainbows, reality is somewhat more complicated. The recent, ongoing launch of Google Wave has almost everything we've come to expect. It begins with a slow roll-out, with people begging for invitations. Then comes the headlines proclaiming the death of email, often based on nothing more than a short preview video and someone else's interview with Wave's creators. more
When he wanted to show the transformative and unifying power of the Internet to open this week's ICANN meeting in Seoul, ICANN President Rod Beckstrom had an ace in the hole: Korean guitarist Jay (Jeong-hyun Lim), who became a global YouTube sensation with his hard-rocking version of Pachelbel's Canon. As I watched Jay wail on his gold-plated guitar to standing ovations, I couldn't help but think of Rod waxing that the Internet was a "symphony" of ideas and voices from around the world. more
With the loud crashing of a traditional drum ceremony and an impromptu electric guitar performance by a young Korean whose rendition of Pachabel has been downloaded sixty million times on YouTube, the 36th meeting of ICANN was kicked off this morning (Korean time) by new CEO Rod Beckstrom and his fellow Directors and assembled one thousand or so participants. ICANN has always been about change, but the atmosphere in Seoul this week is charged with a sense of new challenges and new opportunities. more
The US government is proposing broad new regulations for telecommunications and cable internet service providers. The new proposals appear to target specific providers for regulation and government oversight. Specifically, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey has proposed the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, or the "Net Neutrality" bill, outlining government policies to impose new governance and restrictions targeting telecommunications and cable providers AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner and Comcast. more
New York City government officials announced that they will be applying for the ".nyc" top-level domain (TLD) extension and are looking to choose a qualified vendor to operate the TLD on their behalf. New York City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) recently issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) to try to find a qualified vendor to manage and market the city TLD in hope that they can raise more revenues for the city, to help local small businesses, promote tourism and help extend the branding image of NYC. more
Last time the ICANN faithful gathered in Sydney, there was a fair bit of unrest and some big unknowns. The Implementation Recommendation Taskforce (IRT) report on how Intellectual Property (IP) could be protected in the era of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) stirred the pot as did, to a lesser extent, the issue of Registry-Registrar separation in new TLDs. Additionally, everyone had big questions on their minds - when the root would be signed (and DNSSEC fully implemented)... Four months later and five thousand miles almost due north, the netizens gathering at ICANN 36 in Seoul know the answers to some of those very important questions. more
John McCain has introduced a new legislation at the US Senate, which is called Internet Freedom Act... I agree with the statement about the governmental control and regulation -- we've done exactly this in Bulgaria, and the results are stunning (for the US user): today Bulgaria ranks No. 1 among the EU in number of users per capita who are connected to the Internet at speeds above 100 Mbps (in the US, the typical connection speed is 3 Mpbs), or 30 times faster than the US, and in many cases, people are connected via fiber, at 1000 Mbps, or 300 times faster. more
The Internet's existence within the regulatory system has been a disastrous failure. Network Neutrality is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that it leaves the current abysmal system in place. On my Economics and Architecture of IP Networks Mail list, Erik Cecil has been deconstructing the regulatory system. Bottom line -- the most significant thing that can be done for the citizens of the internet in the US would be for the FCC to declare the internet protocol to be telecommunications and no longer exempt from regulation. more
Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the "Business Community's Suicidal Impulse:" the persistent propensity to persecute one's competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: "Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?" After yesterday's FCC vote's to open a formal "Net Neutrality" rule-making, we must ask whether the high-tech industry -- or consumers -- will benefit from inviting government regulation of the Internet under the mantra of "neutrality." more
RIPE, or Réseaux IP Européens, is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond... RIPE has been a feature of the European Internet landscape for some twenty years now, and it continues to be a progressive and engaged forum. These days RIPE meets twice a year, and the most recent meeting was held at Lisbon, Portugal, from the 5th to the 9th of October 2009. In this column I'd like to share some of my impressions of this meeting. more
Internationalized Domain Names or IDNs are back in the news. ICANN recently released a document entitled "Proposed Final Implementation for IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process"... In a nutshell, ICANN has now offered a path toward authorizing the adoption of ccTLDs in many countries' native languages. This marks a welcome advance for millions of Internet users who do not speak English or who do not use another language covered by ASCII. But with this advance comes some concerns. more
Most people take it for granted that domain names are property. As such, there shouldn't be much dispute that domain names are subject to the claims of judgment creditors. But I've seen enough resistance to this position that I thought a recent case was worth a quick mention. more
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