Internet Governance

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee Is Investigating Google’s Plans to Implement DNS Over HTTPS

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee is investigating Google's plans to implement DNS over HTTPS (DoH) in Chrome according to a report by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. more

The Path Towards Centralization of Internet Governance Under UN: Part 3

This essay is the third of a three-part series, written by Anonymous, and published by the Publius Project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. It focuses on the steps of a possible roadmap for centralizing Internet governance under the United Nations. more

Letter to ICANN on Big Brands Proposed Usage of Generic Domain Extensions

We have been taking an active interest in the development of the new TLD program by ICANN and excited by the many opportunities and challenges that this "opening up" will bring to us, our customers and the internet ecosystem as a whole. However, we also have our concerns about how some entities wish to use generic domain name extensions as "walled gardens". more

How Can ICANN Improve Institutional Confidence?

This week ICANN held a public consultation in Washington, D.C., where ICANN's President's Strategy Committee (PSC) solicited remarks from a packed audience of intellectual property (IP) lawyers, domain name registrars and other Internet stakeholders on how the organization can improve institutional confidence. No surprise, ICANN's decision to add new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to the Internet was on many participants' minds. more

The Road Less Traveled: Time Is Running Out for NTIA-Verisign Cooperative Agreement

It is remarkable? - ?for all the wrong reasons? - ?that only two months remain before the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) must make a fateful decision on how it will address its' long-standing Cooperative Agreement with Verisign? - ?the private-sector corporation that edits the authoritative address book of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), maintains two of the DNS root servers, and operates the .com and .net registries of the Internet, undoubtedly one of the most lucrative concessions ever granted. more

Cybersquatting and Geopolitics Heats Up

Cybersquatting is so 2000, or so we thought. The Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) at WIPO has been chugging along for several years now, methodically determining if complainants IP rights have been violated and reassigning "ownership" of domain names. Typically, the cases are fairly boring. But some recent developments in the world of 800 lb search gorillas, Google and Baidu, suggests that the regime could be faced with substantial pressure in the near future. more

The UN Panel on Digital Cooperation: An Agenda for the 2020s

The UN Panel on Digital Cooperation presented last week in New York its final report, and an old question is back on the international agenda: Could the global Internet be ordered by a reasonable arrangement among stakeholders which would maximize the digital opportunities and minimize the cyber risks by keeping the network free, open and safe? more

DCA Open Letter to Congress in Defense of the Status Quo on Global Internet Governance Model

As spearhead of the Yes2DotAfrica Campaign, I recently wrote a letter on behalf of DCA, to the Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, Senator Jay Rockefeller which was also copied to other U.S. leaders and officials to express support for the present status quo on Global Internet Goverenance and a Reaffirmation of the Mult-stakeholder model. The full text of the letter is published in this post. more

Parallels Between Our Oceans and Internet Governance #WorldOceanDay

Today is June 8th and World Ocean Day. As I ponder on the threats and challenges to the world's ocean with the enormous stresses such as overfishing, pollution, ocean acidification that threatens all global standards of living, I cannot help but think about the startling similarities that global internet governance faces with its respective stresses of increasing cyber security vulnerabilities, threats, breaches of trust, growing cyber crime, breaches of privacy and data protection, identity thefts, pedophilia and many other things that threaten global public interest and our safety within an internet ecosystem. more

New gTLD Expressions of Interest: Proceed with Caution

The ICANN Board, at its October 2009 annual meeting in Seoul, passed a resolution directing staff to prepare an analysis regarding the feasibility of ICANN soliciting Expressions of Interests (EOIs) from prospective applicants for new Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs)... While this latest initiative should not distract ICANN from the remaining four overarching issues, if well executed, this EOI initiative could provide valuable insights into two of the four overarching issues: economics and root scaling. more

Emergence, Rise and Fall of Surveillance Capitalism, Part 2: Rise and Fall

One of the consequences of the Jan 6th events is a renewed attention towards Surveillance Capitalism as a key doctrine undermining democracy.2 This part 2 of the 2 part series of discusses the rise and fall of Surveillance Capitalism under the premise that the better we understand the danger at the door, the better we are able to confront it. more

The Meeting That Changed the DARPA Datagram Internet

The National Science Foundation awarded a small contract to the IEEE to host a small two-day meeting on 30 Sept 1994 of selected invitees at the IEEE's Washington DC 18th Street offices on "Name Registration For The '.COM' Domain." Being part of the InterNIC contract oversight committee, I was one of the eight invitees. It turned out in many ways to be the single most important meeting in the long, checkered history of what is today referred to as "the internet," that made an extraordinarily bad decision. more

Missing in Action - ICANN’s 2010 Annual Report

In preparation for some upcoming long-haul international flights, I was looking for some "light" ICANN reading material. One document that came to mind was ICANN's 2010 Annual Report. Over the last four years ICANN has produced a year end report. While this document was probably originally conceived as a means to demonstrate ICANN's progress... more

Mark Zuckerberg’s Content Moderation Overhaul: Prelude to a Fragmented Internet and a Threat to Truth

Mark Zuckerberg's recent announcement of sweeping changes to Meta's content moderation policies marks a pivotal moment for the internet, democracy, and truth itself. The decision to replace third-party fact-checking with a decentralized "Community Notes" system and relocate trust and safety operations to Texas signals a shift in Meta's governance approach. This move is not only politically expedient but also a troubling prelude to the tech industry bowing to the political priorities of the incoming Trump administration. more

Advancing Cyberstability: Protect the Public Internet Core and Improve Cyber Hygiene

The Paris Peace Forum (PPF), established by the French president Emanual Macron, was picked by the Global Commission for Stability in Cyberspace (GCSC) to launch its final report "Advancing Cyberstability" for good reasons: The Internet isn't just a purely technical issue with some political implications anymore. On the eve of the 2020s, the management of cyberspace is a global problem, a matter of international security, a question of war or peace. more