The Unbelievably High Cost of the War Against Huawei

U.S. companies were selling $11 billion a year of parts to Huawei before the blockade. Losing those sales is just the start of the damage. Every other Chinese and Russian company is making sure to find non-US suppliers. The U.S. has threatened India and Turkey with sanctions as well. As other companies replace U.S. components, the impact will be tens of billions more than the $11 billion of Huawei suppliers.

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.

Let’s Have an Honest Conversation About Huawei

On May 29, I attended an AEI event on "International economics and securing next-generation 5G wireless networks," with Ambassador Robert Strayer, who heads the U.S. State Department's CIP team. But the focus of the talk was not really on 5G security, international trade or 5G development. In fact, there was no constructive agenda at all. The talk was an extended attack on China and the Chinese-based telecommunications vendor Huawei – another episode in an ongoing U.S. government campaign to shut Huawei and other Chinese firms out of the U.S. market, and to convince every other country in the world to do the same.

Domain Enforcement in a Post-GDPR World

The implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and ICANN's conservative temporary policy, which favors privacy and limits registrar liability, has made domain enforcement against cybersquatters, cyber criminals and infringement more difficult, expensive and slow. With heightened concerns over privacy following high-profile breaches of consumer data and its subsequent illicit use and distribution, there is no question that consumer data protection practices would come under scrutiny.

The Myth of 5G and Driverless Cars

A colleague sent me an article that had been published earlier this year in MachineDesign magazine that predicts that driverless cars can't be realized until we have a ubiquitous 5G network. When looking for the original article on the web I noticed numerous similar articles like this one in Forbes that have the same opinion. These articles and other similar articles predict that high-bandwidth, low-latency 5G networks are only a few years away.

Interstate at Rush Hour ...in the Rain ...on a Friday – AKA, Your Enterprise Traffic on the Net

Congestion. Traffic. Two words that draw a visceral response, whether you are commuting to work or managing a network. Managing data traffic used to be easy. Everything was housed in centralized data centers, and all traffic was routed through big, dedicated, effective but expensive "pipes" -- Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) links. When all the applications are at the data center, it makes sense to build private access for all traffic.

Celebrating Twenty Years of the UDRP

The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, commonly known as the UDRP, was first introduced on October 24, 1999, by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The UDRP is incorporated by reference into Registration Agreements for all generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) and some country-code top-level domain names (ccTLDs).

The Loss of a Friend

Dear colleagues and friends, it is very, very difficult to write these words. The loss of a young person is always a tragedy. The untimely loss of a friend is even worse and is always a very difficult time. The loss of a fellow Internet pioneer is like losing a brother. Tarek Kamel was a great friend of the Internet Society–Bulgaria. I remember him giving an interview for the Bulgarian public television in Yokohama during the INET 2000 meeting...

Gartner Says SDN Has Left the Building – Say Hello to Network Automation

In their annual hype cycle on on network technologies, Gartner lists the emerging technologies and an estimate of the timeframe in which they will reach the plateau of productivity. The latest hype cycle on enterprise networking labels Software-Defined Networks (SDN) as an obsolete technology. So on the surface, it would appear that SDN is now semi-officially dead. While most natural scientists accept the Darwinian theories, the technology industry has traditionally been trying to defy evolution.

The “Kiwi” Way of Interneting

By now, we are all exposed to the narrative of how the Internet is no longer a safe place. It is full of bots, misinformation, abuse and violence; it is a space that has been overtaken by terrorists and extremists. The Internet is weaponized to influence elections, undermine democracies, and instill fear in its users. That's the story we are told. No one can deny the swift change that is taking place in global politics. The "brave new world" that has emerged is, currently, based on isolation and fear.