Internet Governance

No Fines for Comcast

Note: this is an update on my earlier story, which incorrectly said that the AP reported that Chairman Martin was seeking to impose "fines" on Comcast. In fact, the story used the word "punish" rather than "fine," and a headline writer at the New York Times added "penalty" to it "F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on Comcast" (I won't quote the story because I'm a blogger and the AP is the AP, so click through.) Much of the initial reaction to the story was obviously colored by the headline. more

Is It Time to Create a Market for IPv4 Addresses?

It's fascinating to watch the Internet technical community grapple with policy economics as they face the problems creating by the growing scarcity of IPv4 addresses. The Internet Governance Project (IGP) is analyzing the innovative policies that ARIN, RIPE and APNIC are considering as a response to the depletion of IPv4 addresses. more

The SocialDNS Project… and Why DNS is Not the Phone Book of the Internet

In this article I will explain the motivations behind the SocialDNS Project. I will justify why the DNS system is NOT the phone book of the Internet. More concretely, DNS is not a public directory nor enables search mechanisms over meta-information related to domains. In this line, I will present the advantages of SocialDNS, a naming and directory system that aims to become the phone book of the Web. SocialDNS is NOT another alternative DNS root nor aims to replace the current DNS for resolving domain names. It complements the existing DNS to offer advanced services that are beyond the scope of the existing infrastructure for Web settings. more

Vint Cerf Comments on Government’s Role in Internet Broadband Access

Some offhand comments by Google's Vint Cerf at a recent event seem to have a triggered a panicky "Vint Cerf proposes nationalizing the Internet" buzz that's been ramping up fairly rapidly. Holy BitTorrent, Batman! Army paratroopers seen dropping into parking lots at AT&T and Comcast, while the Transportation Security Agency orders us all to remove our shoes before surfing the Web! Settle down, everyone. As usual with these kinds of stories, the truth is significantly different from the breathless buzzing. Here's how Vint described his thinking on this issue to me... more

Knowing Less

The announcement yesterday morning in the Times that New York State AG Andrew Cuomo had reached an agreement with three US network operators (Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner) about blocking child pornography was both less and more important than it appeared. It's less important in that part of the agreement covers something ISPs already do... more

Censorship: A Threat to the Stability and Security of the DNS?

Censorship practices by governments and other private actors are becoming more increasingly more sophisticated, and their effects are increasingly being felt globally. A case in point, the YouTube incident in Pakistan was a recent example affecting both users and the DNS at a national and global level. Likely other incidents will occur in the near future. As such, I believe censorship should be considered as a threat to the stability and security of the DNS. In the context of Internet governance discussions, I believe the issue should be raised both at ICANN and the Internet Governance forum. Do others agree? more

European Commission Pushes IPv6 Forward

The European Commission has released a communication on IPv6, in time for the IPv6 Day in Brussels next 30th May. It goes in the same direction as the report presented at the OECD Ministerial meeting on "Future of the Internet Economy", that was held in Seoul, Korea earlier this month. At the same time, the Commission committed to make its own web services available on IPv6 by 2010. It is good to see that intergovermental organizations take the lead on this, after 10 years of failure of the private sector to actually deploy IPv6... more

Do We Need Two Internets?

Jonathan Zittrain's recent book, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, has spurred a lot of discussion both online and offline, with blog posts lauding his insights or criticising his over-apocalyptic imagination. The book itself makes fascinating reading for those who have watched the network grow from its roots in the research community into today's global channel for communications, commerce and cultural expression... One of the reasons that Zittrain puts forward for the growing popularity of closed or, as he prefers 'tethered', devices, is that they are less vulnerable to hacking, security flaws, malware and all the other perils that face any internet-enabled system. more

Domain Name Price Jump: Moore’s Law or Parkinson’s Laws?

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

IP Addresses and Personally Identifiable Information

I don't normally cheer for Google when I don't own shares in the company, but this time I will make an exception. Alma Whitten, Software Engineer at Google, today posted to their Public Policy Blog that IP addresses shouldn't be considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This is not a problem in the United States but it is in the EU, and if the EU actually were to legislate this it would most definitely affect Microsoft and Google's business functionality in the EU... more

Wikileaks Calls for Boycott of Domain Registrar eNom

In the aftermath of the shutdown of Wikileaks.org by a court order issued at the request of Swiss Bank Julius Baer, Wikileaks has called for the boycott of registrar eNom. eNom is best known as the domain registrar that complied with the federal government's order to shut down a Spanish travel agency because it did business with Cuba -- the agency was not under U.S. jurisdiction and so was hardly violating U.S. law, but their domain was registered in the United States, and that was good enough for the feds. more

The Geography of Internet Addressing

The ITU-T has proposed a new system of country-based IP address allocations which aims to satisfy a natural demand for self-determination by countries; however, the proposal also stands to realign the Internet's frontiers onto national boundaries, with consequences which are explored here. ...we do indeed see the Internet as a single entity, and we even speak of the Internet's architecture as if there was one designer who laid out a plan and supervised its construction. But despite all appearances, the Internet landscape is indeed made up of many separate networks... This article will explore these issues, particularly in light of recent proposals to introduce new mechanisms for IP address management, a prospect which could, over time, substantially alter both the geography of the Internet, and its essential characteristics as a single cohesive network. more

Homeland Security Department Was Warned About DNSSEC Key Ownership and Trust Issues

The Internet Governance Project has unearthed a consultancy report to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that makes it clear that the issue of root signing and DNSSEC key management has been recognized as a political issue within the US government for long time. more

DNSSEC: Once More, With Feeling!

After looking at the state of DNSSEC in some detail a little over a year ago in 2006, I've been intending to come back to DNSSEC to see if anything has changed, for better or worse, in the intervening period... To recap, DNSSEC is an approach to adding some "security" into the DNS. The underlying motivation here is that the DNS represents a rather obvious gaping hole in the overall security picture of the Internet, although it is by no means the only rather significant vulnerability in the entire system. One of the more effective methods of a convert attack in this space is to attack at the level of the DNS by inserting fake responses in place of the actual DNS response. more

An Internet Security Operations Viewpoint of IGF

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is an annual UN conference on Internet governance which was held this year in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The topics discussed range from human rights online to providing Internet access in developing countries. A somewhat secondary topic of conversation is Internet security and cyber-crime mostly limited to policy and legislative efforts. Techies and Internet security industry don't have much to do there, but I have a few updates for us from the conference. more