IP Address Location Data

The last few years have shown us how the Internet shrinks distances between distributed teams, organizations and families. This poses a challenge for some organizations. Many business relationships and contractual agreements involving the Internet have geographical implications and restrictions. This matters to anyone operating a network. It is most important for networks that get new address space. more

Thousands of UK Businesses, Individuals to Lose Their .EU Web Address in a No-Deal Brexit

The British government is urging close to 340,000 registered holders of .EU domain in Britain to make contingency plans as their web addresses will disappear if the UK does not agree on a deal with Brussels. more

Leadership and Persuasion: Internet Freedom

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

And Then There Was the Issue of Time

Anyone who has been part of the community during its soon-to-be 12-years of existence will be the first to tell you that while ICANN's intentions are good, its execution, time and again, has been lacking. Unfortunately, the global business world does not and cannot accept only good intentions. Businesses require surety, consistency and clear evidence of stability before they can establish the foundation for their enterprises. more

Net Neutrality? Give Me a Break

As my learned friend John Levine has noted, rightly, any policy that anyone has come up with thus far regarding net neutrality is based upon a Telco model. Now, think about that for a second. A telephone call costs pretty much the same if you whisper or shout. It costs the same if you make a quick phone-call or you yack for hours. These days, even long distance is trivially inexpensive, because the capacity to carry the world's phone-calls is well beyond any foreseeable demand. There is huge headroom. more

Masking Identity with Proxy/Privacy Services

No censure attaches to having domain names registered by proxy/privacy services. However, while the practice has become routine for protecting privacy and sensitive information, registering in the name of a proxy is still taken into account in assessing intention, and even circumstantial evidence without contradiction or explanation can tip the scale in complainant's favor. more

Is the Internet Fragmenting? Join the Discussion Live - Tuesday, May 10, at 3:30pm US EDT

Is the global, open Internet moving away from a network of networks that is universally accessible to a series of networks fragmented along policy, technical or economic lines? As some governments pass laws related to data localization and restriction of cross-border data flows, what will the impact be? What about the increasing use of DNS and content filtering? What other factors have the potential for causing fragmentation? more

ISOC Bulgaria Urges Chapters to Help Governments Answer to a Question from the ITU

ISOC-Bulgaria has been following the developments around Internet governance on the global arena since 2001, when we started participate in the WSIS process. Our representatives supported the efforts of the Bulgarian government to make sure the Internet is developed in an open, bottom-up, and transparent way. Last week in Geneva (November 11-12) at the ITU there was a meeting of the ITU Council Working Group on international Internet-related public policy issues. more

Ontario Court Rejects U.S. Government Demand for Full Access to Megaupload Servers Seized in Canada

Many readers will recall that nearly one year ago, the U.S. government launched a global takedown of Megaupload.com, with arrests of the leading executives in New Zealand and the execution of search warrants in nine countries. Canada was among the list of participating countries as the action included seizure of Megaupload.com servers located here. more

Connecting the Next Billion. Is It Possible? (An African Perspective)

This year, the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group which provide assistance in the preparations for Global IGF meetings called for Intersessional work (activities that are pursued in the months between annual IGFs with the aim of helping the IGF produce more tangible outputs that can become robust resources). Previously, the IGF has used best Practice Forums and Dynamic coalitions to bring out key issues that affect the world as it relates to the Internet. This year's Intersessional activity is centred on "Policy Option for connecting the Next Billion". more

Interview with Avri Doria on the History of Community gTLDs

Community gTLDs play an interesting and even unique role in the ICANN new gTLD process. They reflect the community-driven nature of the Internet. Indeed the story of how Community gTLDs came about is a fascinating example of the how bottom-up process can give rise to innovative policy outcomes. It has been over six years since the community gTLD concept was first discussed. In the mists of time, it's easy to forget the deep foundations upon which this concept is based. more

Satellites Directly to Cellphones

AT&T and satellite company AST SpaceMobile announced a partnership to provide satellite cellular service directly from satellites to cellphones. This will provide a service that is much needed for the billions of remote users who are not in the range of a cell tower. This is an emerging industry that is still being referred to by different acronyms. more

Closing the Gaps: The Quest for a Secure Internet

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

Cuban Satellite Connectivity - Today and (Maybe?) Tomorrow

Last January, Doug Madory of Dyn Research reported on Cuban traffic, noting that C&W's share had increased. And this week Madory reported that ETECSA had activated a new internet transit provider, medium-Earth orbit (MEO) satellite-connectivity provider O3b Networks (Other 3 billion), replacing geostationary satellite provider Intelsat... the time for a data packet to travel from earth to an O3b satellite and back to Earth is significantly less than to an Intelsat satellite. more

A Year in Review: 14,000 Routing Incidents In 2017

How was the state of the Internet's routing system in 2017? Let's take a look back using data from BGPStream. Some highlights: 13,935 total incidents (either outages or attacks like route leaks and hijacks); Over 10% of all Autonomous Systems on the Internet were affected; 3,106 Autonomous Systems were a victim of at least one routing incident; 1,546 networks caused at least one incident. more