Canadians Aren’t Buying Into Net Neutrality

The Tyee, an independent on-line magazine based in BC wrote a story about net neutrality more than a year ago, noting that most Canadians are sleeping through the debate. They followed up again last week. Despite what is called a "perfect storm of events that may crystallize the issue for consumers, businesses, politicians, and regulators," there hasn't been an overwhelming outcry, despite extensive press coverage of the most recent network activities. There are a number of voices who present a conspiracy theory on traffic shaping in Canada... more

Prof. Dave Farber on Where the Internet is Headed

"Internet protocols simply aren't adequate for the changes in hardware and network use that will come up in a decade or so," says Professor Dave Farber who was recently interviewed by Andy Oram. "Dave predicts that computers will be equipped with optical connections instead of pins for networking, and the volume of data transmitted will overwhelm routers, which at best have mixed optical/electrical switching," writes Oram.  more

New Zealand’s Domain Name Commission Wins Appeal in Lawsuit Against US DomainTools

New Zealand's Domain Name Commission (DNC) wins in court against the US company DomainTools for "illegally scrapping personal information" of .nz domain name owners. more

UK Government Planning on New Laws for IoT Devices Including a Mandatory Security Labelling Scheme

The UK government on Wednesday announced plans to introduce new laws for internet connected devices to better enforce the inclusion of basic cybersecurity features into IoT devices. more

How Fast is Starlink Broadband?

We got a recent analysis of Starlink broadband speeds from Ookla, which gathers huge numbers of speed tests from across the country. The U.S. average download speeds on Starlink have improved over the last year, from an average of 65.72 Mbps in 1Q 2021 to 90.55 Mbps in 1Q 2022. But during that same timeframe, upload speeds got worse, dropping from an average of 16.29 Mbps in 1Q 2021 to 10.70 Mbps in 1Q 2022. more

A Gap in the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook?

I strongly believe there is a serious "breach" in the Applicant Guidebook: I checked the scoring, I checked the possible objections, I am aware of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) early warning but I really could not find how ICANN is going to avoid Community applications to be submitted as Standard ones. The role of ICANN is to offer a solution to launching new generic Top-Level Domains, it is no party in saying whether a new gTLD is a Community or not. more

WebRTC/RTCWEB Congestion Control Workshop on July 28 in Vancouver

As we start moving more real-time communications into web browsers with the upcoming WebRTC/RTCWEB offerings, what do we do about congestion control? How do we ensure that all these browser-based communications sessions share the network fairly? With RTC capabilities now already available in builds for browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, how do we deal with the expected increase in voice, video, chat and data traffic? more

ARIN Issues Final IPv4 Addresses in Its Free Pool

Marking an important milestone in the evolution of the Internet, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit association that manages the distribution of Internet number resources for its region, announced today that it has issued the final IPv4 addresses in its free pool. The attention now shifts to IPv4's successor, IPv6. more

Making IDN gTLDs Attractive and Safe

The primary focus of this article is to illustrate that the Applicant Guidebook is not supplying sufficient protection mechanisms, and creates too high financial barrier for those who are interested in applying for multiple Top-Level Domains (TLDs) that are translations/transliterations of each other and/or of an existing generic Top-Level Domains (tt-gTLDs). more

Google Surpasses Supercomputer Community, Unnoticed?

This week's issue of EE Times carries a story Pflops here; now what? about IBM's new 1 petaFLOPS supercomputer, the Roadrunner, and how its designers are scrambling to run benchmarks in advance of the annual International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) being held June 17th-20th. It's an article (dare I say, a puff piece?) about IBM, but it does mention competing supercomputers by Japanese vendors. However, it makes no mention of distributed computing projects like SETI@Home or, more importantly, of the Google computing cluster. more

Regime Change on the Internet: Conference Notes

"Regime Change on the Internet? Internet Governance after WGIG" was the first public event held in the United States on July 28, 2005 to review the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) report. Here are my notes from the event: "Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator, UN Working Group on Internet Governance, reminded the audience that the mandate of the WGIG was specifically articulated by the first part of the WSIS - "To investigate and make proposals for action as appropriate". It was not for sweeping regime change as the conference title would suggest." more

Nominations For Board of Public Interest Registry (Operator of .ORG) Close Nov 24

Would you be interested in helping guide the future of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .ORG domain? If so, the Internet Society is seeking nominations for three positions on the PIR Board of Directors. The nominations deadline is Monday, November 24, 2014. More information, qualification requirements and the submission form can be found here. more

Are Domain Names Recession-Proof? Probably Not, Next Question?

I didn't see the Fortune article Are domain names recession proof until the weekend, and being the author of the now infamous Domain aftermarket overdue for an asset repricing last year I feel somewhat obligated to comment on it. So, how will domain names fare in a recession? The Fortune article was upbeat... more

Reading Tea Leaves: China Statement on Internet Policy

The Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China has issued a statement on "Internet Policy in China." Released Tuesday, the lengthy statement covers a range of topics from promoting internal development and use, to freedom of expression, protecting Internet security, and international cooperation. A quick review reveals two interesting passages relevant to global Internet governance. more

India: Changing Trends in Passing-Off

In India, whilst the Intellectual property owners continue to face the problems of counterfeiting and infringements of their brand names/trade marks, the emerging trend amongst misusers appears to be adopting famous/well known marks as a part of their trading style/corporate name. Obviously, the intention is to choose a name that is easy to recollect and gives the impression of being associated with a well-known company. More often than not, in order to claim honesty in adoption, the marks are adopted in relation to a different business as that of the IP holder. Also it is common among misusers to slightly twist the name or add a descriptive suffix/prefix to the well-known mark. more