On Friday, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's digital transformation minister, asked Cloudflare and Amazon to stop serving Russian web resources and protecting Russian services. He said in a tweet that Ukraine was "calling on Amazon to stop providing cloud services in Russia." He also said that "Cloudflare should not protect Russian web resources while their tanks and missiles attack our kindergartens." more
Last week the Ukrainian government sent a letter to ICANN asking them to revoke the ".ru", ".рф" and ".su" top-level domains. It also said they were asking RIPE, which manages IP addresses in Europe, to revoke Russian IP addresses. Both ICANN and RIPE said no. Other people have explained why it would have been a policy disaster, but beyond that, neither would actually have worked. more
The recent horrific actions undertaken by Vladimir V. Putin and complicit Russian actors against the sovereign nation of Ukraine and its people are widely regarded as war crimes on a profound scale not seen in Europe since World War II. The costs in lives and property are enormous. It has recently resulted in a condemning UN Resolution. At some point, there will be reckoning for Putin and those who aided and abetted his actions through our domestic and international legal systems. more
For several years, many within ICANN circles have raised concerns about the escalating nature of domain name system (DNS) abuse. While some strides were made toward a safer DNS, new data - this time from a comprehensive study of DNS abuse by the European Union - demonstrates that abuse remains a frustratingly obstinate problem that requires urgent attention. We've seen some registries and registrars testing innovative industry-led initiatives in an effort to address the issues. more
In response to Russia's horrific invasion and war against the Ukrainian nation ordered by Dictator Putin that will live in infamy, an array of nations, organizations, and companies have responded to shun and shut off Russia in every possible manner. The actions include no-fly zones, removal from ICT network services, and essentially universal declarations of condemnation. For the first time ever, all Russian proposals to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) quadrennial standards body plenary known as the WTSA have been "bracketed"... more
Ask ten people what privacy is, and you'll likely get twelve different answers. The reason for the disparity is that your feelings about privacy depend on context and your experience. Privacy is not a purely technical issue but a human one. Long before computers existed, people cared about and debated privacy. Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis defined it as "the right to be left alone" in 1890. Before the Web became a ubiquitous phenomenon, people primarily thought of privacy in terms of government intrusion. more
Ukraine's representative to ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) has sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to remove Russian-administered top level domains (.RU, .SU and .рф) from the DNS root zone. In a separate letter, Ukraine's representative also asked RIPE NCC to withdraw the right to use all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses by all Russian members of the regional IP registry for the European region. more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a not-for-profit corporation, which essentially functions as a governing body for the Internet and brings together representatives from government, civil society, academia, the private sector, and the technical community. Despite its importance in crafting policies related to world wide web development, a significant portion of digital rights lawyers underestimates ICANN’s regulatory role in contrast to one of the national governments. more
Imagine that you run an organization out of a building. Imagine that the landlord comes one day and says, "Oh I didn't know you are a resident of country X or dealing with anybody from country X. I have to close this place down right now." And then you are done. You don't have an organization anymore. This very scenario happens on the Internet. more
Time has come again, another year of general elections in Brazil. Some 30,000 candidates are running for Executive and Legislative seats: 1 President, 27 State Governors, 27 Federal Senators, 513 Federal Deputies, 1059 State Deputies, 24 District Deputies to govern 212+ million people and one of the largest economies in the world. For a few lucky industries, success and failure do not correlate with who is in power; for others, policy and regulation are everyday business. more
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