China Continues VPN Crackdown, Targets Alibaba and Other Ecommerce Sites

In the latest series of measures taken by China to clamp down on use and distributions of VPNs, Chinese authorities have issued warning to the country's top ecommerce platforms, including Alibaba's Taobao.com, over the sale of illegal virtual private networks that allow users to skirt state censorship controls. more

ICANN’s Strong Rebuke to Verisign’s Chuck Gomes

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 Empire Fights Back!

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 Christmas Goat and IPv6 (Year 5)

This year I didn't even get a good picture of our famous Christmas goat here in the city of Gavle Sweden. The Christmas goat this year survived Christmas but were suddenly on the 28th of December dismounted. The reason for the poor goat's early leave from its own little park downtown Gavle is that it is now the year of the goat in China, and the city of Gavle has a sister-town in China -- Zhuhai. more

Blissful Ignorance: Placement Prostituting the Press

Andrew McLaughlin, in his excellent dismemberment of the BBC's report on the "IPv4 address crisis", is observing not a random piece of sloppy research, but the success of settled policy. That policy, pursued by public relations companies serving information technology and telecommunications (IT&T) companies, is simple to sum up: "identify, support and encourage technically ignorant journalism". It centres around the most valuable word in the lexicon of the public relations firm: "placement"...A key characteristic of the "placement" story is its conformance to a template...With one search, I found a CNET story published in July with quite startling parallels to the BBC story... more

Interconnection Disputes Are Network Neutrality Issues (of Netflix, Comcast, and the FCC)

A lot of people have been talking about the "interconnection" deal between Comcast and Netflix and whether that deal is related to network neutrality. (It is.) This question comes partly because the FCC's 2010 Open Internet Order (also known as the network neutrality order) was recently struck down. So network neutrality lands back at the FCC, with a new Open Internet proceeding, at the same time Netflix starts working so poorly on Comcast that Netflix had to cut a special deal with Comcast. more

IPv6 for the Rest of Us

IPv6 deployment is in a chicken and egg situation. On the one hand, there is no willingness from ISPs and commodity DNS router manufacturers to include IPv6 support in their infrastructure or equipment because "there is no demand". On the other hand, there is no demand because the average Joe Blow could not care less if he accesses a web site under IPv4 or IPv6. It should just work. The equipment and infrastructure should adapt transparently... What we users can do is to stop waiting for the industry to get its act together and work around its limitations... more

On the Introduction of new Top Level Domains into the Domain Name System

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

ISOC-NY Panel: The Future of WHOIS Policy (Webcast)

The Metropolitan NY Chapter of the Internet Society continued its popular series of public events at the Jefferson Market library in Greenwich Village with a panel discussion on WHOIS policy, moderated by Danny Younger. This is a contentious issue, involving tradeoffs between privacy, anonymity, and accountability. more

KnujOn Releases Internet “Doomsday Book”

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

Normalize inflated iOS 15 Email Open Rates with Unsupervised ML

Happy Holidays. In September 2021, Apple rolled out iOS 15. For high volume email senders, Apple Mail now essentially tracks every email sent as an "open." Seemingly if you are a campaign engineer, high volume sender or ESP, this change can radically affect 25% - 45% of your email subscriber base, across both B2B, B2C or D2C. Inside your email analytics platform, you should see the specific percentage of Apple Mail users in your database, thus a significant rate of change ( delta) regarding inflated "open rates." more

Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance - Part I

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

SpaceX Is First With Inter-Satellite Laser Links in Low-Earth Orbit, but Others Will Follow

When SpaceX first announced plans for Starlink, their low-Earth orbit Internet service constellation, they said each satellite would have five inter-satellite laser links (ISLLs) - two links to satellites in the same orbital plane, two to satellites in adjacent orbital planes, and one to a satellite in a crossing plane. They subsequently dropped the crossing link as too difficult and, when they finally began launching satellites, they had no laser links. Last year they tested ISLLs on two satellites. more

The State of the Internet

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

ICANN Submits Seventh Annual Report

ICANN has just submitted its seventh status report under ICANN/US Government Memorandum of Understanding to United States Department of Commerce (DoC) titled: "Report by ICANN to United States Department of Commerce Re: Progress Toward Objectives of Memorandum of Understanding". The report provides a review of recent ICANN developments including... more