Featured Blogs

Investing in Rural Broadband

There was a headline in a recent FierceTelecom article that I thought I'd never see - Jeffries analyst says the rural broadband market is ripe for investment. In the article, analyst George Notter is quoted talking about how hot rural broadband is as an investment. He cites the large companies that have been making noise about investing in rural broadband. Of course, that investment relies on getting significant rural grants. more

Who Pays When .Org Prices Rise?

When .org prices rise, who suffers – nonprofits or speculators? Will Ethos Capital raise prices more aggressively than ISOC would? Vint Cerf attributed concerns about higher prices to speculators: "Of course, companies that hold domain names in the tens of thousands for speculative purposes might find such increases more troubling, but I don't have much sympathy for that business model in the context of the organizations the .org brand is intended to serve." more

New Top-Level Domains Emerging

With all the buzz surrounding new Top-Level Domain (nTLDs) at the last ICANN meeting in Mexico, I am sure many of you have already encountered or read information regarding the latest applications. For those who haven't been staying abreast of the latest, here is a quick review... There are two different general types of TLDs -- gTLDs and ccTLDs. ICANN is now opening the possibility of adding further TLD extensions, which can virtually be anything... more

Fiber to the Home: Ideal Economic Stimulus?

This week, the headlines seem to be full of fresh doom and gloom for wireline carriers, who employ people in every congressional district across America. Sooner or later, someone is going to call for Congress to tap some of the hundreds of billions in 2009 economic stimulus to help the LECs through troubled times, save lots of jobs, and preserve the way we do business in our critical last-mile communications infrastructure. Is this wise? Is there a better way? more

Re-Examining the Domain Name Registry-Registrar Split

ICANN has released to the public a report they commissioned called "Revisiting Vertical Separation of Registries and Registrars," written by CRA International. It is being referred to as the "CRAI Report." Readers in the U.S. and the U.K. may not know it, but most top-level (TLD) domains in the world don't have registrars-you go straight to the registry and buy your domains from the source. more

45th Anniversary of the First Message Between ARPAnet Computers

Given that CircleID is about "Internet Infrastructure" it would be remiss if there wasn't a mention here that October 29, 2014, was the 45th anniversary of the moment when the first message was sent between two ARPAnet computers located at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). That moment was chronicled well this year by Matt Novak writing on Gizmodo's Paleofuture, complete with photos of the original logs and more. more

4G on the Moon

This post is a little more lighthearted than my normal blog posts. An article in FierceWireless caught my eye talking about how Nokia plans to establish a 4G network on the Moon. The primary purpose of the wireless technology will be to communicate between a base station and lunar rovers. 4G LTE is a mature and stable technology that can handle data transmission with ease... more

Reflections on the Pandemic Effect on Internet Use and Democracy

Last year, around the same time, the release on the same day of two flagship reports on 'the Internet' had prompted me to write an article on CircleID entitled 'Connecting the Next 46 Percent: Time to Pick the Good From the Bad and the Ugly'. I was then prudently asking whether 'the more we connect the world, the less free it becomes?'. Who would have known that a pandemic would erupt a few months later, unveiling different perspectives in assessing that very same question? more

Global Content Removals Based on Local Legal Violations - Where are we Headed?

From the Internet's earliest days, the tension between a global communication network and local geography-based laws has been obvious. One scenario is that every jurisdiction's local laws apply to the Internet globally, meaning that the country (or sub-national regulator) with the most restrictive law for any content category sets the global standard for that content. If this scenario comes to pass, the Internet will only contain content that is legal in every jurisdiction in the world... more

Are You Ready for 10 Gbps?

Around the world, we're seeing some migration to 10 Gbps residential broadband. During the last year, the broadband providers in South Korea, Japan, and China began upgrading to the next-generation PON and are offering the blazingly fast broadband products to consumers. South Korea is leading the pack and expects to have the 10 Gbps speed to about 50% of subscribers by the end of 2022. more

ICANN and Free Speech

Upon being appointed as ICANN's new CEO in Sydney, Rod Beckstrom gave a rousing speech in which he stressed the vital importance of free expression on the Internet... Many ordinary, powerless people are indeed willing to fight and die. But is ICANN going to help them? Or at very least make sure that their decisions won't help those who want to muzzle them? more

Is Secured Routing a Market Failure?

The Internet represents a threshold moment for the communications realm in many ways. It altered the immediate end client of the network service from humans to computers. It changed the communications model from synchronized end-to-end service to asynchronous and from virtual circuits to packet switching. At the same time, there were a set of sweeping changes in the public communications framework... more

ICANN Turning 20 - Your Thoughts?

As most you might know, this year marks the 20th anniversary of the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The organization was officially incorporated as a California non-profit corporation on September 30, 1998. ICANN plans to mark its 20th anniversary during ICANN63 in Barcelona, 20-25 October 2018. In response to a request from the organization, leading up to ICANN63, CircleID will host a series of blogs written by community members... more

Biggest Botnet Takedown to Date

Yesterday law enforcement officials arrested 6 people and charged them with running a massive internet fraud ring. Over 4 million PCs were part of the botnet. According to the FBI, "the cyber ring used a class of malware called DNSChanger to infect approximately 4 million computers in more than 100 countries. There were about 500,000 infections in the U.S., including computers belonging to individuals, businesses, and government agencies such as NASA." more

We Already Are in the Quaternary Industrial Era

British economist Colin Clark (1905-1989) explained that the spendable income for the working class varied according to industry levels, i.e., the spendable income increased as they moved from the Primary industry to the Secondary from the Secondary to the Tertiary. These days when we are experiencing loss of jobs due to the cutting-edge ICT (Information and Communications Technology) of the 21st century without creating new jobs to replace them, we need to examine new economic and labor policies as we move from the Tertiary to the Quaternary industry. more