Featured Blogs

Precrime Regulation of Internet Innovation

In the sci-fi movie Minority Report, a 'precrime' police unit relies on the visions of psychics to predict future crimes, then arrests the potential perpetrators before they do anything wrong. In the world of Internet governance, the future is now, as regulators want online services to predict and prevent safety threats before they actually occur. more

CIRA’s Second Public Letter to ICANN

Readers of my blog may recall that the Canadian Internet Registration Authority wrote a public letter earlier this year to ICANN that expressed concern over the current lack of accountability (note that I am on the CIRA board). The letter indicated that CIRA was withholding payment of any voluntary fees to ICANN until the accountability concerns were addressed. This week CIRA followed up with a second public letter to ICANN... more

Compliance Overhaul a NON-Start

Happy New Year, you're fired. While most of us were getting ready celebrate respective holidays, ICANN was quietly closing a critical office and sending all the staff out to look for new jobs. When asked to confirm this, ICANN's delayed response was pure Orwellian Doublethink. The office was closed because ICANN is "assessing how to effectively grow ICANN resources around the globe." How does one grow global resources while shutting down the Asia-Pacific office right before the Asia-Pacific meeting? more

Maximizing Qname Minimization: A New Chapter in DNS Protocol Evolution

Data privacy and security experts tell us that applying the "need to know" principle enhances privacy and security, because it reduces the amount of information potentially disclosed to a service provider -- or to other parties -- to the minimum the service provider requires to perform a service. This principle is at the heart of qname minimization, a technique described in RFC 7816 that has now achieved significant adoption in the DNS. more

What Does the Future Hold for the Internet?

This is the fundamental question that the Internet Society is posing through the report just launched today, our 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The report is a window into the diverse views and perspectives of a global community that cares deeply about how the Internet will evolve and impact humanity over the next 5-7 years. We couldn't know what we would find when we embarked on the journey to map what stakeholders believe could shape the future of the Internet... more

RIPE at 59!

RIPE, or Réseaux IP Européens, is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond... RIPE has been a feature of the European Internet landscape for some twenty years now, and it continues to be a progressive and engaged forum. These days RIPE meets twice a year, and the most recent meeting was held at Lisbon, Portugal, from the 5th to the 9th of October 2009. In this column I'd like to share some of my impressions of this meeting. more

Building a Brand for an Entire Industry: Q&A With Glenn Ruscoe of .physio

Success has many definitions. For many within the TLD community, it is a question of volume - domains under management, revenue and so on. For others, it's more long-term - renewal rates, utilization, and year-on-year growth. For Glenn Ruscoe, the physiotherapist behind the .physio TLD, success is far grander. His 'philanthropic' approach to the world of new domain extensions stems from a desire to create a global identity for the world's third-largest health profession. more

ICANN Issues a Statement on the Spamhaus Case

ICANN issued a statement on the Spamhaus case: "...ICANN is not a party to this action and no order has been issued in this matter requiring any action by ICANN. Additionally, ICANN cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend Spamhaus.org..." more

What Will 6G Look Like in a Geopolitical Divided World

A recent session of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Australian Smart Communities Association (ASCA) masterclass on 5G, featured Dr. Ian Oppenheimer, the NSW Government's Chief Data Scientist and one of the country's most respected experts in radio technology. Ian is also the Chair of the scientific advisory board of the 6G Flagship organization, a global research organization based in Finland. This organization has just published a range of fascinating research papers on 6G. more

Regulating and Not Regulating the Internet

There is increasingly heated rhetoric in DC over whether or not the government should begin to "regulate the internet." Such language is neither accurate nor new. This language implies that the government does not currently involve itself in governing the internet -- an implication which is clearly untrue given a myriad of laws like CFAA, ECPA, DMCA, and CALEA (not to mention existing regulation of consumer phone lines used for dialup and "special access" lines used for high speed interconnection). more

Robert Soloway Pleads Guilty

Large scale spammer Robert Soloway, whose criminal trial was scheduled to start in a week and a half pled guilty to most of the charges against him. The indictment made three categories of charges. Counts 1-10 were mail fraud, due to Soloway delivering his spamware through the mail, and the product egregiously failing to be what he said it was, notably including 30 million addresses purported to be opt-in. Counts 11-17 seven were wire fraud, sending spam making false claims about the product, support, guarantee... more

Network Complexity: Three Trends That are Contributing to a “Perfect Storm”

Most everyone who visits CircleID is familiar with Moore's Law, which stated simply holds that computing power doubles every 18 months. This has been going on since the 1960s and shows no sign of slowing. Moore's Law drives faster and faster computing, which produces more and more data and network complexity. This inexorable trend is putting immense pressure on corporate networks, and the strain is too much for many of them to handle on their own. more

ICANN To Publish New gTLD Applicants On April 30th

In a recent press release ICANN has stated that they will publish the list of applicants for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) on April 30th. Previously many had spoken of a "big reveal" on May 1st, though that would have coincided with a public holiday in many countries and might have been "missed". However ICANN CEO, Rod Beckstrom, claims that the organisation had always planned to publish the list two weeks after the application window closed. more

China Will Remember the U.S. Huawei War for a Generation

Only an idiot would believe that the U.S. is blocking TSMC manufacture of Huawei cell phone chips because of security fears. This is a commercial rivalry. The U.S. wants to put China's leading technology company out of business. We will fail, of course, at a price far higher than D.C. understands. The U.S. is ready for China's immediate countermeasures, even if Apple's stock price falls $hundreds of billions. But the long-run price will be devastating. more

New Report About Internet Routing With MANRS

I find myself reading, frequently, about "interesting" exploits of IP routing. Recent history includes the redirection of Telegram traffic to Iran, Google traffic to China, and Cloudflare traffic to Nigeria -- and, per bgpstream.com, 64 events this month, 18 of them on one day. Is this expensive? You bet, both in money and in mindshare. Imagine the impact of discovering your company's name in the press. more