The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) named John Curran as president and chief executive officer, effective July 1, 2009. Since January 1, 2009, Curran has served as acting president and CEO of ARIN. He is a founding member of the ARIN Board of Trustees and served as chairman from August 1997 to December 2008. Curran has also been a valuable participant on CircleID where he has shared his views on a number key issues such as IPv6. more
One of the great challenges has been to conceive a business model for next generation telephone companies. This is constrained by their limited core competences which do not match well with many of the opportunities that lie in entertainment and complex/customised bundles for consumers. Frost & Sullivan, a leading firm of industry analysts, notes the enthusiasm of service providers to offer connectivity, entertainment and information services, within a digitally connected world... more
According to reports by German software security company G Data, since the beginning of summer, the malware community appears to have been scaling back its activities. This considerable reduction is, according to the estimates of G Data security expert Ralf Benzmüller, not solely due to the forthcoming holiday season. The global recession appears to have also hit the eCrime economy. "This phenomenon emerges every year as something new. At the start of the holiday season, the number of malware programs falls. One reason for this is the worldwide onset of the travel season, which, based on experience, causes a drop in the number of active Internet users. However, this does not explain a collapse of more than 30 percent," says Ralf Benzmüller. more
The OECD has published a detailed report, Broadband over Powerlines: Developments and Policy Issues, on what was once considered a potentially interesting and disruptive technology that might have rivaled DSL. It notes that having largely failed in that, it is instead being applied to "smart grid" applications. more
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that antitrust enforcement in telecommunication is being ramped up by the Obama Administration, after relatively lax times. In a piece entitled Telecoms Face Antitrust Threat it indicates that investigators are weighing up the roles of the large carriers and whether they are abusing the market power amassed under the Bush Administration. more
On July 1st 2009, Rod Beckstrom succeeded Paul Twomey as the fourth CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Rod assumes this important leadership role at a critical juncture in ICANN's ongoing evolution. Saying that he is jumping into the deep end of a pool would not do justice to the magnitude of the tasks before him. The more appropriate analogy might be parachuting from a plane above the Mariana Trench during a typhoon. However, after reading some of his writings, reviewing his biography, and having met with him one-on-one during ICANN's recent Sydney meeting, I am confident that the ICANN Board made the right decision in selecting Rod to lead the organization at this defining moment in Internet governance. more
Our world finds itself at a critical juncture. Both trillions of dollars and the future of human communications including fundamental access to it are at stake. For telecom operators and media outlets there is not a migratory way from where we are to the future. There is a clear consumer shift underway that runs in the opposite direction to that of telecom and media incumbents; emergent social practice is increasingly clashing with the very structure and desires of incumbent players... It was for these reasons that one of the six keynote speakers invited to Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco was Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel. His keynote was entitled, Tinkering without Tampering: Wrestling with Convergence and Communications Policy... more
Professor Denis Carlton was asked by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to submit a report on (or justify!) the impact of new top-level domains (TLDs) on industry competition. After he did so, Dr. Michael Kende posted an elaborate comment on the report on behalf of AT&T, to which Professor Carlton published a rebuttal. This essay outlines some of the errors in Professor Carlton's rebuttal and Dr. Kende's comments. more
The DKIM standard has been out for two years now, and we're starting to see some adoption by large mail systems, but there's still a lot of misunderstanding about what DKIM does and doesn't do... Any a mail system can add a signatures to the messages it handles, and spammers can sign their mail, too. A DKIM signature contains, stripped down to its basics, the domain of the signer and a checksum of the message. more
With countries like Australia and New Zealand implementing infrastructure that can deliver 100Mb/s for their next generation broadband -- and with most Europeans not too far behind this -- it is quite shocking to see that the $7.2 billion economic stimulus package in the USA (under the RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP)) requires nothing more than 768 kilobits per second (kb/s) downstream and 200 kb/s upstream. more
Average level of spam in the second quarter of 2009 has risen by 53 percent, as compared to the first quarter of this year, according to latest report from Google's email security and archiving services group, Postini. The report foresees unpredictable pattern of drops and spikes for the rest of the year... more
I read this to the ICANN Board Thursday morning, in Sydney, after more prep work than I care to recall. If you don't know that the DAGv3 is delayed, or what the IRT is, this is a good time to bush up on current ICANN state. "Good morning. My name is Eric Brunner-Williams, and I am speaking to you on behalf of the initial signatories of the Step-by-Step proposal. I represent one of the signatories as the principal of the native, aboriginal, and indigenous cultural and linguistic Top-Level Domain (TLD) project, one of many similar efforts to preserve living languages and cultures..." more
As a number of China hands predicted, the Chinese government has postponed its mandate requiring that all computers sold in China must include the Green Dam -Youth Escort censorware by today. Yesterday after the news broke I told the Financial Times: "There's been this impression in the internet industry that when the Chinese government makes a demand, they have to roll over and play dead. The lesson here is that's not necessarily the case." more
China is to delay a controversial plan requiring all new computers sold in the country to be equipped with an internet filtering software, state media says. The filter, called Green Dam Youth Escort, was to have been required from Wednesday, but the industry ministry said computer makers needed more time. more
With the Internet's global reach and importance showing exponential growth, pressure on the United States to share control of ICANN is mounting. A number of experts believe that the question is simply how much the United States should give up and how soon. This essay argues that "giving up" can be a win-win solution; i.e., control sharing is not a zero-sum game. more
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