Internet Governance

NCUC Group Releases Nominations

The Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) is the constituency group representing civil society organizations in the formation of domain name policy. In August 2004 it initiated a process to nominate people to serve on the UN Secretary-General's Working Group on Internet Governance, as representatives of civil society. Our purpose was to assist the Secretary-General to identify qualified and widely-supported individuals capable of serving on the WGIG on behalf of civil society. more

Ensuring Trust in Internet Governance

This week in Singapore, important decisions are being made about the future of the Internet at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) 52 conference. At stake are fundamental questions: Should the American people surrender stewardship over core technical functions that have preserved the open and neutral operation of the Internet since its inception? Should the Obama Administration cede this authority to an organization many consider to be non-transparent, unaccountable and insular? more

Letter from EU to UN Secretary General

Today the Swedish IT Minister Åsa Torstensson together with the Commissioner Viviane Reding sent a letter to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I think the letter is extremely well written, but when I twittered about it, some people contacted me and asked what was so special with it? Let me try to explain... more

The Internet’s Climate Quandary and the Inconvenience of Practicing What We Preach

It all started earlier this year in June. I was coding transcripts of the past global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meetings as part of a data mining exercise for DiploFoundation's Geneva Internet Platform (GIP). Pouring over transcript after transcript, the work was tedious, but I was learning a great deal about the Internet governance community as well. My interest was piqued by the conversations, the familiar names I came across, and the multi-stakeholder manifestation of politics, perspectives, and positions. more

If the Stakeholders Already Control the Internet, Why NETmundial and the IANA Transition?

Last weekend C-Span, the public service network that broadcasts proceedings of the U.S. Congress and other U.S. government functions, aired a segment of its series "the Communicators" featuring ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade; C-Span describes the show as "Half-hour conversations with the leaders who shape our digital future". While the interview is actually just 28 minutes long, and appears to have been recorded on January 28th, it contains some surprising statements that raise some intriguing questions. more

Overture to Take Over Internet Governance: ITU at ICANN Meeting, Cairo

ITU is 143 years old and it has done a lot of good work. But it is so huge and powerful that it has been monopolizing (or mono-unionizing) Telecommunications for the last 143 years. ITU's hold over communications has been sweeping. But during the last ten years, ITU's member Telcos have seen several challenges from the open Internet architecture... ITU and the Internet organizations did not quite get along for this and several other reasons Especially the ITU has had its share of differences with the ICANN. Dr. Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the ITU addressed the ICANN Annual Meeting at Cairo on 6 November 2008. Here are some excerpts from the Secretary General's speech with my comments. more

The Continuing ITU Meltdown

It is rather like watching the episodes in the new season of a soap opera. When we last left the ITU at its WCIT treaty conference in Dubai in December, fifty-five nations got up and left, refusing to sign a profoundly broken scheme to regulate anything and everything related to telecommunications, information systems, and the Internet. Eighty-nine nations signed - notably Russia, China, Korea, and most of the Middle East and African countries. This G55 versus G89 split fundamentally fractured the legal basis of the ITU and the role of its standards making body. more

New Book on Domain Name Regulation

My book, "The Current State of Domain Name Regulation: Domain Names as Second Class Citizens in a Mark-dominated World" is now available by Routledge. The following is an overview of the book. more

Banning 5G Equipment is a Foolish Strategy

It has become popular today around Washington and the venues of its coerced allies to issue threats to ban telecommunications equipment from certain countries - especially equipment intended for 5G use. The guise is vague assertions of "national security." It is an old tactic dating back to the turn of the last century and recurrent for decades. A combination of treaty instruments and collaborative industry standards activity several decades ago largely put an end to the banning tactic - significantly benefitting the entire world. more

My Comment on Forbes - Why Is the UN Trying to Take over the Internet

Forbes just published this article that's being shared all over my facebook friends feed. I left a comment on the article that I've copied and pasted here, as it is just about long enough to qualify as a CircleID post by itself... The problem is that peering isn't always settlement free -- and even if it is, if and only if there's an equitable amount of traffic exchanged between two ISPs. And then there's transit, where you pay another network to carry your packets for you. more

Mishandling the Registrar Contract Negotiations

By publishing a draft Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) for public comment before it has been agreed on by both parties, has ICANN dealt the bottom-up multi-stakeholder model a blow? ICANN Staff and the registrars have been negotiating a new version of the RAA for the past 18 months following requests by Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) such as Interpol for greater consumer protection. With both ICANN and registrars working hard, by early this year agreement had been reached on 11.5 of the 12 LEA "asks". A deal looked close. more

UN Secretary General’s Roadmap on Digital Cooperation: Creative Navigating in Stormy Cyberwaters

When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced in January 2020 that he was preparing a global "roadmap for digital cooperation," he had no idea that six months later, the world had made a quantum leap into the digital age. Home office, distance learning, online shopping, and video conferencing have been around for a long time, but the standstill of the real world during the pandemic has led to an unexpected expansion of the virtual world. more

IETF Reaches Broad Consensus to Upgrade Internet Security Protocols Amid Pervasive Surveillance

Internet security has been a primary focus this week for more than 1100 engineers and technologists from around the world gathered at the 88th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Participants are rethinking approaches to security across a wide range of technical areas. more

The Open Internet?

I'm sure we've all heard about "the open Internet." The expression builds upon a rich pedigree of term "open" in various contexts. For example, "open government" is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight, a concept that appears to be able to trace its antecedents back to the age of enlightenment in 17th century Europe. more

Here’s Looking at You…

Much has been said in recent weeks about various forms of cyber spying. The United States has accused the Chinese of cyber espionage and stealing industrial secrets. A former contractor to the United States' NSA, Edward Snowden, has accused various US intelligence agencies of systematic examination of activity on various popular social network services... These days cloud services may be all the vogue, but there is also an emerging understanding that once your data heads into one of these clouds, then it's no longer necessarily entirely your data; it may have become somebody else's data too... more