A Network by Any Other Name

Last month Wired News, the online service that grew out of Wired Magazine, decided that it was going stop using an upper-case 'I' when it talked about the internet. At the same time Web became web and Net became net. According to Tony Long, the man responsible for their style guide, the change was made because 'there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words'. In fact, he claims, 'there never was.' ...Forgive me for saying, but those who choose 'internet' over 'Internet' are as wrong as those who would visit london, meet the queen or go for a boat trip down the river thames. more

Google’s Spending Spree: 2.4 Million Servers, and Counting

Google just published its Q3 financial results. So, what is Google spending on IT, and how much servers would that buy? This is one of their best kept secrets. In this post I give ballpark estimates based on back-of-the-envelop calculations, similar to the 'guestimates' I made 5 years ago. more

Google, China, and Lawful Intercept

Like many people, I was taken by surprised by Google's announcement about its threatened withdrawal from China in the wake of continued censorship and attacks that appeared to emanate from there. My immediate reaction was quite simple: "Wow". There's been a lot of speculation about just why they pulled out. Some reports noted that Google has been losing market share to Baidu... I don't think, though, that that's the whole story. more

Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales

Garth Bruen reports on a paper published by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics of Boston University School of Law authored by Bryan A. Liang and Tim Mackey titled, "Searching for Safety: Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales". From the paper: "Online sales of pharmaceuticals are a rapidly growing phenomenon. Yet despite the dangers of purchasing drugs over the Internet, sales continue to escalate. These dangers include patient harm from fake or tainted drugs, lack of clinical oversight, and financial loss. Patients, and in particular vulnerable groups such as seniors and minorities, purchase drugs online either naïvely or because they lack the ability to access medications from other sources due to price considerations. Unfortunately, high risk online drug sources dominate the Internet, and virtually no accountability exists to ensure safety of purchased products."  more

Stopping the Flow of Online Illegal Pharmaceuticals

Reading through Brian Kreb's blog last week, he has an interesting post up on the White House's call upon the industry on how to formulate a plan to stem the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals...It is unclear to me whether or not the goal of this initiative is to stem the flow of online crime in general or to reduce the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals flowing into the United States (since presumably this cuts into the profits of large pharmaceutical companies... more

U.S. Senators to Introduce IoT Security Bill

U.S. senators on Tuesday announced plans to introduce legislation seeking to address vulnerabilities in IoT devices. more

Facebook vs. Domain Names: Lessons from Cambridge Analytica

The current revelations about Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data illustrate an important drawback to using a Facebook account as your business' online presence: Facebook knows and sells your customers! Millions of companies - especially small companies and start-ups - rely on a Facebook account for their online presence. On the surface, it seems like a great idea... more

Cloudflare Reverses Long-Held Policy to Remain Content-Neutral, Ends Service to the Daily Stormer

Cloudflare on Wednesday reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and terminated its service to neo-Nazi site, The Daily Stormer. more

ICANN: Our Top 3 Policy Priorities for 2015

2014 was a big year for us and for our clients. The new gTLD program forced us to rethink, reprioritize and implement new and different strategies to protect our brands online. The uncertainty largely behind us, and with more information at our fingertips about just how well (or not) brands are faring in the new environment, it's time to look forward to what we can do in 2015 to fix what's broken, throw away what's useless, fight for what's important... more

Internet Governance: Why Africa Should Take the Lead

Recently during an afternoon meeting with a friend of mine, Bob Ochieng, who happens to work for ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Africa Operations, he lamented that at online Internet Governance discussions fora such as CircleID, and 1net.org, there is no serious frequent engagements from African Voices. This got me thinking and I realized that most African Internet Stakeholders would rather use a "wait and see approach" in matters as critical as Internet Governance. more

Huawei’s Very Red World

The map below shows countries working with Huawei 5G in red and pink. As can be seen, Huawei is doing very well in 5G, although it's not as dominant as the colors here suggest. Ericsson is actually close to Huawei in 5G revenue, aided by the ban in the US and Australia. Years ago, Huawei was the price leader in order to break into the European market. more

Gruber Gives Up On His IDN

Tech pundit John Gruber threw in the towel on his domain ?df.ws. He writes: "What I didn't foresee was the tremendous amount of software out there that does not properly parse non-ASCII characters in URLs, particularly IDN domain names." more

Policy Advisory Boards - A Cornerstone PICS (Public Interest Commitment Specification)

Six months following the April 11th issuance of the Beijing Communique by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), ICANN continues to wrestle with whether to accept the bulk of the GAC's proposed safeguards for new gTLDs as set forth in Annex 1 of that document. On October 1st ICANN Board Chairman Stephen Crocket sent a letter to GAC Chair Heather Dryden summarizing the results of the September 28th meeting of the New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) that considered the remaining and still undecided advice received from the GAC. more

ICANN Senate Hearing: The Battle Between Intellectual Property and Multistakeholderism

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Hearing on ICANN's Expansion of Top Level Domain Names on December 8, 2001 was all about strategy. The strategy was simple: while the world has its attention turned to the debate on the copyright legislative proposals of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, let's have another ICANN hearing and try to re-open trademark protection for new gTLDs. more

US Senate Committee Holds Hearing on ICANN’s New TLD Expansion

As previously noted, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation today held a full committee hearing on ICANN's expansion of top level domains (TLDs). The hearing was held to examine the merits and implications of the program and ICANN's efforts to address concerns raised. ICANN will begin accepting applications for new TLDs on January 12, 2012. more