ICANN has delayed the decision for the sale of the .ORG registry, pushing the issue off for another month following a last minute letter from California's attorney. more
It's still early days, but Singapore's approach to fiber deployment is beginning to pay off. In December 2007, Singapore announced a major program to get fiber deployed throughout their city state. A critical advantage of their approach was government mandated structural separation between the dark fiber layer deployed in the public right-of-way (a natural monopoly) and higher layer services (where competition is possible and highly desirable. more
Three months ago, I pondered the question Would the Internet Survive a Trump Apocalypse? As improbable as that outcome was in August, enough of the American electorate has "pulled the pin" to bring it on. It is a brave new world -- distinctly darker and more uncertain. At the moment, the Trump team is trying to figure out how to manifest their vacuous invectives masquerading as policy. The world is watching, and Washington looks like the scene in Ghostbusters where the containment grid has just been turned off, and the demonic ghosts are rising from the underbelly of K-Street. The result here is a Washington lobbying dream -- a result rather different than that promised to naïve Trump devotees. more
Over the last year the world has been virtually buried under news items describing hacks, insecure websites, servers and scada systems, etc. Each and every time people seem to be amazed and exclaim "How is this possible?" Politicians ask questions, there is a short lived uproar and soon after the world continues its business as usual. Till the next incident. In this blog post I take a step back and try to look at the cyber security issue from this angle... more
The long rumored reorganization of the telecommunications sector in China has begun. Now China will have three major companies, each with both mobile and fixed networks. The focus for fixed network growth is broadband Internet access. The focus for mobile will be continued growth in mobile subscribers and the launch of 3G services, with the three companies using three different 3G technologies. more
"2010 should be viewed as the year distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks became mainstream as many high profile attacks were launched against popular Internet services and other well known targets," reports Arbor Networks in its just released Sixth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report. According to the report, the year also witnessed a sharp escalation in the scale and frequency of DDoS attack activity on the Internet. The 100 Gbps attack barrier was reached for the first time while application layer attacks hit an all-time high. Service providers experienced a marked impact on operational expense, revenue loss and customer churn as a result. more
On December 14, 2022, the European Parliament adopted the Directive on measures for a high common level of cybersecurity across the Union (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) hereinafter referred to as "NIS2"), which was published in the official journal on December 27, 2022. Being a directive, NIS2 requires transposition into national law. According to Art. 41 of NIS2, the transposition into national law must take place by October 17, 2024 and the measures must be applied as of October 18, 2024. more
There is no doubt that big data is going to be one of the most important tools that will assist human society in the future. Our increasingly complex society has been able to move forward, and it will continue to do so, based on rational, scientific facts and figures within the context of the needs of humanity. As an example, neuroscience is giving us more insight into ourselves, and we are learning that many of the elements that we have always thought of as being uniquely human are based on neurological/biological processes that can be put into algorithms. more
Is there any act more primary than naming? It comes before all else and makes possible what follows. For the most part, names are drawn from cultural assets: collections of words, geographic locations, family names, etc. They can be valuable, which is why they are guarded, protected, and hoarded. The balancing of rights among those competing for names is a deliberate feature of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). more
On March 20th, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Op-ed writer L. Gordon Crovitz published an article titled "Stop Obama's Internet Giveaway". In his opinion piece Mr. Crovitz opposed any near-term transition of the IANA functions... In the course of his article Mr. Crovitz also stated, "Icann already has been kowtowing to authoritarian regimes," alluding to former CEO Fadi Chehade's December 2015 decision to become a Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee to China's World Internet Conference... more
There is currently a great deal of debate regarding the need for gigabit networks. There are still a lot of voices, often led by conservative political and media people, who argue that hardly anyone needs such networks. Unfortunately for them, however, their arguments are totally flawed. And who are they, anyway, to set the tone for such new infrastructure. Isn't necessity the mother of invention? more
Secretary Clinton's major address on internet freedom made the connection between humanity and technology. We've been waiting a long time for our political leaders to have the courage to express thoughts like this, to have a vision about the role of the internet in human history, and yesterday the day arrived. The speech wasn't an isolated event, of course. more
Tucows issued a press release today wherein they announced lower domain name pricing and enhanced services. The bigger change, which might set a trend for other registrars, is the greater transparency of the registry and ICANN fees relative to the fees charged by Tucows... If all registrars were to quote domain name prices in this manner (I had called it "Asterisk Prices" when I had suggested the idea to various registrars last December, for lack of a better term), it would shift the blame to ICANN and the monopoly registry operators (e.g. VeriSign) every time they raised their fees. more
In 1946 Winston Churchill declared that Russia had lowered an iron curtain across Europe, and in 2022 Vladimir Putin created an iron firewall between the Russian Internet and media and the rest of the world, but, like its precursor, it is porous. Information wants to be free. more
Compared to Miami, Havana is an Internet desert, but Havana may have 5G wireless connectivity before Miami. 5G architecture, US politics and policy, and the 5G timetable favor Havana. Let's start with 5G architecture. 5G will require many "small cells" because it uses high-frequency radio signals that don't travel as far as 4G signals and are more easily blocked by obstructions like trees and buildings. more
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