A Post-Pandemic Look at Owning (Virtual) Space for Business vs Renting on Social Media

Over 20 years ago, in 1997, the very first social media platform, SixDegrees.com, was launched. Most of us have probably not heard of it, and that's not surprising since the platform survived for only four years. Since then, there has been a surge in the number of social media platforms that have been launched: Friendster, MySpace, Foursquare, Classmates, Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest, WeChat, Vine, WhatsApp, Blogger, WordPress, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, ClubHouse, the list goes on.

What ICANN Should Do Now to Help Future Applicants of New gTLDs

During ICANN71, the Brand Registry Group (BRG) openly asked potential future applicants what ICANN can do to help prepare them for the next gTLD round. The answer was very clear - commit to opening the next round and provide as much information as possible early on. However, in recent correspondence to the BRG from ICANN Chair, Maarten Botterman, he emphasized that "significant work lies ahead of us: the 2012 Applicant Guidebook must be updated with more than 100 outputs...

The Dumb Pipe Question

Every few years, I read something that resurrects the old question of whether ISPs should be dumb pipe providers or something more. Some ISPs have fought against the idea of being dumb pipe providers and want to believe they are far more than that. The latest event that raises this question anew is AT&T's debacle with ditching DirecTV and WarnerMedia. AT&T was clearly not content with being considered as only a dumb pipe provider.

The Internet and the Cloud Are Going Into Space

Unlike Bezos and Branson, they're going to stay there. Today we have space-based internet access and a terrestrial internet; within ten years, we'll have a space-based internet. Internet traffic will travel more miles in space than on terrestrial fiber. By that time, the great cloud data centers of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and their competitors and successors will mostly be in orbit as well. Five years from now, this transition will be obvious, accepted, and well underway...

A Simulation of the SpaceX, Amazon, Telesat and OneWeb Broadband Satellite Constellations

Over two years ago, an MIT research group ran a simulation of the low-Earth orbit broadband constellations of OneWeb, SpaceX, and Telesat, and last January they repeated the simulation updating with revised constellation characteristics and adding Amazon's Project Kuiper. They ran the new simulation twice, once using the planned initial deployments of each constellation and a second time using the configuration shown.

5G Base Stations $13,000 in China

Most carriers don't order 200,000 5G base stations, so they will pay more, but that's the actual price for the joint procurement of China Telecom and China Unicom. The 200,000-300,000 cells the two jointly are upgrading are probably more than the entire rest of the world will add. The second Chinese network, jointly built by China Mobile and China Broadcast, is growing even faster.

How Does the Acceptance of All Domain Names in Open-Source Software Look in 2021?

A recent study carried out by Governance Primer on behalf of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) identified trends in the acceptance of all domain names in software hosted at Github, the largest open-source repository globally. This research builds on top of previous efforts aimed at identifying the underlying issues that result in problems when different applications need to handle Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) and new gTLDs, particularly when it comes to email addresses.

Where are the Gigabit Applications?

I remember that soon after the City of Chattanooga launched its citywide fiber network, the company held a competition seeking web applications that would benefit from gigabit speeds. I don't recall if anything useful came out of that effort, but I know that there are still today almost no big bandwidth applications on the web online aimed at the average household.

Euro 2020 Part Two: eCommerce Marketplace Activity

Following our previous article on the Euro 2020 football tournament that looked retrospectively at domain name registrations relating to the competition, this article considers activity on eCommerce marketplaces. For this study, our Discovery Engine technology was used to conduct a regular series of scans across key international online marketplaces. We monitored for listings (offers of sale) relating to Euro 2020 clothing and merchandise.

Email Recommendation System-Abstract: Deployment Considerations (Part III)

Perhaps, one of the most thrilling moments of any machine learning project for a data science team is learning that they get to deploy the model in a production environment. However, this can be a daunting task or a simplified one, if all the tools are readily available. Machine-learning (ML) models "require" deployment to a production environment to deliver optimal business value, and the reality is that most models never make it to production.