Featured Blogs

A Bend in the River: ICANN Should Prepare for a 2 °C World

Toward the end of last week, the world waited with bated breath for the outcome of the 21st annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The meeting, commonly called COP 21, was held in Le Bourget, Paris, from November 30 to December 12; a bit too soon after the terrorists attacks on Paris earlier in November. COP 21 was important because COP 15 in Copenhagen (2009) failed to arrive at a global consensus... more

Internet Society Posting Updates from ITU Plenipot 2014 in Busan

If you are, like me, not in Busan, South Korea, for the 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference but are curious about what is going on there, my Internet Society colleagues on our public policy team have been posting regular updates to the Internet Society's blog and to the @ISOCPolicy Twitter account... Given that I work in the technology side of Internet Society's work and don't have the cycles to keep up-to-date with everything going on there in Busan, I've found these updates very helpful in understanding some of the major events happening at the ITU Plenipot 2014. more

Bridging the Gaps: MAAWG, IETF, and BITS Establish Formal Relationships

As announced this morning, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has established formal relationships with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the BITS/Financial Services Roundtable... It's often said that there are too many different organizations working on the overlapping areas of abuse, trust, and related issues. I believe the collaborative approach MAAWG has chosen will bridge these gaps. more

The TLD Operator Webinar Transitions to the DNA University

Readers of my posts will have noticed that we've been working over the last two months to launch the TLD Operator Webinar which was held recently. Its purpose was to unite all new TLD applicants and collectively share our experiences in order to build momentum in the industry and support each other in our pursuits. With more than 300 registrations and 40 percent of all new TLDs attending, we were humbled and overjoyed with the success -- validating our 'educated guess' that there was a global appetite for information to assist new TLD applicants. more

Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance (Milton Mueller, NYU 12/14)

The Internet Society's NY Chapter (ISOC-NY) is delighted to present Milton Mueller's first full exposition of his new book Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance at NYU on Tuesday December 14 2010. Prof. Mueller is a co-founder of ICANN's NonCommercial User's Constituency and a renowned cyberlibertarian. more

Data Security: Being Open About Secrecy

It must be tricky to be an advocate of transparency when your job involves selling serious encryption tools to government departments, large and small companies, hospitals and people who are concerned about having their bank account details hijacked from a home PC. After all, the point about good encryption software and the systems that surround it is that they provide a way to keep your secrets secret, while open government and the effective regulation of financial services would seem to require the widest possible dissemination of all sorts of operational data... more

Is Defining Broadband by Speed a Good Policy?

I’ve lately been looking at broadband policies that have shaped broadband, and I don’t think there has been any more disastrous FCC policy than the one that defines broadband by speed. This one policy has led to a misallocation of funding and getting broadband to communities that need it. The FCC established the definition of broadband as 25/3 Mbps in 2015, and before then, the definition of broadband was 4/1 Mbps, set a decade earlier. The FCC defines broadband to meet a legal requirement established by Congress and codified in Section 706 of the FCC governing rules. more

International Pandemic Contact Tracing Standards Group Formed

The formation of an international pandemic contact tracing standards group was announced yesterday. Designated E4P, it is being established as an open public-private initiative under ETSI to "develop a framework and consistent set of specifications for proximity tracing systems, to enable the development of applications and platforms, and to facilitate international interoperability" that also provide for privacy protection. more

Reaching Critical Mass for Gigabit Connections

The statistics concerning the number of gigabit fiber customers in the US is eye-opening. OpenVault tracks the percentage of customers provisioned at various broadband speeds. At the end of 2019, the company reported that 2.81% of all households in the US were subscribed to gigabit service. By the end of the first quarter of 2020, just after the onset of the pandemic, the percentage of gigabit subscriptions had climbed to 3.75% of total broadband subscribers. more

Dealing With the Digital Divide

A political focus on subsidizing telecom infrastructure is just so easy. There are multiple photo opportunities (at the announcement, the cheque presentation and the system activation), happy mayors, happy voters. It gets to be portrayed as economic stimulus, direct job creation and consistent with progress on digital economic development. But while it may feel satisfying politically, I question the effectiveness of continued broad government subsidies based on geography, rather than taking a more focused approach based on need. more

The Internet and My 53 Years Online

With the upcoming celebration of the 50 years of the Internet, I'm trying to figure out how the traditional story misses the powerful idea that has made the Internet what it is -- the ability to focus on solutions without having to think about the network or providers. It's not the web -- thought that is one way to use the opportunity. The danger in a web-centric view is that it leads one to make the Internet better for the web while closing the frontier of innovation. more

On Internet Centrality and Fragmentation

I attended a workshop on the topic of Internet Fragmentation in July. The workshop was attended by a small collection of Australian public policy folk, some industry representatives, folk from various cyber-related bodies, and those with a background in Internet Governance matters. It was a short meeting, so the perils of fragmentation were not discussed at length, as they often can be, but the concerns about the breakup of the essential bonds that keep the Internet together were certainly palpable in that meeting. more

Preparing for GDPR’s Impact on WHOIS - 5 Steps to Consider

With GDPR coming into effect this May, it is almost a forgone conclusion that WHOIS as we know it today, will change. Without knowing the full details, how can companies begin to prepare? First and foremost, ensuring that brand protection, security and compliance departments are aware that a change to WHOIS access is on the horizon is an important first step. Just knowing that the ability to uncover domain ownership information is likely to change in the future will help to relieve some of the angst that is likely to occur. more

The Netizen’s Guide to Reboot the Root (Part I)

In the world of ICANN and Internet policy, complexity is manufactured to create an illusion that issues are impenetrably technical such that normal and everyday principles can't apply. This causes a pervasive and entrenched phenomenon of eyes that glaze over at the mere mention of the word "ICANN" -- including those of government regulators and other officials that might otherwise take more of an active interest. more

Celebrating the 25Th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Today the full original name of the World Wide Web is being seen everywhere as people all around the world join together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the proposal that Tim Berners-Lee submitted at CERN that led to the creation of the "Web" we have today. While many of our articles here on CircleID focus more on the underlying Internet infrastructure that makes the Web possible, it's good to take a moment to reflect on - and celebrate - the amazing evolution of the Web from those very early days!  more