Michael "Mick" Moran, who has helped rescue thousands of child abuse material victims since he started working in the field in 1997, challenged the internet industry to do more to protect innocent children as he received the 2017 M3AAWG Mary Litynski Award. more
Yesterday marked the last day of the OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Digital Economy, but also the culmination of a week where the need for an open and trusted Internet has been the main message from all stakeholders. Back in 2008, the OECD was one of the first intergovernmental organizations to open its discussions to the wider Internet community. more
Last month at CIRA's annual general meeting, I had the pleasure of meeting Tracy Axelsson, the executive director of the Vancouver Community Network. Her organization is working to connect street-involved citizens in downtown Vancouver with critical life-saving information via SMS messages. Chatting about her program was a vivid reminder for me of what many technology companies around the world have recognized, that the benefits of our wares can have a profound impact on our economies, culture and social fabric of our countries. more
On March 2, Russia covered the US flag on the Roscosmos Space Agency rocket that was scheduled to launch 36 OneWeb broadband satellites on March 5. The Russians made two obviously untenable demands -- that OneWeb guarantee that the satellites would not be used for military purposes and the United Kingdom government remove its investment in the company. OneWeb declined, and the satellites were removed from the rocket. more
"Boots becomes latest company to terminate new gTLD but other '.brands' go full steam ahead." Trevor Little reporting in World Trademark Review. more
Zhiwei Yan writes to report: "CNNIC recently lunched a monitoring to measure the performance of the DNS root service in China (mainland). The results reflect that the service diversity from different ISPs and different geographical locations is obvious for different root servers. Besides, the stability of the DNS root service is directly affected by the BGP routing system. CNNIC will continue this work and anticipate the wide participation from the community." more
Brexit will impact many things. One that has not been getting much attention, however, is domain names and more specifically .eu domains. Under the current regulations, you need to be a resident of the European Union to register a .eu domain name. As I covered in a blog post last year, there is the potential for hundreds of thousand of .eu domain names being pulled overnight. more
Controversy over .WEB auction takes a new turn as various sources today pointed to a lawsuit filed against ICANN by Ruby Glen LLC, a subsidiary of Donuts Inc. -- the largest registry for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). more
The public cloud services market in the mature Asia/Pacific (AP) region is on pace to grow 8.7 percent in 2015 to total $7.3 billion, up from $6.7 billion in 2014, according to new research from Gartner. more
Opensignal recently published a report that looks around the world at the quality of cellular video. Video has become a key part of the cellular experience as people are using cellphones for entertainment, and since social media and advertising have migrated to video. The use of cellular video is exploding. Netflix reports that 25% of its total streaming worldwide is sent to mobile devices. The new Disney+ app that was just launched got over 3 million downloads of their cellular app in just the first 24 hours. more
The hiQ ruling erased legal protections against commercial scraping, leaving infrastructure providers to absorb escalating costs. Without federal action defining data misappropriation, a free-rider AI economy could undermine open networks, investment, and long-term data integrity. more
Within this supercycle of digital innovation, we are experiencing globally; AI is revolutionizing business both in predictable and unpredictable ways. With an expectation of more than $20 trillion added to the global economy by 2030, the impact of AI on business is real. While most of the patents and citations are still coming from the US, China is rapidly gaining citations. more
My first day back at the office after a summer of working remotely featured a traffic jam of the sort that reminds me why I hate commuting: one car crash, a key highway closed, and no reasonable surface road alternative routes. There's just nothing to do but suffer the consequences when that road backs up. I had an early team meeting and was already scrambling to leave the house with a buffer of half the regular commute time. It wasn't going to be enough. I dropped a note to my team, who'd all be participating from their locations (in other cities and countries), and warned them. more
The success of smart phone, in particular the iPhone, is both a blessing and a curse for the mobile operators. On the one hand it has broken into the monopolistic business models used by most operators and has most certainly loosened part of their stranglehold; on the other, these phones have increased usage on their networks. But these cracks are going to continue and will eventually lead to similar structural changes in the mobile industry to the ones we are currently experiencing in the fixed market. more
With two simultaneous processes getting underway in the UN General Assembly's First Committee, the UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Cybersecurity, and several technology and multi-stakeholder initiatives pushing cybersecurity improvement, the world of cyber norms has become both more interesting and more complicated. more