The really important part of the World Conference on IT (WCIT) is not the internet battles that have caught the interest of the press - it is what will happen after the conference has ended. Membership of WCIT is on a per-country basis... Each country is free to make up its own delegation and these delegations can therefore represent a large variety of social, economic, business, legal, technical and other interests - as large and as wide as each country decides its delegation will be. more
The next few short weeks in the run-up to ICANN's Cartagena meeting could prove the most important time yet for the organization to show that it is a credible and capable overseer of the domain name system. After over two years of delays, tens of thousands of email exchanges, weeks of heated face-to-face discussions, and many millions of accumulated frequent flier miles, the time has arrived for ICANN to finally draw a line under the new top-level domain policy-development process and name the date for the opening of the first-round application window. more
Brendan Sasso reporting in the Hill: "Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), issued a statement late Wednesday slamming Russia for passing a bill that would allow the government to blacklist certain websites. He said the country had moved in a 'troubling and dangerous direction.' ... 'The world’s experience with the Internet provides a clear lesson: a free and open Internet promotes economic growth and freedom; restricting the free flow of information is bad for consumers, businesses, and societies,' he said. more
The ACPA and the UDRP provide two separate and distinct methods for resolving domain name disputes. Both alternatives have many critics and proponents, but the true value of each will ultimately be determined by how well each combats cyber-squatting. Separately, the UDRP and the ACPA will probably work well to defuse most of the cyber-squatting that is currently invading the Internet. If combined together the UDRP and the ACPA can be a cost saving and effective way to prevent cybersquatting... more
The ICA has just dispatched a letter to Assistant Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Strickling in advance of the talks scheduled in Brussels on February 29-March 1 between ICANN's Board and its Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). Our letter expresses strong concerns that the positions being advocated by the U.S. government and the GAC regarding the proposed Final Applicant Guidebook (AG) for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) would be detrimental to ICANN's multi-stakeholder policy process and would undermine the rights of legitimate registrants at new gTLDs. more
Internet freedom is under threat from governments around the world, including the United States, warned Vint Cerf on Monday. Andrew Feinberg reporting in the Hill: "Cerf, a computer scientist who was instrumental in the Internet's creation, now employed by Google as its 'Internet evangelist,' said officials in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe are using intellectual property and cybersecurity issues 'as an excuse for constraining what we can and can't do on the 'net.' 'Political structures ... are often scared by the possibility that the general public might figure out that they don't want them in power,' he said." more
Today the Internet Technical Advisory Committee (ITAC) to the OECD published the fifth edition of its newsletter. The ITAC was created in 2009 following the OECD's Seoul Ministerial with the objective to provide Internet technical and policy expertise to the work of the OECD on Internet-related issues. This informal group is coordinated by the Internet Society and currently counts 28 members active in domains such as open Internet/Web standards development, interconnection, IP addressing, security or privacy. more
The Mexico City ICANN Conference was more eventful than some of us had anticipated. Among the highlights was Paul Twomey's announcement that he is stepping down as President and CEO of ICANN effective on June 30... Before the Conference, ICANN had released the second draft of its Guidebook for new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). It was not greeted with universal acclaim... more
The Internet Society (ISOC) will present an INET Regional Conference today June 14 2011 at the Sentry Center in NYC. The theme is "It's your call. What kind Of Internet do you want?". The distinguished line up of speakers will include 'Father of the Internet' Vint Cerf, World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee, and Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the U.S. Department of Commerce Lawrence Strickling. more
Later this week, ICANN is finally going to vote on the proposed sale of .ORG to Ethos Capital. It will decide the future owner of .ORG, but the decision will also provide a window into whether ICANN will remain independent of the U.S. government. It's a big decision, one that can strengthen both ICANN and the NGO community on the web, if we get it right. For nearly a decade, the ICANN community fought hard to untether itself from the U.S. Department of Commerce. more
I kept wondering if all that I had said about Dr Toure was fair -- I hadn't met him before and had written so much to comment on the transcript of his speech at ICANN, Cairo . My discomfort was short-lived and even before a month elapsed I met him at the Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad. Exchanged pleasantries before saying "I wrote some strong comments about your speech at Cairo". Dr Toure looked happy to see me, beamed with a bit of surprise and said he read my comment... more
The Canadian government released a statement saying "Facebook committed serious contraventions of Canadian privacy laws and failed to take responsibility for protecting the personal information of Canadians." more
At least 21 news sites critical of the government in Egypt, including the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera and Huffington Post’s Arabic-language site HuffPost Arabi, have been blocked. more
Internet Society CEO and President, Andrew Sullivan, recently testified in front of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law in support of Section 230. more
I was naively optimistic in the early days of the Internet, assuming that it would enhance democracy while providing "big data" for historians. My first taste of that came during the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 when I worked with colleagues to create an archive of the network traffic in, out and within the Soviet Union. That traffic flowed through a computer called "Kremvax," operated by RELCOM, a Russian software company. The content of that archive was not generated by the government or the establishment media -- it was citizen journalism... more
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