Internet Governance

Agriculture At High-Speed: Project Updates on Bridging California’s Rural/Urban Digital Divide

When farms are connected to the Internet, we all benefit. Agriculture that gains real-time information about plants, soil, atmosphere, and irrigation, dubbed "precision agriculture", can save farmers 20-30% of their water consumption while increasing productivity by 20-70%, according to Valley Vision. The San Francisco-Bay Area Internet Society Chapter is pleased to announce that we have started phase one of our collaborative project, "Bridging California's Rural/Urban Digital Divide with Mobile Broadband"...

Three Layers of China’s International Strategy on Cyberspace

China's newly released International Strategy on Cyberspace is marked by three distinctive layers with different degree of priority: (1) sovereignty (or cybersecurity, or UN Charter), (2) globalization (or digital economy, or WTO rules), and (3) fundamental freedoms (or human rights, or UDHR). The good point of the strategy is that it tries to make the three layers peacefully co-exist in one document. The failure, however, lies in the intentional ranking of relevance/importance of the three layers...

ICANN Can Help China Secure Cyberspace

Before the righteous too much deride the "International Strategy of Cooperation on Cyberspace" emanating from China's cooperative one-party state, consider what progress it represents: a policy document that begins with principles, speaks often of cooperation, and clearly details the bilateral and multilateral approaches the country intends. By any measure, this is good practice from a keystone of the international system. And it offers a gift to those who would wish the Internet to be governed otherwise.

Healthy Domains Revisited: The Pharmaceutical Industry

Users scored an exciting victory over copyright-based censorship last month, when the Domain Name Association (DNA) and the Public Interest Registry (PIR), in response to criticism from EFF, both abruptly withdrew their proposals for a new compulsory arbitration system to confiscate domain names of websites accused of copyright infringement. But copyright enforcement was only one limb of the the DNA's set of Registry/Registrar Healthy Practices.

Notice, Takedown, Borders, and Scale

I was on the front lines of the SOPA wars, because SOPA touched on two matters of strong personal and professional importance for me: protecting the Internet infrastructure, and protecting the economy from Internet related crime. I've continued to study this field and advise industry participants in the years since then. The 2017-02-20 paper by Annemarie Bridy entitled Notice and Takedown in the Domain Name System: ICANN's Ambivalent Drift into Online Content Regulation deserves an answer, which I shall attempt here.

Digital Geneva Convention: Multilateral Treaty, Multistakeholder Implementation

Microsoft's call for a Digital Geneva Convention, outlined in Smith's blog post, has attracted the attention of the digital policy community. Only two years ago, it would have been unthinkable for an Internet company to invite governments to adopt a digital convention. Microsoft has crossed this Rubicon in global digital politics by proposing a Digital Geneva Convention which should 'commit governments to avoiding cyber-attacks that target the private sector or critical infrastructure or the use of hacking to steal intellectual property'.

At the NCPH Intersessional, Compliance Concerns Take Centre Stage

The non-contracted parties of the ICANN community met in Reykjavík last week for their annual intersessional meeting, where at the top of the agenda were calls for more transparency, operational consistency, and procedural fairness in how ICANN ensures contractual compliance. ICANN, as a quasi-private cooperative, derives its legitimacy from its ability to enforce its contracts with domain name registries and registrars...

Keys to Successful Collaboration and Solving Wicked Internet Problems

The incredible pace of change of the Internet -- from research laboratory inception to global telecommunication necessity -- is due to the continuing pursuit, development and deployment of technology and practices adopted to make the Internet better. This has required continuous attention to a wide variety of problems ranging from "simple" to so-called "wicked problems". Problems in the latter category have been addressed through collaboration. This post outlines key characteristics of successful collaboration activities.

Commercial Incentives Behind IPv6 Deployment

The Best Practice Forum (BPF) on IPv6 at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) explored what economic and commercial incentives drive providers, companies and organizations to deploy IPv6 on their networks and for their services. The BPF collected case studies, held open discussions online and at the 2016 IGF meeting, and produced a comprehensive output report. This article gives a high-level overview.

Narcotics Traffic Is Not Part of a Healthy Domain System

A stack contrast is emerging within the DNS between providers who tolerate blatantly illegal domain use and those who do not. Our study, just published here focuses on five U.S.-based providers, their policies, and their response to reports of opioid traffic within their registry or registrar. There are many providers, not covered here, who removed hundreds of domains selling opioids and I applaud their efforts.