Can SpaceX Launch Version 2 Starlink Satellites This Year?

The answer to the question in the title depends on the availability of SpaceX's new Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster rocket, collectively referred to as Starship. Elon Musk says he is highly confident about getting Starship to orbit this year. He also says, "At SpaceX, we specialize in converting things from impossible to late." Starship is critical to Starlink because the version 2 satellites are seven meters long and weigh about 1.25 tons...

DOTZON Study: Digital City Brands 2022

The 2022 edition of the DOTZON study Digital City Brands has just been published. After having introduced the study in early 2017, DOTZON has mapped for the sixth year in a row how successful cities are in using their Digital City Brands. The Digital City Brand is the digital dimension of the City Brand and mirrors the "Digitalness" of a city. The advent of the Internet was the reason why Digital City Brands came into being in the first place.

11th Registration Operations Workshop (ROW), June 21th, 2022, Online

The Registration Operations Workshop (ROW) was conceived as an informal industry conference that would provide a forum for discussion of the technical aspects of registration operations in the domain name system and IP addressing. The 11th ROW will be held online on Tuesday, June 21st, 2022 at 13h00 -- 16h00 UTC. The discussion topics will be...

Data, DNS Abuse and What to Do Next

To the annoyance of some, surely, the issue of abuse in the domain name system (DNS) has been high on the list of critical issues in internet governance circles. Personally, in my more than 20 years of internet governance experience, tackling DNS abuse is one of the more important issues I've participated in and seen debated. Despite this intense scrutiny, common-sense solutions (such as contract improvements) have been so far elusive, even as they fall squarely within its ICANN's remit.

IPv4 and Education: The Basics

An IP address is a unique identifier for a device on a network, including the internet. IP stands for Internet Protocol (IP) which is a set of rules (a protocol) for addressing and routing data so it can travel through networks and arrive at its intended destination. Hence, "address." Internet-connected devices such as computers and smartphones each have a unique IP address.

Getting Ready for the Metaverse

In a recent article in LightReading, Mike Dano quotes Dan Rampton of Meta as saying that the immersive metaverse experience is going to require a customer latency between 10 and 20 milliseconds. The quote came from a Wireless Infrastructure Association Connect (WIAC) trade show presentation. Dano says the presentation was aimed at big players like American Tower and DigitalBridge, which are investing heavily in major data centers.

Cyber Diplomacy History at Foggy Bottom: The Latest Chapter

Foggy Bottom is the local affectionate name for the U.S. State Department -- because of its location near a former low-lying Potomac River lagoon in Washington DC. It recently announced the appointment of Nate Fick as the head of its "Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy," pending Congressional approval because it is wrapped up with ambassadorial status. The term "cyber" in this international diplomacy context has come to include all manner of electronic communication and information systems and services, i.e., ICT.

The Politics of Submarine Cable in the Pacific

There was a naive idealism in the early days of the Internet that attempted to rise above the tawdry game of politics. Somehow, we thought that we had managed to transcend a whole set of rather messy geopolitical considerations that plagued the telephone world and this new digital space that the Internet was creating was simply not going to play by the old rules.

The UDRP “Celebrates” Its 500th Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Case

Today, for the 500th time, an expert panel under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy or "UDRP", issued a decision finding a Complainant guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking or "RDNH". RDNH is an attempt to egregiously misuse the UDRP to unjustly seize a domain name from its lawful owner... To-date, the UDRP has adjudicated over 80,000 domain name disputes. The vast majority of them result in the transfer of a cybersquatted domain name to the rightful trademark owner.

More Mysterious DNS Root Query Traffic from a Large Cloud/DNS Operator

With so much traffic on the global internet day after day, it's not always easy to spot the occasional irregularity. After all, there are numerous layers of complexity that go into the serving of webpages, with multiple companies, agencies and organizations each playing a role. That's why when something does catch our attention, it's important that the various entities work together to explore the cause and, more importantly...