New York City Releases Internet Master Plan For City’s Broadband Future

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chief Technology Officer John Paul Farmer today announced an Internet Master Plan for the City aimed to chart a path for internet providers in the private sector to work in partnership with the City in order to address market gaps and deliver universal broadband to New Yorkers. more

What Your ISP (Probably) Knows About You

Earlier this week, I came across a working paper from Professor Peter Swire - a highly respected attorney, professor, and policy expert. Swire's paper, entitled "Online Privacy and ISPs", argues that ISPs have limited capability to monitor users' online activity. The paper argues that ISPs have limited visibility into users' online activity for three reasons: (1) users are increasingly using many devices and connections, so any single ISP is the conduit of only a fraction of a typical user's activity; (2) end-to-end encryption is becoming more pervasive, which limits ISPs' ability to glean information about user activity; and (3) users are increasingly shifting to VPNs to send traffic. more

Kenya’s .KE Domain Registrations Nearing 100,000 Mark, but It Can Do Better – Here’s Why

Over the years, the Kenyan Network Information Center (KeNIC) has struggled to reach the 100,000 mark in .ke Kenya country code domain registrations. Many reasons have been given for this shortfall, among them pricing, competition from generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) like .com and .org, and also competition from Geographic domains like the new .africa. Also, not opening up the second level for registration has been cited as one of the reasons for the low number. more

Parallel Processes: ICANN Accountability and the IANA Transition

ICANN President Fadi Chehade gave Internet stakeholders a welcome surprise last week when he announced ICANN would launch a community-driven process to strengthen its accountability, and that this process would be "interdependent" with the transition of IANA functions away from U.S. Government oversight. It was fitting that Fadi announced the accountability process at NETmundial in Sao Paolo, where Internet stakeholders from around the world gathered to discuss the evolution of the global Internet governance. more

The Sportsmanship of Cyber-warfare

As a bit of a history buff I can't avoid a slight tingling of déjà vu every time I read some new story commenting upon the ethics, morality and legality of cyber-warfare/cyber-espionage/cyberwar/cyber-attack/cyber-whatever. All this rhetoric about Stuxnet, Flame, and other nation-state cyber-attack tools, combined with the parade of newly acknowledged cyber-warfare capabilities and units within the armed services of countries around the globe, brings to the fore so many parallels... Call me a cynic if you will, but when the parallels in history are so evident, we'd be crazy to ignore them. more

Security Firm Predicts Unprecedented Series of New gTLD Failures by 2017

The cybersecurity firm, IID, is anticipating an unprecedented series of domain registry failures due to lack of gTLD popularity by 2017 in the form of bankruptcies and abandonment, leading to demise of websites relying on them. more

Could You Go for a Year Without Internet Access? Paul Miller Reports on His Experiment…

Could you sign off of the Internet today -- right now, in fact -- and not come back online for 12 months? If you are a reader of CircleID, odds are pretty good that the answer is probably an emphatic "No!" This is, after all, a site for "Internet Infrastructure" and for most of us visiting the site (or writing here) the "Internet" is completely woven into the fabric of our lives... and we have a hard time thinking of a life without it. more

Superstorm Sandy and the Global Internet

The Internet has managed to collect its fair share of mythology, and one of the more persistent myths is that from its genesis in a cold war US think tank in the 1960's the Internet was designed with remarkable ability to "route around damage." Whether the story of this cold war think tank is true or not, the adoption of a stateless forwarding architecture, coupled with a dynamic routing system, does allow the network to "self-heal" under certain circumstances. Can we see this self-healing in today's network? more

Cuba’s Odd Emphasis on the National Intranet

In 2014, Cuba embarked on a program for the "informatization" of society and "advances in the informatization of society" was the theme of the short videos by ETECSA president Mayra Arevich Marín and Vice Minister of Communications Wilfredo González... I was struck by the emphasis on the Cuban national intranet, as opposed to the global Internet... This emphasis is reflected in the relatively low price of intranet access and the continued development of Cuban content and services. more

Another Letter Filed Against .sucks TLD for Extortion

Kevin Murphy reporting in DomainIncite: "ICANN's Business Constituency wants US and Canadian regulators to intervene to prevent Vox Populi Registry, which runs .sucks, 'extorting' businesses with its high sunrise fees. The BC wrote to ICANN, the US Federal Trade Commission and the Canadian Office for Consumer Affairs on Friday, saying .sucks has employed 'exploitive [sic] pricing and unfair marketing practices'." more

WSIS+20 and the Youth Dilemma: Rethinking Participation in Global Internet Governance

On Wednesday, 9 July, I attended the WSIS+20 HLE Overall Review multistakeholder consultation with co-facilitators H.E. Mr Ekitela Locale from the Republic of Kenya, and H.E. Ms Suela Janina from the Republic of Albania with my UNU-CRIS hat and had the opportunity to talk with them together with my fellow youth IGF colleagues Dana Cramer and Jasmine Ko. We discussed youth participation in Internet governance, and I raised my concerns about the future of youth IGFs. more

Watch Live Thurs 28 May: The Way Forward for the WSIS+10 Review Process

Would you like to learn more about what the WSIS+10 Review process is all about? How can you participate in the process if you are not with a government? What is "WSIS" all about anyway -- and why should you care? Those questions and more will be part of a luncheon briefing on Thursday, May 28, 2015, from 13:15 - 14:45 Central European Time (UTC+2). more

How Not to Stop Spammers

Spam Arrest is a company that sells an anti-spam service. They attempted to sue some spammers and, as has been widely reported, lost badly. This case emphasizes three points that litigious antispammers seem not to grasp: Under CAN SPAM, a lot of spam is legal; Judges hate plaintiffs who try to be too clever, and hate sloppy preparation even more; Never, ever, file a spam suit in Seattle. more

A Logical Place to Start the IPv6 Transition

The transition to IPv6 is top of mind for most service providers. Even in places where there are still IPv4 addresses to be had surveys we've run suggest v6 is solidly on the priority list. That's not to say everyone has the same strategy. Depending where you are in the world transition options are different -- in places such as APAC where exhaustion is at hand one of the many NAT alternatives will likely be deployed since getting a significant allocation of addresses is not going to happen and other alternatives for obtaining addresses will prove expensive. more

Speculation on Trump’s Forthcoming Cuba Policy Speech and Its Impact on the Cuban Internet

Trump has a dilemma. He has to take some executive action that will allow him to ridicule President Obama and show that he is punishing Cuba for its human rights violations and the confiscation of businesses and property after the revolution, but not harm US telephone companies, hotel chains, airlines and cruise lines. Trump is expected to announce his Cuba policy next Friday in Miami. There can be little doubt that he will reverse some of President Obama's executive orders... more