Canadian Marketing Association Attacks Anti-Spam Bill

With the final Industry Committee review of C-27, Canada's anti-spam legislation, set for Monday afternoon, lobby groups have been increasing the pressure all week in an effort to water down many of the bill's key protections. Yesterday, the Canadian Marketing Association chimed in with an emergency bulletin to its members calling on them to lobby for changes to the bill. While the CMA was very supportive of the bill when it appeared before the committee in June, it now wants to kill the core protection in C-27 - a requirement for express opt-in consent. more

Ten Years of UDRP

In 1999, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) developed a policy to resolve disputes between trademark owners and registrants of domain names. This policy, the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) was made available for disputes concerning an alleged abusive registration of a domain name. In the past 10 years alone, more than 16,000 disputes have been filed resulting in more than 10,000 domain name transfers. more

Finland Legislates Universal Broadband

Finland's national broadband strategy (NBS) was set up in 2004 by the Ministry of Transport and Communications with the practical goal of increasing the number of broadband connections. The strategy, part guided by the EU's i2010 'Broadband for all by 2010' plan which focuses on rolling out broadband through a range of measures while promoting competition in and between networks, included an implementation program of 50 separate measures. Broadband access in sparsely populated and rural areas was to be supported by structural funds from the EU and central government. more

AT&T Says Google Voice Not Neutral

AT&T has turned up the volume on Google Voice in a filing with the FCC. At issue is Google's decision to block calls that are routed to certain rural areas with higher than average termination costs. Google questions regulating its service - a web application - the same as traditional phone services, but AT&T's letter claims that at the end of the day, Google Voice is routing PSTN to PSTN calls. more

Content is Everything: How to Regulate the USA

As countries begin to fully understand the implications of universal broadband, a mind-shift is taking place in the minds of the people involved in the decision-making processes, and the split between infrastructure and content is becoming more apparent. Futile regulations from the past are making this crystal clear. more

From Subscribers to Connections

The global telecoms industry numbers remain impressive: By 2020 there will be 6 billion mobile subscribers -- of which, according to Nokia, 95% will have access to wireless broadband by 2015, and by 2020, there will also be 3 billion fixed broadband subscribers. However the relevance of these numbers will decline. By 2020 there will be 50 billion fixed and mobile connections. more

Rod Beckstrom’s First 100 Days at ICANN

Rod Beckstrom took over as ICANN President/CEO on July 1, 2009, so October 9th marked his 100th day in office -- and a good opportunity to examine the progress made by ICANN during his short tenure. ...to borrow an analogy from American football: when you have the ball in the Red Zone, you need to score touchdowns, not field goals. So far, under Rod's leadership, ICANN has moved down the field on a number of issues. In particular, ICANN scored a "touchdown heard round the world" by bringing the MoU/JPA to a successful conclusion. more

VeriSign Supports New gTLDs with Appropriate Safeguards

The introduction of new Internet domains to the global marketplace has the potential to dramatically grow the domain name marketplace, increasing the value of domain names, driving new demand for registry services and opening new markets for registrars and registries alike. Because VeriSign operates .com -- the legacy generic top-level domain (gTLD) -- many in the Internet community have assumed that we would oppose the introduction of new gTLDs. The truth is quite the opposite. more

An Unwelcome Afterlife for a Long-Dead Blacklist

There's still a few weeks before Halloween, but have we ever got a scary story for you -- and every word of it is true. (Imagine we're sitting around a campfire, chowing down on s'mores, flashlights under our faces.) Seven years ago, on this very internet, there was a man named Matthew who was angry about spam. Now sure, there are lots of people angry about spam, and some of them are named Matthew, but this particular Matthew decided that he was going to do something about it... more

Compromised Accounts - Are Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail Seeing an Increase in Spam Sent Out?

Last week, I commented on the the Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo username and password leak. The question we now ask is whether or not we are seeing an increased amount of spam from those services. On another blog, they were commenting that various experts were claiming that this is the case. more