The Exponential S-Curve Hastens Decline of Asset Values

At the moment we are facing the end stage of a relatively large range of traditional products and services. The reason for this is that for a long time traditional industries have been able to delay the arrival of the decline phase of many of their products, basically because of the monopolistic, or at least dominant, structures of many of the industry sectors -- and in particular telecoms, media, energy and banking. more

FCC Proposes a ‘Third Way’ of Regulating Broadband Providers

Jared Newman reporting in PC World: "Wounded from a court decision that stopped the government from regulating Internet service providers, the Federal Communications Commission has announced a new way to gain some control over the broadband industry. The proposal would let the FCC treat Internet transmissions like telephone communications, entailing more oversight, but would prevent government control over Web services, applications and e-commerce sites." more

Network Neutrality and the FCC’s Inability to Calibrate Regulation of Convergent Operators

For administrative convenience and not as required by law, the FCC likes to apply an either/or single regulatory classification to convergent operators. Having classified ISPs as information service providers, the Commission unsuccessfully sought to sanction Comcast's meddling with subscribers' peer-to-peer traffic. Now Chairman Genachowski wants to further narrow and nuance regulatory oversight without changing the organic information service classification. more

First Three IDN ccTLDs Are Now Live

Announced in a blog post today, ICANN's Manager of Root Zone Services, Kim Davies, reports: "Today the first three production non-Latin top-level domains were placed in the DNS root zone. ... The three new top-level domains are ????????. (“Al-Saudiah”), ??????. ( “Emarat”) and ???. (“Misr”). All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left. Expect more as we continue to process other applications using the “fast track” methodology." more

DNSSEC Root Signature, Almost There!

IT security specialists have known for years that the plain DNS is not to be trusted. Any hope for improvement rests on the DNSSEC protocol deployment. In this post, I will review the current status in one critical aspect, namely the DNS root signature key management. The other two foremost are the application usage of DNSSEC protocol functionality and the operational front, or the extent of deployment in the DNS infrastructure. The operational front includes the support by the DNS root nameservers, but my focus on signature key management leaves this issue aside. more

CNN Live Interview on Internationalized Domain Names

CNN Live interviews ICANN Senior Director of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) on issues related to new IDN developments. The interview includes overview of extending top-level domains to enable TLDs such as .com, .cn (for China), and .gr (for Greece) available in their native languages and scripts. more

One Big Cheer for ICANN - But Still a Way’s from Our “Gooool”

As we approach the World Cup in South Africa this June it's heartening to see the amount of attention being paid to the continent. As with ICANN's recent Nairobi meeting, the eyes of the world are focusing on Africa in a new way -- as a sophisticated marketplace, and as a destination for investment, technology, and yes, sports... Still, as we prepare for the Cup and as we celebrate ICANN's recent approval of more Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), our job as an Internet community remains unfinished. Too many scripts and thus too many key voices remain "off the pitch". more

Set-Top-Box Revisited: How Does the Gateway Solution Increase Competition?

The FCC seems determined in revisiting and repairing the current CableCard rules fiasco in which it chose to mandate a universal Set-Top-Box for Cable, Telco, and DBS providers. Where does a solution lie, and is the FCC going down another road of improbable acceptance? The problem with a CableCard solution, in an attempt to create more competition, was the opening of current provider STB's to access other venues, which turned out to be both technically and business concept unfriendly. more

Open Broadband Infrastructure… And Why There’s No Business Case for FttH to Sell TV

Those advocates of a free market approach to fiber to the home (FttH), rather than a utilities-based one, often point to entertainment as the way to make that happen. And they then immediately point to the USA, where FttH rollouts have indeed been driven by competition between the cable TV companies... The telcos who were initially less enthusiastic about broadband (because it required them to abandon their lucrative ISDN services and replace them with the simpler and cheaper DSL technology) suddenly found themselves bested in the broadband market by the cable TV companies - a trend we also saw in some of the European markets - for instance, the Netherlands... more

Tackling Cyber Security: Should We Trust the Libertarians?

One of the RSS feeds that I read is Reason magazine, which is a web site for libertarians. In general, libertarians want less government intervention both in our personal lives and in the economy. The idea behind libertarians is that today's Republicans want less government intervention in our economy but are perfectly fine to have them dictate some aspects of morality. Similarly, today's Democrats want less government intervention in our personal lives but are perfectly fine with creating government bureaucracy to deliver social services. That's an oversimplified summary, but is more or less correct. About two months ago I got an article in my RSS feed where Reason was commenting on the government's response to the cyber war threats. more

EU’s Cyber Security Agency Identifying Five Areas as Critical IT Security

The EU's 'cyber security' Agency ENISA (The European Network and Information Security Agency) has launched a new report concluding that the EU should focus its future IT security research on five areas: cloud computing, real-time detection and diagnosis systems, future wireless networks, sensor networks, and supply chain integrity. more

First Internet War from a Social Psychological Perspective

The month-long series of coordinated attacks against Estonia's Internet in 2007 that shutdown websites of Estonia's government, those of its officials, banks and news agencies are believed to be based by various physiological principles including anonymity and contagion. more

Fake Anti-Virus Peddlers Taking Aggressive Steps to Avoid Detection

Over at Krebs on Secrity blog, Brian Krebs reports: "Purveyors of fake anti-virus or 'scareware' programs have aggressively stepped up their game to evade detection by legitimate anti-virus programs, according to new data from Google. In a report being released today, Google said that between January 2009 and the end of January 2010, its malware detection infrastructure found some 11,000 malicious or hacked Web pages that attempted to foist fake anti-virus on visitors." more

World’s Critical Infrastructure

After all the unexplainable outages that undersea cables have severed, I thought it would be essential to highlight a brief history about who owns the oceans including some pointers about global undersea communication cables aka world's critical infrastructure. more

ICANN Gives Jordan Preliminary Approval for Its ccTLD in Arabic

ICANN has given Jordan preliminary approval for its IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) ccTLD. "At this time ICANN has received a total of 21 requests for IDN ccTLD(s) through the String Evaluation process, representing 11 languages. A total of 13 requests have successfully passed through the String Evaluation and are hence ready for the requesting country or territory to initiate the application for String Delegation." more