Internet Governance

ICANN Should Curb Anonymous Domain Name Abuses

E-commerce has revolutionized how businesses sell to consumers -- including those involved in illicit activities, such as websites peddling illegal narcotics, pirated movies and music, or counterfeit handbags. For example, 96 percent of Internet pharmacies do not comply with U.S. laws, and as they ship pills tainted with paint thinner, arsenic, and rat poison, they put the health and safety of consumers at risk. Why don't law enforcement officials do more to combat this problem? Partly because of the difficulty of identifying who is actually operating the illegal pharmacies. It is time to fix this, while allowing anonymity for those who deserve it. more

The Credible Threat

If you have been following the debate over Internet governance over the past few years, you know that while ICANN supporters (U.S., Canadian, Australian governments; business lobby) and critics (developing world and occasionally Europe) argue over the optimal approach, particularly with respect to government involvement in the domain name system, the reality has been that possession is all. ...The alternate root has always lurked in the background as a possibility that would force everyone to rethink their positions since it would enable a single country (or group of countries) to effectively pack up their bags and start a new game. ...It is with that background in mind that people need to think about a press release issued yesterday in China announcing a revamping of its Internet domain name system. Starting tomorrow, China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. more

Google AdSense Asks Publishers to Change Their Websites’ Privacy Policy

I received an e-mail from Google Adsense about its new interest-based advertising feature. The latest feature of Google AdSense allows Google to track the behavior of users who click on ads on their AdSense network. It also allows Google users to ‘select’ their interests—this way they would view advertisements based on their category of interest…

ICANN Fails Consumers (Again)

In its bid to be free of U.S. government oversight ICANN is leaning on the global multistakeholder community as proof positive that its policy-making comes from the ground up. ICANN's recent response to three U.S. senators invokes the input of "end users from all over the world" as a way of explaining how the organization is driven. Regardless of the invocation of the end user (and it must be instinct) ICANN cannot seem to help reaching back and slapping that end user across the face. more

Why the Lawsuit Against .XXX Maybe the Best Sales Tool Ever For New gTLD Applicants

"There is a serious danger that ICM will establish and monopolize such a distinct market. As consumers seeking adult content become more aware of the .XXX TLD, registering and displaying websites in other generic TLDs may not easily be substituted for registration in the .XXX TLD." No that statement is not from the ICM Registry's sales material. more

Internet Governance Outlook 2015: Two Processes, Many Venues, Four Baskets

2015 has just started, but the calendar of events related to Internet Governance is already fully packed until the end of the year. The list of issues under discussion gets longer and longer and more and more people expect concrete results from the numerous meetings. Whether we will see the next stumbling step forward on the long march through the Internet Governance Ecosystem will depend to a high degree from the outcomes of two different, but interrelated processes which will overshadow the Internet discussion in 2015. more

Infrastructure ENUM

After much initial fanfare a couple of years ago ENUM has matured to a state where it is currently yet another under-achiever in the technology deployment stakes. ENUM initially presented itself as a very provocative response to the legacy telco position of monopolising public voice services through their exclusive control over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the associated controlling position over the telephone number space... The perception was that ENUM was going to dismantle these levers of control and open up the voice market to a new wave of competitive carriers. If the address plan was the key to the PSTN, then ENUM was intended unlock this network and position the new wave of Voice Over IP (VOIP) carriers to take over any residual treasures of the traditional voice market. Events have not played out according to these expectations... more

What Is “1net” to Me

APNIC is a signatory to the Montevideo Statement, a declaration from members of the Internet technical community about the current state of Internet technical coordination, cooperation and governance. The statement conveys in particular an agreement on "the need for ongoing effort to address Internet Governance challenges", and a commitment to "catalyze community-wide efforts towards the evolution of global multi-stakeholder Internet cooperation". Last week during ICANN 48 in Buenos Aires, there were numerous discussions about the Montevideo Statement... more

Internet to ITU: Stay Away from My Network

An ITU document entitled "Beyond Internet Governance" crossed my desk earlier this week. Given that I had absolutely nothing better to do, I decided to give it a read. The audacity of the ITU Secretariat is nothing less than shocking. It has been a long while since I read such a self-serving, narrow-minded and inaccurate document. The backbone of the ITU's contention rests on the premise that something called the Next Generation Network and the contention that this network will act as one big bug fix for all the problems created by current inter-networking technology. more

The Government of Niue Launches Proceedings With ICANN to Reclaim Its .nu Top-Level Domain

The Government of Niue, a small island 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, launched proceedings today demanding a "redelegation" of its country code top-level domain, .nu, from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). more

The .DOCTOR Quarantine

ICANN should reconsider its decision to quarantine .DOCTOR, given that it's not even sick. In an utterly surprising move, ICANN staff and the Board's New gTLD Program Committee ("NGPC") recently informed the applicants for .DOCTOR that it has singled out the gTLD as a test case for controlling content and limiting speech on the Internet. In the epitome of top-down policy making, ICANN issued an edict that it will implement nearly year-old advice from the Government Advisory Committee ("GAC") differently from all other similarly situated gTLDs and in contravention of subsequent GAC advice. more

The .XXX Fiasco is Almost Over

At Friday's meeting of the ICANN board in Brussels, they voted, probably for the last time, to approve the 2004 application for the .XXX domain. Purely on the merits, there is of course no need for a top level domain for porn. This isn't about the merits, this is about whether ICANN follows its own rules. Despite overheated press reports, .XXX will not make porn any more available online than it already is (how could it?), there is no chance of all porn being forced into .XXX (that's a non-starter under US law), and .XXX will have no effect on the net other than perhaps being a place to put legal but socially marginal porn far away from any accidental visitors. more

XXX Saga Continues

Sex and the internet. Put the two together and you are bound to find an interesting story. While the saga surrounding sex.com took a new twist in the last couple of days, with the current owners going dotbomb, the .xxx story also took an interesting turn... For several years ICM and ICANN tangoed. more

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

Four senators (Rockefeller, Bayh, Nelson, and Snowe) have recently introduced S.773, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. While there are some good parts to the bill, many of the substantive provisions are poorly thought out at best. The bill attempts to solve non-problems, and to assume that research results can be commanded into being by virtue of an act of Congress. Beyond that, there are parts of the bill whose purpose is mysterious, or whose content bears no relation to its title. more

The Geo-Politics of ICANN vs ITU

Over the past couple of years I have had the opportunity to talk to US policy makers and have seen how ITU and ICANN have emerged as proxies for a much wider diplomatic dispute over who is going to control cyberspace. The Internet is now the engine of the new global economy. It is a communication infrastructure. Both have been correctly regarded as national security interests of the very highest level of priority. Some of the participants in the ICANN/ITU world are former participants in arms limitation circles. Their mode of thinking is illustrated by the frequent use of phrases such as 'why would we give up...'. more