ICANN and Attorneys General: Ends, Means and Unintended Ends

In a move, unprecedented in scale, ISOC moved to sell PIR, the registry for .ORG, to a for-profit entity which intends, in turn, to convert PIR into a for-profit entity itself. This move has, understandably, raised concerns from around the Internet community and cast a bright light on ICANN, the nature of its contracts with Registries and the responsibilities of the ICANN Board... As the Vice Chair for Policy of the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), I've tried to navigate a consensus involving ALL of those parties because of our diverse membership. more

What ICANN Should Do Now to Help Future Applicants of New gTLDs

During ICANN71, the Brand Registry Group (BRG) openly asked potential future applicants what ICANN can do to help prepare them for the next gTLD round. The answer was very clear - commit to opening the next round and provide as much information as possible early on. However, in recent correspondence to the BRG from ICANN Chair, Maarten Botterman, he emphasized that "significant work lies ahead of us: the 2012 Applicant Guidebook must be updated with more than 100 outputs... more

Centrality and the Internet

The IRTF is a research-oriented part of the larger IETF structure. It has a number of research groups, one of which, DINRG, is looking at decentralized Internet Infrastructure. That's a big topic, and one could certainly look at distributed decentralized blockchain frameworks applied to ledgers, used by Bitcoin and similar, or self-organizing systems that perform orchestration without imposed control or distributed hash tables. more

.AI You Ready? A Domain to Add to Your Portfolio… Before Someone Else Does

On the sunny beaches of Anguilla -- a small island of just 35 square miles -- I'm sure artificial intelligence (AI) is the last thing people are thinking about. The primary industries of Anguilla, set in the Leeward islands in the Caribbean, are tourism and offshore banking. However, this nation has been assigned the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .AI -- which is being repurposed to represent artificial intelligence. more

Tracking Internet Piracy: Harder Than You Think

Wired Magazine recently published an article called "The Shadow Internet", where it says: "Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in." But what are the difficulties in tracking and identifying these so-called topsites? Joel Snyder, a senior network consultant responds. more

Breaking Nonsense: Ted Cruz, IANA Transition and the Irony of Life

Harvard Professor Karl Deutsch, the late nestor of political science, described world history as the "history of side effects". Political actions, according to his theory, always have side effects which go out of control and constitute new history. The history of the Internet is full of side effects. But this time, we could have special unproductive side effects. A failure of the IANA transition could trigger a process towards a re-nationalization of the borderless cyberspace... more

Who Really Cares About New gTLDs?

ICANN's recent announcement of what it called "an exciting milestone in the evolution of the domain name system" - the delegation of the 1,000th new generic top-level domain (gTLD) - went largely unnoticed. While that's consistent with the new gTLD program in general (at least from the perspective of the general public), that doesn't mean trademark owners should forget about them. more

An Open Letter to the Prime Minister of India, from Within India, Through an Internet Blog

Hon' Prime Minister, Why would India table Proposal 98 for the work of the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference? Contribution 98 wants the ITU to develop an IP address plan; wants it to be a contiguous IP address platform so as to enable the Governments to map and locate every Internet user; suggests that the ITU may coordinate the distribution of IP addresses accordingly; instructs the ITU Secretary General to develop policies for... naming, numbering and addressing which are [already] systematic, equitable... more

Israel’s Brutal Gaza ICT Infrastructure Demolition Derby

Over two years of war, Israel has decimated Gaza's ICT infrastructure, crippling connectivity, impeding emergency response, and isolating civilians from the digital world, while cementing long-standing control over telecommunications under the guise of national security. more

Researchers Find One-Third of IPv4 Address Space Under Some Type of DoS Attack

For the first time, a large-scale analysis of victims of internet denial-of-service (DoS) attacks worldwide has resulted in discovery of millions of network addresses subjeted to denial-of-service attacks over a two-year period. more

Sweden’s Internet Traffic Drops by a Third as New Anti-Piracy Law Kicks In

April 1st was the start of a new anti-piracy law in Sweden where, according to traffic data, an immediate and significant drop (over 30%) occurred in the nation's overall Internet traffic. Reported today by Royal Pingdom: "The combined traffic passing through Sweden's Internet Exchange Points usually peaks around 160 Gbit/s, but on Wednesday it peaked at around 110 Gbit/s. That's a huge drop in traffic, and is presumably a direct result of less file sharing taking place. ... Another interesting observation is that there was more traffic than usual during the last days before the law took effect. Were people hoarding films and music? On Tuesday (the day before the law went live) traffic peaked at nearly 200 GBit/s, roughly 25% above normal levels." more

SpaceX Gets FCC’s Approval to Bid in a Federal Auction for Rural-Broadband Funding

SpaceX's Starlink project appears to be the only low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite ISP among close to 400 ISPs to qualify to bid in a U.S. federal rural-broadband funding auction. more

Your Cybersecurity is Only as Strong as Your Weakest Vendor

Managing the risk of third parties has become a compliance focus for many large organizations. Companies even work with third-party service providers and external vendors just to manage this risk. The recent SolarWinds attack escalates the critical need for chief compliance officers to collaborate with their business counterparts to identify and mitigate potentially unknown threats that lie within third-party supply chains. Yet how can companies manage this risk when it's not if but when you're attacked? more

Thinking Outside the Internet

This is a talk I gave at Google in Cambridge January 6, 2014. Some may know this as Ambient or Borderless Connectivity, but I'm titling this post as "Thinking Outside the Internet." It builds on my Three Stages of Digital theme, outlining how we are shifting from a telecom-centric framing with meaning and value inside the wire to today's Internet in which meaning and value are no longer contained within channels. more

ICANN Should be Reformed Before “Privatization”, Says New Study

The Technology Policy Institute (TPI), an IT and communications policy think tank, has just released a paper proposing that "ICANN's governance structure should be dramatically reformed to make it more accountable before the current tie with the U.S. Department of Commerce is allowed to expire." The paper titled "ICANN At a Crossroads: a Proposal for Better Governance and Performance" is written by Thomas M. Lenard, President and Senior Fellow at TPI, along with Lawrence J. White, Professor of Economics at the NYU Stern School of Business. The 52-page study also asserts that ICANN must have a clear focus on encouraging competition with minimal role as a regulator with respect to the creation of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). more