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There's been a global argument going on for some time now over how the Internet should be governed. Many governments, including China but also many others, are not happy that the "root" of the Internet is controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which ultimately answers to the U.S. Department of Commerce. In 2005, there were proposals from various countries to move Internet governance from ICANN to a United Nations body of some kind... But there was no consensus. Human rights groups were rightly concerned that giving governments like China and Iran greater say in Internet governance would lead to more censorship and the elimination of privacy and anonymity. more
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a post today pointing out that the FCC continues to ignore the technical parts of a letter sent to it earlier this year by nearly 200 Internet engineers and computer scientists. more
As we approach the WSIS+20 Review, the future of Internet governance is at a crossroads. In its January 29th submission, the Regional Commonwealth in the Field of Communications (RCC) - representing Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Rostelecom - advocates for a state-led governance model that challenges the Western-led multistakeholder approach. The submission reflects an ongoing ideological divide between sovereignty and openness in digital governance. more
There is a questionmark over ICANN's upcoming meeting in Nairobi, Kenya again. This time it has more bite than the usual xenophobia: the COO has published a US Department of State report that lists the conference centre itself as a specific threat from a Somalian insurgency group, Al-Shabaab. In response, a number of Internet companies have already announced they are pulling their people. more
There certainly is a lot of interest in machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT). But what we are seeing is only what is happening on the surface. Most of the M2M activities are taking place unnoticed. For example, most newly produced electronic devices are now all M2M enabled. Over 100 million smart meters have already been deployed by the electricity industry, with literally hundreds of millions of them in the pipeline. Healthcare is another key industry. more
It seems like most new technology today comes with a lot of hype. Just a few years ago, the press was full of predictions that we'd be awash with Internet of Thing sensors that would transform the way we live. We've heard similar claims for technologies like virtual reality, blockchain, and self-driving cars. I've written a lot about the massive hype surrounding 5G -- in my way of measuring things, there isn't any 5G in the world yet, but the cellular carriers are loudly proclaiming its everywhere. more
Wow. It's out. It's finally, finally out... So there's a bug in DNS, the name-to-address mapping system at the core of most Internet services. DNS goes bad, every website goes bad, and every email goes...somewhere. Not where it was supposed to... I'm pretty proud of what we accomplished here. We got Windows. We got Cisco IOS. We got Nominum. We got BIND 9, and when we couldn't get BIND 8, we got Yahoo, the biggest BIND 8 deployment we knew of, to publicly commit to abandoning it entirely. It was a good day... more
The ongoing ITU Plenipotentiary Conference wraps up at the end of the week. The more than 2000 people present in Busan Korea from 171 countries -- overwhelmingly government bureaucrats -- have been busily polishing nearly a hundred resolutions on everything that ails them. The good news is that some sanity seems to have prevailed and most of the really extreme provisions apparently disappeared during the ensuing dialogue. One of the reasons for the change of heart is the realization that the ITU emperor's budget for clothes is disappearing. more
Global Payments, an Atlanta-based payment card processing firm, announced yesterday that they had suffered "unauthorized access into a portion of its processing system". Sometime in early March they uncovered the attack, and there are some indications that the breach occurred between January 21st and February 25th of this year... There are a number of unverified reports that a New York City street gang with Central American ties took control of "an administrative account that was not protected sufficiently". more
After more than two years of work behind closed doors, the Global Network Initiative is launching this week. That's the corporate code of conduct on free speech and privacy I've been talking about in generalities for quite some time. By midnight Tuesday U.S. East Coast time, the full set of documents and list of initial signatories will be made publicly available at globalnetworkinitiative.org. more
Early June 2018 the European Internet community traveled into the Caucasian Mountains to participate in EURODIG 11. On its way into the digital age, Europe is, as EU Commissioner Mariya Gabriel said, at another crossroad. In cyberspace, Europe risks becoming sandwiched between US and Chinese Cyberpower policies. Social networks, search engines, smartphones, eTrade platforms - key sectors of today's digital economy - are dominated both by the US and Chinese giants: Alibaba and Amazon, Google and Baidu, Facebook and Weibo, Apple and Huawai. more
Kevin Shatzkamer, Chief Architect for Cisco Mobility, speaks to the mobile research Cisco has developed in helping Mobile Service Providers reach their ROI goals and objectives in projecting an increasingly demand driven market. ... There has been speculation for years that increased demand for mobile video would tax and possibly crash current networks and infrastructures of mobile operators. A predictor may be The World Cup games held in South Africa. more
When the ICM Registry initially launched .XXX last year, the notion of a 'registration block' was a fairly novel idea. Essentially, the ICM Registry allowed companies who were not part of the "global adult entertainment industry", to seek permanent removal of names matching their trademarks from the general pool of names available for registration for a low-cost fee. Many saw this move by the ICM Registry as a genuine attempt to protect the rights of brand owners, while others saw it as yet another mechanism for generating revenue from rights owners under the guise of a "Sunrise Period." more
A few days ago I opined that if several people want the same Top-Level Domain (TLD) and can't come to terms otherwise, they should arrange a private auction. It would be an odd sort of auction, since the buyers and sellers are the same people, so unlike normal auctions, the goal is not to maximize the selling price. How might it work? more
In "Net Neutrality: Discrimination, Competition, and Innovation in the UK and US", Alissa Cooper and Ian Brown explore the relationship between two broadband regulatory regimes and their practical outcomes. The paper is of (paradoxical) interest as it (unintentionally) demonstrates how policy is being made without sufficient understanding of packet network performance. This paper contains many common fallacies about performance. These fallacies are fuelling misdirected conflicts over broadband regulatory policy. The underlying (false) assumption is that 'neutral' (aka 'non-discriminatory') networks exist. more
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