Featured Blogs

Is the Internet Sustaining the Growth Trajectories Observed as the COVID-19 Pandemic Hit the World?

With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the fifth month of global disruption, many companies have readily shared data, statistics and observational insights on how the pandemic has impacted the global data infrastructure. At DE-CIX, we quickly observed core Internet infrastructure demand increasing and readily reported this data in April of 2020. Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella remarked to DatacenterDynamics in April of 2020 "we have seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months." more

War-Torn Syrian City Aleppo Gets New Fiber Link

The northern Syrian city of Aleppo is one of the key battlegrounds of that country's on-going civil war as well as the epicenter of the European refugee crisis. The most appropriate United States response to events in Aleppo has become a major foreign policy question among the candidates in this year's U.S. presidential election. Experts are now predicting that forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, backed by the Russian military, will take control of rebel-held eastern Aleppo within weeks. more

9 Things You Need to Consider When Choosing a Registrar Solutions Partner for Your New gTLD

The ICANN board has passed a resolution approving the renewal of .INFO, .ORG and .BIZ Registry agreements with the clause on cross -- ownership (aka Vertical Integration) removed. What this means is that these Registries will now be allowed to own, part or whole, of a Registrar business. This will enable them to sell their TLD directly to end customers and also establish a reseller chain thus allowing much greater control and flexibility over sales channels. more

Net Neutrality Alternative: Effective Interpretation, Oversight and Enforcement of Existing Rules

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

What Will 2021 Have Install for the ICT Industry?

While 2021 will remain a year with lots of uncertainties, at the same time, we can say that the pandemic has not affected the information and communications technology (ICT) industry in any significant way. Yes, there has been a slowdown, for example, in the sale of smartphones. Shortages in both materials and expertise are slowing fiber deployment, and the recovery over 2021 will be slow and uncertain because of the many lockdowns and travel restrictions. more

The 4 Major Drivers for Investment in NFV

Communication Service Providers (CSPs) have been driving the industry to develop agile solutions that abstract physical hardware from their solution platforms. With this technology, they hope to commoditize service functions to increase service agility and reduce the capital required to achieve better and more efficient service. Over the years, we have seen solutions from TMForum and CableLabs that help standardize certain aspects of the CSP plant and similar initiatives in the CPE world with Reference Design Kit (RDK)... more

The [Dot]Brand Tribes - Part 1

In my last post we talked about the value of introducing new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) to Tribes. We discussed what a Tribe was and how communities of people sharing knowledge and experiences can benefit from new TLDs. In the next three posts from my blog we'll discuss how brand owners can either benefit from creating a tribal home and/or come together with other tribes for the benefit of their members. more

The 3 Biggest Challenges Facing New gTLDs

When ICANN announced the nTLD program, thousands of applicants threw their hats in the ring. It seemed pretty straight forward; the existing TLDs were running out of short meaningful options, all that was needed was to create newer options that would be more relevant for specific sets of customers. Years later, the process is well underway; hundreds of nTLDs have hit the market, yet less than 10% of those that have gone live seem to have found success. more

Toward an ITU Renaissance

For nearly fifty years now, a significant portion of my professional engineering and lawyering life has been threaded through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It has included all of its multiple sectors, working on the inside for two Secretary-Generals and running its Relations between Members and Regulations Division, writing two books including "The ITU in a Changing World" with the late George Codding, representing the U.S. at several conferences... more

Protect Access to Safe Online Pharmacies Through Cyber Policy

The high cost of prescription drugs has created a health and economic crisis in the U.S. Personal prescription importation gives Americans a lifeline for affording safe medications. As prescription drug prices continue to skyrocket, the Internet has made it possible for Americans to access medications safely at considerable cost savings. As I've shared previously on CircleID, safety and affordability are the most important considerations when choosing an online pharmacy. more

Fear of Disaster: 5 Tips to Help Enterprises Cope

IT disasters can strike anywhere, anytime. In 1983, a faulty Soviet warning system nearly precipitated World War III -- the system claimed five missiles were en route from the U.S. Only quick thinking by Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov saved the day when he realized the United States would never launch so few warheads. And in 2004, a private contractor working with the British Child Support Agency (CSA) suffered a glitch that overpaid 1.9 million people and underpaid 700,000. more

Net Neutrality’s Legal Binary: An Either/Or With No “Third Way”

People working on net neutrality wish for a "third way" — a clever compromise giving us both network neutrality and no blowback from AT&T;, Verizon, Comcast and others. That dream is delusional because the carriers will oppose network neutrality in any real form; they want paid fast lanes. They have expressed particular opposition to "Title II" of the Communications Act — something telecom lawyers mention the same way normal people might reference the First or Second Amendments. Title II is the one essential law to ban paid fast lanes. more

STEM to STEMM: It Will Take Musicians to Save the Internet

The internet is under all kinds of attacks from all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. It’s not just the internet’s infrastructure that is under attack, so too is the very concept of the internet as an open communications platform serving the commonweal. Constructing effective technical defenses of the internet will require that America’s students learn and develop the quantitative disciplines known as STEM; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Constructing effective, ethical defenses of the internet will require that students study art and philosophy. The two educational paths are symbiotic... more

Identify DDoS Attacks with External Performance Monitoring (Part 2 of 3)

In Part One of this series, we examined internal server, network and infrastructure monitoring applications. Now let's take a look at another way to capture DDoS information: external performance monitoring... Unlike network/infrastructure tools - which are usually installed inside a customer's network - external performance monitoring solutions are typically provided by a third party and leverage monitoring locations from around the world. more

Trust, but Verify

We are at an inflection point in our lifetimes. The Internet is broken, seriously broken... Almost all of the systems currently in use on the Internet are based on implicit trust. This has to change. The problem is that these systems are so embedded in our everyday lives that it would be, sort of like, changing gravity, very difficult. more