The ANA and Hand-Wringing

The Association of National Advertisers is at it again, this time spelling the death of new gTLDs barely after they emerge from the gate. In 1982, at the dawn of the video age, Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti infamously told Congress, with more than one unfortunate reference to various types of violent crime, that the advent of the VCR would spell immediate and irrevocable doom to the motion picture industry, and that the device should certainly be thrown to the scrap heap even before its arrival. more

African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) Streaming Live This Week From Dakar, Senegal

The 5th African Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) gets underway today, August 26, 2014, in Dakar, Senegal, with a packed agenda full of sessions focused on the future of peering and interconnection in Africa. There are sessions targeted at Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), infrastructure providers, content creators and policy makers and regulators. The event goes through Thursday, August 28, 2014. more

A New Way to Value Registry Business

There's a new site on the web - nTLDstats.com - that has a ton of valuable information about the new gTLD program. It shows numbers of registrations by registry, registrar, registry service provides - all the "Rs" in the domain name industry. It has quickly become the place where people go to measure how the industry, and the competitors in it, are doing. There's only one problem - not all domain registrations are created equal. more

Telecoms - Where Will the Money Come From?

With the arrival of mobile saturation stagnation is occurring in telecoms revenue growth in most developed telecoms markets. Voice traffic is increasingly moving onto IP-based systems, which are either free or at very low cost to its users. This is taking place on both the fixed and mobile networks. While in the case of corporate and government organisations nearly all fixed voice traffic has moved to IP-based systems, in the SME and consumer market this has not been the case. more

IGF Call for Public Comments on the Definition of Multistakeholder Participation Mechanisms

Over the past weeks, communities gathering experts from government, business, Civil Society, and the academic and technical communities, have been working through open mailing lists and online virtual meetings on IGF Best Practices. The discussion was documented by independent experts that will feed into five 90 minute Forums in Istanbul and that will in turn report into a Best Practices Main Session. more

Do You .RUN?

I am not such a good runner but I have decided to run early in the morning. It is what I just started to do today and to be honest, I hated it. But it does not matter, I will run again tomorrow morning... So what is the market for .RUN? Do runners communicate on Internet? Do they need to communicate because they are runners? Is .RUN for runners only? more

Wireless Broadband vs Fixed Broadband - The Story Continues

This never-ending story is used by opportunistic telcos and their lobbyists to confuse the issue in order to gain regulatory or political advantage. The debate is now raging again in the USA. In an attempt to talk down their monopolistic position in the market the three telcos - and this time in particular, Comcast - are claiming that real competition does in fact exist in the American broadband market, citing competition from the mobile 4G LTE services as an example. more

Prepare for the Worst, But Hope for the Best

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the importance of the timeline leading up to the September 2015 deadline for the IANA oversight transition proposal. In that post, I explored the nature of U.S. politics and how it can affect the transition if we, as a community, are not diligent in our efforts to meet that deadline. Since then, the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) has held its first meeting and a conference call, resulting in some new information that necessitates an update to that post. more

Quelle Suprise! ICANN’s Accountability Plan Gives ICANN Board Total Control

After a long await, ICANN's senior management finally released its plan for "Enhancing Accountability" at the private California corporation that makes global Internet domain name policy. Unfortunately, the accountability deficit crisis created by ICANN's longstanding policy of purely "self-policing" with no meaningful external accountability mechanisms will not be solved by this weak plan for more self-policing. more

How to Translate a Gov’t IPv6 Mandate Into an Action Plan: Guidance for National IPv6 Task Forces

Last year, I gave a short talk at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) Forum in (Abuja, Nigeria) on this topic and I thought I'd offer more details here. Let's say an African government has realised that IPv4 address exhaustion imposes limits its country's ICT development. Initial investigations indicate that deploying IPv6 is the only sustainable solution. Governments are however not very skilled in the bottom-up approach that is popular in the Internet world. more