Data on Cuba’s SNET and a Few Suggestions for ETECSA

I've written several posts on Cuba's user-deployed street networks (SNET), the largest of which is SNET in Havana. (SNET was originally built by the gaming community, but the range of services has grown substantially). My posts and journalist's accounts like this one describe SNET, but a new paper presents SNET measurement data as well as descriptive material. more

ICANN at the Inflection Point: Implications and Effects Of the GAC Beijing Communique

Although this article was first published just a few days ago, on May 8th, there have been several important intervening developments. First, on May 10th ICANN released a News Alert on "NGPC Progress on GAC Advice" that provides a timetable for how the New gTLD program Committee will deal with the GAC Communique. Of particular note is that, as the last action in an initial phase consisting of "actions for soliciting input from Applicants and from the Community', the NGPC will begin to "Review and consider Applicant responses to GAC Advice and Public Comments on how Board should respond to GAC Advice... more

Online Safety Bill: UK’s Digital Overhaul

The UK Parliament has given the green light to the controversial Online Safety Bill, putting Ofcom, the communications watchdog, in charge of internet regulation. This step brings the legislation closer to becoming law. more

Appeals Court Revives the CFIT Anti-Trust Suit Against VeriSign

Back in 2005 an organization called the Coalition for Internet Transparency (CFIT) burst upon the scene at the Vancouver ICANN meeting, and filed an anti-trust suit against VeriSign for their monopoly control of the .COM registry and of the market in expiring .COM domains. They didn't do very well in the trial court, which granted Verisign's motion to dismiss the case. But yesterday the Ninth Circuit reversed the trial court and put the suit back on track. more

Tony La Russa’s Legal Claims Against Twitter Look Tenuous

It was bound to happen of course - someone sued Twitter for not verifying a "celebrity" or brand account. Mashable reports on a lawsuit brought by Tony La Russa, who is apparently a manager for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Mashable and others initially reported that La Russa and Twitter had resolved this one. It turns out they haven't after all. So what to make of Mr. La Russa's claims? more

If ICANN Won’t Stand Up to EU in WHOIS Dispute, Then the U.S. Congress Should

The early designers of the Internet quickly realized that as the number of domain names flourished, there was a need for tracking domain name owners to resolve questions and conflicts that might arise. To that end, they created WHOIS, a public database with the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses of registered domain owners and operators. more

Sailing Backwards: WSIS 10+ Avoids Entering Uncharted Territory

Early August 2014 the UN General Assembly agreed on the procedures how to review the results of the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) from 2005. According to the draft resolution, the WSIS 10+ event will be a high level intergovernmental meeting in New York in December 2015. This meeting will adopt an "intergovernmental agreed outcome document"... The outcome document will be negotiated by governments in an "intergovernmental negotiation process". Non-governmental stakeholders from the private sector, civil society and technical community will be invited for "informal interactive consultation" in a parallel process. Wait a minute? What are "informal interactive consultations" in a parallel process? more

Understand the Value of Defensive Domain Registrations

The bulk of corporate domain portfolios largely consist of defensive registrations which often include common misspellings, product names, and abbreviations in countries where they may not even be doing business. More than ever, with the launch of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) expected to occur next year, companies are now taking a hard look at their defensive holdings and asking themselves whether or not they really need all of these registrations. more

The IoT Cyber Seal Fog

For four days in Southern France, cybersecurity experts from a broad array of different countries and sectors gathered for the annual ETSI Security Conference. The event undertaken by one of the world's major industry information-communication (ICT) standards organisations was intended to take stock of the state of cybersecurity and trends. more

Leading Global Standards Organizations Endorse ‘OpenStand’ Principles

Five leading group of global organizations - IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - today announced that they have signed a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards. The group have invited other standards organizations, governments, corporations and technology innovators globally to endorse the principles. more

The WSIS Deal

There is considerable coverage this morning (or this evening in Tunis) on the last minute WSIS deal struck yesterday. The gist of the coverage rightly reports that the U.S. emerged with the compromise they were looking for as the delegates agreed to retain ICANN and the ultimate U.S. control that comes with it (note that there is a lot in the WSIS statement that may ultimately prove important but that is outside the Internet governance issue including the attention paid to cybercrime, spam, data protection, and e-commerce). This outcome begs the questions -- what happened? And, given the obvious global split leading up to Tunis, what changed to facilitate this deal? more

IPv6: Do as I Say or Do as I Do?

How important is it for a vendor, service provider or integrator to be using a service or technology that it is pushing on its clients? When Voice over IP (VoIP) came out Cisco began a gigantic push, having its salespersons pitch it to anyone and everyone on their client list. But Cisco had not yet deployed VoIP within its own corporate network. It was still making use of traditional voice systems from vendors that today it probably considers competitors. Many people on the receiving end of a sales pitch recognized this... more

Top 10 Spam Stories of 2008

Well, it's a yearly tradition in the western hemisphere that at the end of the year, we compose a top 10 list of the 10 most . Since it is now 2009, I thought that I would create my own list of the top 10 spam stories of 2008. Now, not all of these will be universally applicable to everyone, they are the top 10 stories as seen by me. more

Remembering Dave Taht

Dave Taht died on April 1st. I met him only recently, and never in person, but his passing saddens me. His technical work and evangelism have improved the Internet, and I will give some examples of his contributions to the Internet community and users, but I am sad because he was a good person -- idealistic, unselfish, open, and funny. I'll miss him. First, his contributions, then his values. more

A Tangled Web

A recent ICANNfocus article discussed the magnitude of ICANN's legal fees. Specifically, ICANNfocus questioned whether the extent of ICANN's legal fees, about 20% of their total revenues, was related to the organization functioning as a regulator instead of simply as a technical manager of the internet.  more