Internet Governance

The Kinetic Frontier: Lessons From Geopolitical Violence and the Bunkerization of AI Infrastructure

Kinetic attacks on Gulf data centres expose the cloud's physical fragility, recasting AI infrastructure as strategic targets and accelerating bunkerisation, while outdated data laws leave firms choosing between legal compliance and digital survival.

Mandate Laundering: From RIR Fantasy to Transition Architecture

Private internet registries have inflated narrow technical roles into quasi-sovereign authority, laundering mandate through ritual and rhetoric; a fragile system now faces legal, economic and political reckoning, prompting calls for coordinated transition urgent global reform.

Africa’s AI Governance Crisis Is Not a Regulatory Gap, It Is a Sovereignty Emergency

Africa's looming AI rules expose a deeper problem: foreign-controlled infrastructure, weak enforcement capacity and externally governed data flows are eroding digital sovereignty, leaving states unable to regulate, protect citizens or meet global obligations.

Trusted Notifier Network (TNN) Core Concept 1: Unfair Cost Transfer and Reversal of Commercial Best

A flawed abuse-response system shifts costs from perpetrators to intermediaries, overwhelming enforcement. The Trusted Notifier Network seeks to realign incentives, curb low-quality reporting, and restore efficiency by embedding trust, accountability, and cost redistribution.

The Internet That Works for Some: Universal Acceptance Failures Across Asia Pacific

Across Asia Pacific, millions are excluded from digital services because systems fail to recognise non Latin scripts, exposing how flawed design assumptions about internet users entrench inequality across the region in welfare, finance and education.

Africa Can’t Skip IPv4 on the Road to IPv6

Africa's push toward IPv6 cannot bypass IPv4 scarcity, as uneven infrastructure, market dynamics, and governance disputes raise costs, entrench inequality, and risk turning transitional address shortages into a lasting brake on digital development across regions.

Moving Beyond Associated Domain Checks: The Urgent Need to Ban Short-Term Domain Leasing

ICANN's new DNS abuse rules mark progress, yet short-term domain leasing enables fleeting, hard-to-detect attacks. A proposed 30-day minimum lease could curb cybercrime by undermining the economics of weaponised parked domains.

Running-Code Betrayal: How the RIR System Turned Consensus Against the Technical Community

A dispute over African IP governance exposes a flaw in the RIR system, where thin policy, weak accountability and institutional self preservation risk overriding running networks and undermining the technical legitimacy that sustained global coordination.

The Misinformation War Over Africa’s Internet Registry

Afrinic crisis exposes how legal pressure, proxy advocacy and owned media reshape narratives, potentially threatening global internet registry governance and shifting Africa's IP resources from public stewardship toward market commodification with broader far-reaching institutional consequences.

Five Things the UN Permanent Mechanism on Cybersecurity Must Actually Deliver

The UN's new permanent cybersecurity mechanism promises continuity after decades of fleeting forums, yet risks irrelevance unless states enforce existing law, bridge cybercrime divides, address AI threats, build practical capacity, and include non-state expertise meaningfully.

The Poverty Penalty: How the RIR Model Taxes the Poor While Calling It Equality

Critics blame IPv4 markets for inequality, but registry rules long rewarded scale and imposed regressive costs. Scarcity was managed, not equalized, leaving poorer networks paying more for slower, less predictable access over time and regions.

Governing Through Liability: Cox v. Sony and the Fragmentation of the Internet

Cox v. Sony narrows intermediary liability, insisting on intent over knowledge. In doing so, it preserves infrastructure neutrality, resists privatized enforcement, and sharpens a growing divide between American and European models of Internet governance.

Cyber Threats, Climate Impacts, Internet Sovereignty: CaribNOG 31 Takes It All On

CaribNOG 31 convenes in Kingston as climate risks, cyber threats and sovereignty concerns converge, pushing Caribbean engineers, policymakers and operators to strengthen resilient internet infrastructure through cooperation and technical exchange over three days of meetings.

Sovereignty Inversion: How RIRs Reduced National Sovereignty to a US$100 Liability Cap

Regional internet registries, once coordinators of technical scarcity, now effectively cap liability at $100 while retaining control over national numbering systems, shifting risk to states and entrenching a governance model critics argue today inverts sovereignty.

When the Internet Doesn’t Recognize You: Universal Acceptance and India’s Welfare Crisis

India's digital welfare systems, built without universal acceptance, have excluded millions from vaccines, wages and food, revealing how technical design choices can entrench inequality and reshape access to basic rights across rural regions today in India.