Featured Blogs

So Many Nonprofits Have Trusted Dot Org for So Long

ICANN's Board will meet soon, perhaps even tomorrow, to discuss the dot-org domain sale. It is a pivotal inflection point in the history of Internet governance. When Internet Society (ISOC) was awarded the dot-org domain over ten other bids in 2002, evaluators voiced concerns about their ability to steward it. The report explains: Some on the Committee expressed concern, however, that ISOC's associations extend only to the networking/connectivity community and not to a broader base... more

Loving to Hate Our Big ISPs

The American Customer Satisfaction Survey (ACSI) was released earlier this summer that ranks hundreds of companies that provide services for consumers. Historically cable companies and ISPs have fared poorly in these rankings compared to other businesses in the country. The running joke reported in numerous articles about this survey is that people like the IRS more than they like their cable company (and that is still true this year). more

ICANN’s 20th Anniversary Blog Collection

In the weeks leading up to ICANN63, CircleID in collaboration with ICANN invited community members to send their thoughts reflecting on the early days of ICANN and some of the points over the last 20 years that stand out in their memory. And the response was tremendous! Thank you, everyone, for your responses and thoughtful contributions. Below you will find the collection of blogs that we have featured in past weeks. Enjoy! more

Back to the Future Part IV: The Price-Fixing Paradox of the DNS

GenX-ers may remember spending a summer afternoon at the movie theater and seeing the somewhat corny but beloved antics of Marty McFly and Doc as they used a souped-up Delorean to travel the space-time continuum. In Back to the Future Part II, Doc and Marty travel into the future, where the bullying, boorish Biff causes a time-travel paradox when he steals the Delorean and takes a joyride into the past to give his younger self a sports almanac containing the final scores of decades worth of sporting events. more

Evolving ICANN Carries Great Promise for Internet Users

The headlines out of ICANN's meeting in Beijing may be all about new domains, but it is the quiet, systemic evolution of ICANN itself that holds the greatest promise for Internet users globally. ICANN President Fadi Chehadé opened the meeting by announcing that it was ICANN's "season to evolve," and setting forth a series of programs, restructuring efforts and policy initiatives intended to make ICANN more responsive to the needs of its stakeholders, and by extension, to the needs of all Internet users, everywhere in the world. more

Shame on the Regulators

It's clear that even before the turn of this century that the big telcos largely walked away from maintaining and improving residential service. The evidence for this is the huge numbers of neighborhoods that are stuck with older copper technologies that haven't been upgraded. The telcos made huge profits over the decades in these neighborhoods and ideally should not have been allowed to walk away from their customers. more

WSIS+10 and the Challenge of Securing the Internet

In just one week, representatives of governments from all around the world will gather at the UN headquarters in New York for the 10-year Review of the World Summit on the Information Society, a.k.a. "WSIS+10". We are very pleased to see the consensus forming that the principles of multi-stakeholder cooperation and engagement should be at the core of the Information Society. Moreover, consensus has emerged around a "post-2015" vision for how the Internet can be used to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will bring about a better future for us all. more

Grenada Steps Up Into New Role in Global Internet Governance

Grenada advances its digital resilience by signing the Convention on the Packet Clearing House Organization, positioning itself to help shape global Internet governance while gaining coordinated support, stronger infrastructure, and a formal voice in decisions that influence worldwide connectivity and security. more

Antigua to Host CaribNOG 18 in September

Antigua and Barbuda will host the eighteenth regional meeting of the Caribbean Network Operators Group (CaribNOG) from September 25 to 27. CaribNOG is a vibrant community of professionals committed to improving the region’s networks, expanding the technical capacity of those who build and secure them, and strengthening the interconnections among all actors in the Internet space. more

Distributed Reporting of Web Filtering

Today the Berkman Center announced a new project that might be of interest to readers. Since 2002 I've studied Internet filtering around the world, most recently as part of the OpenNet Initiative. Last year with support of the MacArthur Foundation we published "Access Denied," a study of filtering in about 40 states. Our work so far has been centralized... We're now complementing that effort with a distributed reporting system... more

Caribbean Network Operators Group Hosts 17th Regional Meeting

The seventeenth regional meeting of the Caribbean Network Operators Group, CaribNOG 17, took place at the Hilton Barbados Resort, Bridgetown, Barbados from April 10 to 12, 2019, with the theme "Securing Caribbean Networks." Approximately 100 participants, including technical experts from the global Internet community and other stakeholders from across the Caribbean, joined dozens of online participants for this first of two regional gatherings for the year. more

Broadband Tariffs: The Significant Gap Between Residential and Business

Analysis from Point Topic's recent reports on global broadband tariffs has revealed a significant gap in residential and business tariffs worldwide. Clearly businesses are paying more for their services than residential consumers but the relative differences in the ratios is more marked than might be expected. The first thought is that they are paying for more bandwidth and that is true to an extent. more

Reaching Google via Asia?

Across the Internet, yesterday, Google users twittered, blogged and emailed that Google search and mail were not usable. And, yesterday afternoon, on Google’s official blog, Urs Hoelzle reported that Google “direct[ed] some […] web traffic through Asia”... Even though Google is very well-connected to a diverse set of other networks, two of these relationships predominate. It is through these relationships that much of the Internet reaches Google... more

Not Another Yearly Recap: What 2018 Tells Us About .brand Domains

It's that special time again! Time to unwind, spend time with loved ones -- and to reflect on another 12 months of progress across the .brand movement. Over the last few years, we've used this end of year assessment and our efforts with MakeWay.World to show you how the industry is being embraced globally -- through a range of examples, statistics and predictions about how the year ahead will be our best ever. more

The ICANN Experiment: Lessons From NewCo

As ICANN turns 25 and I turn 51, I realize that I have literally spent more than ½ of my life working in the domain name industry and with the first multistakeholder experiment originally called NewCo (later called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN"). My first interaction with NewCo, after the Green Paper, White Paper, Internet Forum for the White Paper, etc., was an Intellectual Property attorney at the law firm of Arter & Hadden. more