India's DNS abuse crisis exposes a registrar accountability gap: malicious domains remain online while vulnerable users bear the cost. Concentrated abuse patterns suggest stronger oversight and faster mitigation could significantly reduce predictable harms nationwide today.
AI surveillance systems increasingly classify human differences as algorithmic risk, leaving persons with disabilities vulnerable to exclusion, misclassification, and invisible barriers that threaten decades of progress in accessibility, accountability, and digital inclusion throughout public infrastructure.
Internet-governance bodies routinely invoke "the community" to legitimize decisions. The Constituent Community Doctrine asks who holds authority, how mandates are conferred, and when institutional claims exceed, distort or outlive the consent on which they rest.
Africa's pursuit of digital sovereignty demands more than keeping data at home. True resilience depends on controlling the infrastructure, platforms, cybersecurity capabilities, governance, and human expertise that underpin an increasingly interconnected digital economy across Africa.
Measuring online abuse can reveal its scale, but not who should intervene. Effective policy must distinguish harm from contractual responsibility, identify the actors best placed to act, and target remedies where they can work effectively.
ICANN applies identical rules to every registrar, yet new research reveals a sharply unequal market where seven firms capture half of inflows, renewals dominate activity, and many accreditations barely operate at all in practice today.
Authors defend research showing malicious domain registrations occur at industrial scale, arguing that blocklist data is reliable and that policymakers must prioritize prevention alongside mitigation to curb cybercriminal exploitation of the domain name market globally.
The Internet Governance Forum has secured its permanent place in the UN system. Its next challenge is to strengthen its relevance, deepen multistakeholder collaboration, and deliver greater impact across an increasingly complex and fragmented digital governance landscape.
Africa has digital strategies in abundance, but weak institutions, inconsistent leadership, poor governance and limited execution keep ambitious policies from delivering trusted, interoperable public services and sustainable digital transformation across the continent in practice today.
Internet institutions can remain operational while losing the legitimacy that sustains their authority. A proposed governance stress test distinguishes continuity from legitimacy, helping expose capture, substitution, and accountability failures before institutional crises become irreversible realities.