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At Friday's board meeting, ICANN once again narrowly approved the contentious .XXX domain intended for pornography. What this vote primarily shows is that ICANN's processes have been broken for a long time, and aren't getting fixed. Two board members made thoughtful and eloquent statements before the vote outlining the reasons they were about to vote for or against the domain. more
The Internet Governance Project (IGP) issued a set of reports analyzing the current "state of play" in Internet governance. The reports were commissioned by the United Nations ICT Task Force as an input into the deliberations of the UN Secretary-General's Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). The report identifies the international organizations and agreements affecting the Internet, and points out where there are conflicts and gaps. more
Internet all over Egypt has been blocked in an unprecedented revolt. I call on my friend Tarek Kamel, Egypt's Minister of Telecommunication, to overturn this oppressive decision and to unblock the Internet in all Egypt immediately and to join his people in their peaceful revolt. I have known Tarek Kamel for more than a decade and long before he became minister back in the days when he used to say he had no authority and that the decisions were in the hands of his boss and that he was a mere decision-less adviser to then Minister of Telecommunication, Mr. Nazif. more
Internet governance can be a little on the dry side. So when tech policy reporters get a chance to write an ICANN story that features porn stars on picket lines, it's hard to blame them when they run with it. But all the media hype about ICANN's .xxx decision at last week's meeting in San Francisco exposed the real dilemma facing ICANN: how to engage governments in a multi-stakeholder model that's led by the private sector. more
Since the early 2000s, the global debate about Internet Governance did have its ups and downs. We did see the establishment of ICANN, the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the making of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and the failure of the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT). We did see NetMundial and the IANA transition. more
CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, has looked back at the notable events of the last decade in our industry. Each year/link in the post explodes to a discrete blog entry with a month-by-month break-out of notable events. more
Websites associated with the upcoming referendum in Catalonia are being blocked by ISPs in Spain. While several of the domain names used by advocates of the Catalan referendum have been seized by authorities others are being blocked by the ISPs in Spain. For those of us outside Spain the blocking has zero impact on us, so we can see the sites without any issue, but for users in Catalonia, ISPs are blocking access. more
According to the draft of new Generic Top-level Domains (gTLD) contracts for Section 7.3, "Price controls have been removed for 2008 in favor of the transparent pricing model outlined above." Section 3.2.b) of the .com registry agreement states: "ICANN shall not apply standards, policies, procedures or practices arbitrarily, unjustifiably, or inequitably and shall not single out Registry Operator for disparate treatment unless justified by substantial and reasonable cause." In my opinion, VeriSign (and other existing gTLD operators) are almost being invited to ask for their contracts to be amended... more
On December 14, 2021, Dot Hip Hop, LLC (DHH) filed an Urgent Reconsideration Request following ICANN staff inaction (for its over four-month delay) of its Assignment Request for the .hiphop Registry Agreement. Not only did the ICANN Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) decide against considering the Reconsideration Request on an urgent basis, but on its last day of business for 2021, ICANN Org decided to retaliate against DHH for filing the Reconsideration Request in the first place ... more
1974, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf checked in the Crown Plaza Hotel in Palo Alto, worked a couple of days and presented to the world the TCP/IP protocol. Stanford hosted one of the four computers connected on equal footing (ARPANET) in 1969... A framed document in the hotel lobby remembers the historic moment. On March 31, 2014 a crowd of about 30 people from all over the world checked in the same Crown Plaza hotel for the first working meeting of the new Coordination Council (CC) of the NetMundial Initiative (NMI). more
The best part is ... this isn't one of those 'now that I've got your attention' tricks, like one of those old "free beer" posters; there really is a ton of stuff happening above the 49th parallel this summer. To begin with, as a precursor to Canada's Anti-spam Law coming into effect later this year, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, and Industry Canada have all issued regulations, the latter two in draft form with an RFC. more
Verisign recently informed ICANN that it had received a letter from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, regarding the proposed auction of o.com described in the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement agreed to by ICANN and Verisign in March 2019. This letter, which doesn't appear to be on official letterhead, is from a NIST Grants Officer and purports to overturn a letter raising objections to the auction... more
The Internet has been growing at 115% per year, more than doubling annually, for thirty years. Today, over two billion people are connected to the Internet. The openness of the Internet has been the main catalyst for many social and economic advances. It has enabled a level of human communication and interconnection unprecedented in human history, as demonstrated by the staggering global popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It has also spurred new levels of innovation, fueling significant economic activity. more
The Mozilla Internet Health Report is packed with interesting statistics about the state of the Internet. Reports like this one remind us that broadband is a worldwide issue that is much larger than the US broadband industry I write about every day. The report contains a lot of interesting facts: A little more than half of the planet is still not connected to the Internet. As a planet, we still have a long way to go. While the largest percentage of a region still not online is in Africa, by sheer numbers, most of those still not connected are in Asia... more
As we have previously observed, the efforts undertaken by ICANN, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and CGI.BR to launch a NETmundial Initiative (NMI) to follow up on last spring's NETmundial meeting in Sao Paulo has encountered heavy skepticism and substantial resistance from the major civil society and technical groups from which endorsement and participation was sought. more
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