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As of September 6, Brazilians caught using VPNs to access Elon Musk's social media platform X will face fines of up to 50,000 reais ($8,943.74) per day, despite false claims online suggesting otherwise. more
Russia's Ministry of Digital Development is set to invest nearly 60 billion rubles ($660 million) over the next five years to enhance its internet censorship system, according to a government proposal revealed by Reuters. more
Russia's communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, intends to block Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) starting March 1, 2024, according to Senator Artem Sheikin of the United Russia party. more
France's forthcoming SREN Bill could mandate web browsers to block websites deemed illicit by the government, setting a precarious standard for digital freedoms, warns Mozilla Foundation in a recent blog post. more
On Friday, 23rd June, Caribbean telecommunications operators (telcos) held a meeting in Miami to fine tune their strategy to force Big Tech companies to contribute financially to regional telecoms network infrastructure. Hosted by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU), and taking a similar perspective to the "fair share" proposal currently being debated in the European Union, regional network operators are arguing that over-the-top (OTT) service providers are responsible for 67 percent of the total Internet traffic in the Caribbean, but make no contributions or investments toward local delivery networks. more
In the latest twist of the US-China spat, President Trump has his sights on TikTok, the short-form video-sharing platform and ByteDance subsidiary. On July 31, President Trump threatened to ban TikTok because it was a threat to US national security. On August 6, he made good on his threat when he signed an Executive Order to that effect. President Trump tightened the screws with an August 14 Executive Order requiring ByteDance to divest its assets in the US and destroy any TikTok data on its US users within 90 days. more
Iran has disrupted mobile internet access for some three hours on 19 January 2023. Real-time NetBlocks metrics show that mobile networks were disrupted for three hours on Thursday morning, while fixed-line services were largely unaffected. more
How to properly balance the commercial rights of a complainant with the free speech rights of a respondent has challenged a generation of Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) panelists. Panelists have adopted a variety of approaches and consensus has been elusive. Paragraph 4(c)(iii) of the Policy provides that a respondent may have a right or legitimate interest in a disputed domain name... more
Let's face it. The suppression of free speech is happening all over the Internet. Examples range from fanatics shouting down "unbelievers" in chatrooms to governments silencing voices to rig elections. We are equally convinced that freedom of speech as a principle should be generally upheld in cyberspace. This principle is strong where freedom and democracy are strong. It shines bright for those in search of freedom and democracy. Well, folks, think again. A recent experience has made me think otherwise. more
I'm writing this from Taipei, where I have lived in peace for over 10 years. Sadly I learned that during this week, intermediate-range ballistic missiles (operated by China) have flown far above the capital of Taiwan and that five of them have landed in the waters of Japan's exclusive economic zone (EEZ). This provocative live-firing drill came as a direct response from China following Pelosi's visit. more
In late 2021, the term Web3 began to increasingly appear in mainstream media outlets. This does not refer, however, to a sudden increase in interest in the Semantic Web as defined by Tim Berners-Lee, but rather to something entirely different. Enthusiasts of cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) seized this term and changed its meaning to reflect a supposed new stage of the Web, running on top of blockchains and having decentralization as its core value. To summarize the narrative being spun, the first generation of the Web afforded independence to the owners of websites, but this did not extend to the average user... more
As a designated committee of experts prepares to draft a new treaty to combat the use of information and communications technologies in cybercrime at the UN in January 2022, it is paramount that other stakeholders oversee these discussions to avoid violating human rights on the Internet. This initiative was kickstarted by a 2019 resolution led by Russia and endorsed by other countries considered by many to behavior controversially on cybersecurity matters, such as China, Venezuela, Cambodia, North Korea, and others. more
For those who follow the issue of blocking illegal content from the Internet, there is an interesting development in relation to this issue here in Germany, and I will tell you a little about it. One way to make it difficult to access illegal content is to block it directly in the DNS. But what is DNS for? Basically, it serves to translate the domain name into the IP of the server that is hosting the content. By blocking directly at the DNS level, a query to a domain will no longer bring the server's IP number, and with that, the user no longer accesses that content. more
United States President Biden has recently commented: “But let me be very clear: Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation. Without healthy competition, big players can change and charge whatever they want and treat you however they want. […] So, we know we’ve got a problem – a major problem.” It’s not every day you hear the President of the United States take on the very industry that supported his national economy remaining the world’s richest over the past couple of decades. Yet his tone resonates with a growing unease within the US... more
It’s now more than 6 weeks since the Cuban political protests and accompanying Internet service disruption. Will they lead to a long-run change in the Cuban Internet or the Cuban political situation? Let’s start with the Cuban Internet. Many of the Internet changes during the protests have disappeared. Total daily traffic, the ratios of mobile to fixed traffic, and human to automated posts, and the proportion of blocked Signal sessions are about what they were before the protests. more
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