Featured Blogs

How Regional Internet Registries Should Adapt to Current Markets

Outdated policies at Regional Internet Registries hinder the efficient transfer and leasing of IP addresses, driving up internet costs in emerging markets and limiting innovation. A faster, more inclusive governance model is urgently needed. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Electronically Steered Antennas Replace Parabolic Antennas in Satellite Ground Stations? (ChatGPT-Assisted Version)

In a previous post, I asked whether electronically steered antennas (ESAs) would replace parabolic antennas in satellite ground stations. I read a few articles suggested by others and by Google search, used some common sense, produced a list of advantages of ESAs, and concluded that it was likely they would eventually replace parabolic antennas for many applications. 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

Food for Thought on the “New TLD” Business Models

There is always some degree of confusion in discussions about the "new TLDs". Some points of view try to be optimistic, others on the contrary only highlight the bad news, and most refer indistinctly to the "new TLDs" as if they did not break down into different segments, each of which obeys dynamics and constraints of its own. The purpose of this post is to provide some food for thought and to shed some light on those dynamics and constraints... more

Gall’s Law and the Network

In Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, John Gall says: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." In the software development world, this is called Gall's Law... more

An Economic Perspective on Internet Centrality

The IETF met in November 2022 in London. Among the many sessions that were held in that meeting was a session of the Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group, (DINRG). The research group's ambitions are lofty: DINRG will investigate open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity management, name resolution, resource/asset ownership management, and resource discovery. 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