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On May 25, 2018, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect, meaning that European data protection authorities (DPAs) can begin enforcing the regulation against non-compliant parties. In preparation, the ICANN Board passed a Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data - essentially a temporary policy amendment to its registrar and registry contracts to facilitate GDPR compliance while also preserving certain aspects of the WHOIS system of domain name registration data. more
Word to the wise: Fadi Chehadé's ICANN isn't going to take criticism lying down! In the past, the organisation has tended to react to criticism with a silence that was probably considered a way to avoid aggravating critics any further, but instead tended to infuriate people that were expecting answers. No longer. Since Chehadé came in as CEO, they get answers! 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 expected, VeriSign raised the price of domain names, effective in October. New prices wholesale prices (to the registrar) for .com domain names are going from $6.42 to $6.86, while .net will increase from $3.85 to $4.23. This news came a few days ago in a letter to registrars. (Hint to consumers: renew your domains now.) ...So, basically, many if not most of VeriSign's registry costs have been falling at an exponential rate. Hard disk storage, computing performance, bandwidth, RAM storage... yet the cost is going up. How is this justified? 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
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
Post Russia's April 4th blockage of Telegram, increasing number of users in the country are turning to VPNs and proxies to continue their access to the messaging platform. As a result, the government has gone a step further and started blocking every possible way of connecting to Telegram. more
This is the first part of a three-part series interview by Geert Lovink with Jeanette Hofmann, policy expert from Germany, where she talks about her experiences as a member of the ICANN's Nominating Committee and her current involvement as a civil society member of the German delegation for the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). "You recently published a paper (in German) called 'The Short Dream of Democracy on the Net.' Your conclusion is a rather sombering one. How would you describe the current situation related to ICANN? You state that nothing has been learned from the failed At-Large Membership experiment. Would you even go that far and see a backlash happening right now?..." more
The introduction of new top level domains (TLDs) has been the subject of debate and action in the ICANN arena since 1999 (just a year after the organization was founded). Herein are some thoughts about some of the issues associated with increasing the top level domain name space. more
Reporting from Brussels, Belgium. Since January KnujOn has been conducing its own audit of ICANN Registrar contractual compliance and illicit commerce within the generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) space. Our findings are shocking. more
Why does all of the discussion around potential options for WHOIS in the era of the EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) feel like déjà vu? Is it because issues around WHOIS never really go away, and become a hot topic every few years? Is it because no one is really happy with the current system? Privacy advocates would be delighted to do away with it altogether, while business and Intellectual Property professionals press for improvements to accuracy and availability, which I fully support. more
Even as we increasingly discover that every facet of our modern lives now revolve around, and are dependent on the Internet, for which reason its availability, functionality, safety, stability and security are now of great and continuing concern to all of us. These issues have a profound impact on its overall governance. To most of us, during the past three decades, the Internet has always been available, stable, affordable and open; and it should continue this way even as it is controlled and administered in a secure manner... more
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a Petri dish for acronyms. The latest one to be introduced into the ICANN lexicon is MOPO which is short for Morality and Public Order. MOPO is one of the four grounds by which a third party can challenge an application for a new generic top-level domain (gTLD). The profile of MOPO recently increased when ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC) provided formal advice to the ICANN Board regarding the current MOPO procedures set forth in ICANN's Draft Applicant Guidebook (DAG) for new gTLD applicants. The resolution of this issue will largely determine whether new gTLD applications will be accepted by ICANN in 2011 as planned or sometime in the far distant future. more
In late 2021, the term Web3 began to increasingly appear in mainstream media outlets. This does not refer, however, to a sudden increase in interest in the Semantic Web as defined by Tim Berners-Lee, but rather to something entirely different. Enthusiasts of cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) seized this term and changed its meaning to reflect a supposed new stage of the Web, running on top of blockchains and having decentralization as its core value. To summarize the narrative being spun, the first generation of the Web afforded independence to the owners of websites, but this did not extend to the average user... more
As the world grows more connected and more complicated, we all need ways of defining, identifying and keeping track of things and cross-referencing them with their owners. The simplest way to do that is with registries -- everything from the Domesday Book, a medieval registry of land, property and people; to current-day auto registries on the one hand and the worldwide Domain Name System on the other...But now, companies and organizations have to keep track of ever more things and people, not just inside their walls but across extended organizational boundaries. Call this new wrinkle an "external registry". Finally, they may want to interact with things and people, rather than just look them up, via an "active registry". more
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