10 Main Internet Governance Developments in 2011

Here is the provisional list of the main Internet governance developments in 2011 and we need your help to compile a final list. Please let us know your views by: Making comments and adding any other development you think should be on this list. Join the webinar discussion on 20 December 2012 at 15.00 (CET). more

TLDs, CJD and Other Mad Cows

"At every crossroad on the road that leads to the future, tradition has placed against us ten thousand men to guard the past". These were the words of Stanley Prusiner in 1992 describing the opposition to his radical discovery of what he called prions, the causative agents of a clutch of baffling brain diseases. These include kuru, affecting New Guinea cannibals, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD), and BSE or mad cow disease. And today these guardians of the past are in place again at the crossroad that leads to a future of thousands of top-level Internet domain names. more

Chinese Hackers and Cyber Realpolitik

For many people the comments made by Michael Hayden, Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, at this week's Black Hat Technical Security Conference in Abu Dhabi may have been unsettling as he commented upon the state of Chinese cyber espionage. I appreciate the candor of his observations and the distinction he made between state-level motivations. In particular, his comment... more

Will Launch of New gTLD Program Be Delayed as a Result of Recent Hearings?

Yesterday evening, the ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) held its last teleconference of the year. We had invited ICANN's new gTLD supremo Kurt Pritz to give an update on the recent US Congress hearings. Kurt was ICANN's spokesperson in both hearings, and felt that the first was more favourable to ICANN than the second. more

Important Progress on Accountability and Transparency

The ICANN Board made a couple of important decisions regarding accountability and transparency at its 8 December meeting. Specifically, it approved compensating Directors and also enhanced ICANN's conflicts of interest rules. These are positive developments for the organization, and come at a critical juncture as the Internet governance debate heats up in 2012. more

Stopping SOPA’s Anti-Circumvention

The House's Stop Online Piracy Act is in Judiciary Committee Markup today. As numerous protests, open letters, and advocacy campaigns across the Web, this is a seriously flawed bill. Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Darrell Issa's proposed OPEN Act points out, by contrast, some of the procedural problems. Here, I analyze just one of the problematic provisions of SOPA: a new"anticircumvention" provision more

Providing Persistent Domain Names Under .ARPA

Some domains are too big to fail. Quite apart from the obvious ones like google.com and facebook.com, upon whose availability our everyday lives depends, there are many others upon which the infrastructure of the Internet (and much of the modern world itself) depends. These are domains like w3.org and ietf.org, which host the technical specifications which describe the World Wide Web and the Internet themselves. more

New gTLDs and Endangered Languages

While exploring the UNESCO's interactive atlas of the world's languages in danger, I am happy to see that new generic Top-Level Domains could help save some of these languages. .CAT for Catalan language already exist; .BZH will probably have the "Breton" language to help survive; "Basque" is vulnerable but there is a .EUS initiative; .CORSICA will certainly help the "Corsican" language to develop... more

2nd FCC Workshop on PSTN Transition Streaming Live Today

Today, December 14, 2011, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding the second of two workshops on the transition of the PSTN to new technologies. The workshop started streaming live this morning at 9:30am US Eastern. The FCC's note about the workshops mentions that people watching the live stream can send in questions to panelists using either of two methods... more

2012 Security Predictions: APT’s, Mobile Malware and Botnet Takedowns

As the weeks remaining in 2011 dwindle and 2012 peaks out from behind the last page of the calendar, it must once again be that time of year for purposeful reflection and prediction. Or is that navel gazing and star gazing? At the highest level of navel gazing you could probably sum up 2011 with one word -- "More"... But let's put that aside for now. What does 2012 hold in stall for us? more