Somalia’s Extended Internet Outage Results in Millions of Dollars of Loss per Day, Says Government

Somalia's internet connection was finally restored on Monday after weeks of outage due to a severed undersea cable. more

The Perfect, the Good, and the FCC

It has been a busy week in U.S. communications policy, with an FCC meeting adopting important spectrum policy reforms, an FCC complaint about Comcast's approval policies for cable modems, and a dispute between Comcast and Level 3 over fees for Internet backbone traffic. And late last night, it got even more interesting. more

US Government Admits IANA Transition May Not Move Forward

The US government plan to move control of the internet's naming and numbering functions to ICANN next month may not move forward, reports Kieren McCarthy more

Who Owns Your Connected Device?

It's been clear for years that IoT companies gather a large amount of data from customers. Everything from a smart thermometer to your new car gathers and reports data back to the cloud. California has tried to tackle customer data privacy through the California Consumer Privacy Act that went into effect on January 1. Web companies must provide California consumers the ability to opt-out from having their personal information sold to others. more

The Over-Optimization Meltdown

In simple terms, Meltdown and Spectre are simple vulnerabilities to understand. Imagine a gang of thieves waiting for a stage coach carrying a month's worth of payroll. There are two roads the coach could take, and a fork, or a branch, where the driver decides which one to take. The driver could take either one. What is the solution? Station robbers along both sides of the branch, and wait to see which one the driver chooses. more

Bring a Responsible Closure to the New gTLD Process - The Home Stretch

Over the course of the last year, the ICANN Board and Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) have constructively worked through a long list of their differences contained in the GAC scorecard. As we near the finish line with Monday's scheduled ICANN Board meeting to approve the Applicant Guidebook, there remains a small handful of issues that will hopefully be resolved in a similar responsible manner during Sunday's ICANN Board/GAC consultation. more

The Costs of a Dysfunctional Relationship - Part 1

"The current Board-GAC relationship is dysfunctional and has been so for several years." Never has this line from the ATRT Report seemed so apt as now, when the ICANN board and the GAC are preparing to meet in Brussels. Part 1 of this blog will describe their impasse over the introduction of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). Part 2 will analyze that impasse and offer recommendations to begin resolving it. more

Unregistered Gems Part 4: Other Brandable Domain-Name Styles

In the fourth in this series of articles exploring how the application of appropriate tools, algorithms and analysis techniques can identify the existence of attractive, unregistered brandable domain names, I consider the prevalence of a few additional styles of name. more

Understanding the Brazilian Court Decision to Arrest Google’s Representative

Brazil has been on the news lately, and not for good reasons: an electoral judge order the arrest of Google's Director in Brazil for not complying with a court decision that ordered the removal a YouTube video with allegedly defamatory content. A lot has been said about this, but it seems that many people got it wrong, so let's recap some of the misinterpretations that circulated, specially those at the EFF website. more

Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance (Milton Mueller, NYU 12/14)

The Internet Society's NY Chapter (ISOC-NY) is delighted to present Milton Mueller's first full exposition of his new book Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance at NYU on Tuesday December 14 2010. Prof. Mueller is a co-founder of ICANN's NonCommercial User's Constituency and a renowned cyberlibertarian. more

Curious Statement About 2012 gTLD Round Name Collision Fears at IGF

During his presentation at IGF on 7 December in Guadalajara, Akram Atallah, President of ICANN's Global Domain Division, said the following: So when you look at that, you'll see that we are left with only 20 to go. There are a few that need to be withdrawn that haven't withdrawn... This surprised me, but since the meeting was about possible new application procedures and not the handling of the last round's persistent problems, I decided not to ask at that point. more

Is There a Role for ICANN in Satellite Internet Governance?

A recent invitation to participate in a webinar to discuss ICANN's Role in Satellite Internet Governance as an enabler of UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9 prompted me to consider this issue. As a legal scholar with expertise in telecommunications infrastructure, I had much to say and discuss about the new mega-constellation phenomenon and its potential role in achieving SDG9, which, for me, is a multifaceted and fascinating subject. more

Rebalancing Telco Infrastructure Investments

One of the reasons telecommunications has been so successful for more than 160 years is that it adopted a strategy that resulted in a seamless network all around the world. You can pick up a phone anywhere in the world and, with little or no instruction, make a call to anybody else in the world without worrying what phones and technology they are using on the other end of the line... But during that process the nature of the network operators changed. more

Domain Abuse: Are We Speaking the Same Language?

For those of us in the domain name industry, it's clear that security threats and the way we track, report, and mitigate them has been a topic of increased discussion and focus in recent months. As we prepare to come together as a community again at the next ICANN public meeting in Marrakech, many of us will look to continue these conversations, as there is no doubt it is a topic of importance, relevance and urgency for our community at this time. more

Lessons from Sandy: Building Networks and Cyber-Infrastructure to Survive Climate Change

Hurricane Sandy has been a badly needed wake up call for the Internet community as to the threat of climate change. Although most people have forgotten, Sandy is the second hurricane to hit New York in as many years with Irene last August and a third tropical depression headed to New York at the time of this writing. Two, supposedly once in a hundred year storms, within such a short time frame should even make the most die-hard denialist that something's afoot. more