Most Employees in Rural America Can’t Work From Home Due to Lack of Required Broadband Speeds

One of the hottest topics in the news related to coronavirus is working from home. Companies of all sizes are telling employees to work from home as a way to help curb the spread of the virus. Companies without work-at-home policies are scrambling to define how to make this work to minimize disruption to their business. Allowing employees to work at home is not a new phenomenon. more

Australia Aborting Its Ambitious $44 Billion Broadband Project

Rodney S. Tucker reporting in IEEE Spectrum: "In April 2009, Australia's then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, dropped a bombshell on the press and the global technology community: His social democrat Labor administration was going to deliver broadband Internet to every single resident of Australia... So now, after three years of planning and construction, during which workers connected some 210 000 premises (out of an anticipated 13.2 million), Australia's visionary and trailblazing initiative is at a crossroads. The new government plans to deploy fiber only to the premises of new housing developments." more

Is Call Forwarding an “Information Service” and Why It Matters for FTC Jurisdiction

Time to brush the dust off your Computer II notebooks. Are voicemail, electronic fax, and call forwarding enhanced services or telecom services? Today's case: FTC v. American eVoice, Ltd... The FTC brought an action against Defendants claiming that they were engaged in cramming, adding unwanted voicemail, electronic fax, and call forwarding services to consumers bills to the tune of $70 million. more

Dot App, Dot Art Among Most Applied-for TLDs According to List Revealed by ICANN

ICANN announced today that it has received 1,930 applications for its new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program. 884 from US based organizations, 40 are from the UK, 303 from the Asia-Pacific region and 17 from Africa. Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's CEO, during the "Reval Day" event that took place in London today said: "The internet is about to change forever -- now a powerful change is coming." more

Starlink and the Seven Dwarfs

Starlink dominates the satellite internet race, echoing IBM's past supremacy in computing. But geopolitical divides, advancing rivals, and Elon Musk's controversies suggest its lead will narrow as competitors gain ground in a fragmented global market. more

Senators Introduce COPIED Act to Combat AI-Driven Deepfakes

In a bipartisan effort to address the growing threat of deepfakes, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) have introduced the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act). more

ICANN Security Team Reports on Conficker Post-Discovery Analysis

A paper released today by ICANN provides a chronology of events related to the containment of the Conficker worm. The report, "Conficker Summary and Review," is authored by ICANN's Dave Piscitello, Senior Security Technologist on behalf of the organization's security team. more

The Trajectory of the Broadband Industry

For well over a decade, it was fairly easy to understand the trajectory of the broadband industry. In the residential market, cable companies snagged all the growth while telcos shrank as customers abandoned DSL. Other technologies like fiber or fixed wireless gained customers but were a blip on the national scale. more

Air Pollution in China Causing Higher Data Center Equipment Failure Rates

China's notoriously high air pollution levels are a well-documented public-health issue. But pollution also has other less talked about effects. One of them is on the efficiency of data centers in the country. more

Google and ETECSA Will Agree to Exchange Internet Traffic Without Charge

Google and ETECSA have signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to negotiate a peering agreement that would allow cost-free data exchange between their networks once an undersea cable physically connects them. Google has worked hard to establish a relationship with ETECSA and the Cuban government. In recent years, Cuba, not the US, has limited the Cuban Internet. This agreement telegraphs a change in Cuban policy. more

Coronavirus Online Threats Going Viral, Part 4: Phishing

In part four of this series of posts looking at emerging internet content relating to coronavirus, we explore phishing. In times of crisis, cyber criminals invariably take advantage of the growing concerns of the public. In the case of the coronavirus, they have done so by sending phishing emails that play on the fears surrounding the spread of the illness. A number of reports have emerged of emails purporting to provide advice or assistance relating to COVID-19... more

ICANN Clarifying Questions - How to Respond (Part 2 of 3)

In the first part of this series on ICANN's impending Clarifying Questions period, I outlined what you can expect in terms of question structure. Here I would like to outline how the points work and provide some advice on how to answer questions for best success. more

Obama to Sign Executive Order for Streamlining Approval of Internet Networks

Currently, the process for approving broadband construction projects on federal property varies from agency to agency. Property controlled by the federal government includes roads, about 30 percent of the nation's land and more than 10,000 buildings. The order will require the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Interior, Transportation and Veterans Affairs as well as the Postal Service to develop a single process for approving Internet construction projects. more

Competing Processes Obfuscate Internet Policy-Making in India

Net Neutrality has become a hot topic in India, following a brief but high-profile national debate instigated by a consultation paper from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) that solicited views on what net neutrality is, and whether regulations protecting it are needed in India. The paper also hinted at possible regulation of all kinds of online services (like Skype, Uber, or Google) in the future. But no-one could have predicted what happened next... more

ICANN Clarifying Questions - How Are They Structured? (Part 1 of 3)

Several weeks ago ICANN issued clarifying questions to approximately 50 of the 1,930 new gTLD applications submitted last spring. Some of our clients were selected for this pilot effort and we've had the opportunity to review seven sets of clarifying questions totaling approximately 30 individual questions. ICANN has indicated that in late November they will begin issuing Clarifying Questions to the balance of applicants. more