Featured Blogs

Africa Is Not a Digital Quarry

Africa's internet registry crisis reflects not abstract design flaws but sustained legal and market pressure, as scarce address resources are drawn into global arbitrage, challenging stewardship and exposing the fragility of regional digital governance. more

The Internet Has a New User - It’s Not You

AI agents are rapidly becoming primary internet users, with inference-driven traffic reshaping network demands and exposing infrastructure blind spots as latency-sensitive, machine-to-machine activity begins to outpace and outcompete human web behavior. more

Starlink Flexing Its Market Power

Starlink is leveraging its growing dominance with data-hungry AI ambitions, regulatory demands, and space infrastructure plans. A merger with xAI could solidify its position as an unregulated gatekeeper of orbital connectivity and intelligence. more

Securing Africa’s Digital Future: Why Cybersecurity Must Lead Digital Transformation

Africa's rapid digital expansion, from fintech to e-government, is outpacing its cybersecurity capacity, leaving critical systems exposed and trust at risk unless governments embed security as a core pillar of development across the continent today. more

The Post-MLAT Era: Why Dynamic Injunctions are the New Frontier of Access Blocking

As cross-border enforcement falters, dynamic injunctions are reshaping internet governance, allowing authorities to update blocking lists in real time and prioritize access deterrence over slow, often futile source takedowns across fragmented global legal regimes. more

The Challenge of Adding Fiber to Poles

An FCC ruling in a dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power clarifies pole attachment cost rules, but exposes how regulatory delays and uncooperative utilities can slow fiber deployment and raise costs for broadband providers. more

Ireland’s Solution to the Rural Divide

The pandemic has given the whole world a pause to consider if we should return to business as usual when the pandemic is behind us. Ireland has a unique reaction and is something that could make sense here. Ireland plans to provide incentives to lure people from cities back to smaller rural towns. Like much of the world, Ireland has seen decades of young people moving to cities to find work, leaving behind shrinking and aging rural towns. more

Shape Internet Policy: Apply for ICANN NomCom’s Council Positions

ICANN's 2026 Nominating Committee invites applications for key policy council roles that shape global Internet governance, offering leadership opportunities in domain regulation, digital rights, and multistakeholder decision-making. Deadline: 18 February 2026. more

Building Trust in Digital Travel: Interoperability, Privacy, and the Future of Global Mobility

Digital travel credentials promise to streamline air travel by enabling privacy-preserving identity sharing across borders. Their success will depend on interoperable standards, trusted governance and gradual adoption alongside passports worldwide as governments airlines cooperate. more

Trusted Notifier Network (TNN) Core Concept 1: Unfair Cost Transfer and Reversal of Commercial Best

A flawed abuse-response system shifts costs from perpetrators to intermediaries, overwhelming enforcement. The Trusted Notifier Network seeks to realign incentives, curb low-quality reporting, and restore efficiency by embedding trust, accountability, and cost redistribution. more

NOGs at a Crossroads: Confronting the New Demands of Network Operations

Surging outages and mounting losses are increasingly forcing a rethink of network operations, as NOGs now confront a shift from technical exchange to strategic governance, where resilience, leadership, and institutional influence define the profession's future. more

IPv4 Buying and Leasing in 2026: A Market Recalibration

Falling IPv4 prices in 2026 reflect not collapse but maturation, as hyperscaler demand wanes, buyers diversify, and leasing expands, turning scarce addresses into managed assets shaped by liquidity, flexibility, and infrastructure driven needs today increasingly. more

Let’s Not Forget the Lobbyists

Common Cause recently released a report, Broadband Gatekeepers, that describes the influence that lobbyists have on broadband policies. The numbers are staggering -- the ISP industry spent $234 million lobbying the 116th Congress (2019 and 2020). That number is likely understated since the rules on reporting lobbying are lax, and enforcement is almost nonexistent. That number doesn't include the huge amounts of lobbying efforts at State legislatures. more

Mandate Laundering: From RIR Fantasy to Transition Architecture

Private internet registries have inflated narrow technical roles into quasi-sovereign authority, laundering mandate through ritual and rhetoric; a fragile system now faces legal, economic and political reckoning, prompting calls for coordinated transition urgent global reform. more

Rising Costs of Broadband Construction

Despite steady expansion of fibre networks, the cost of building them is rising. New survey data show labour-heavy construction, higher aerial costs and persistent inflation pressures likely to push deployment expenses higher in 2026. more