The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently issued a public notice that it will be holding two workshops on the transition of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to "new technologies" such as voice-over-IP (VoIP). The workshops will be held on December 6 and 14, 2011, at the FCC's office in Washington, DC. The public notice states the goal as... more
"Top websites and Internet service providers around the world, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai, and Limelight Networks, joined together with more than 1000 other participating websites in World IPv6 Day for a successful global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6," reports Internet Society (ISOC) in its day after news release on World IPv6 Day held on Wednesday, Jun 8. more
It was only a few weeks back, in July of this year, where I remarked that an Akamai report of an outage was unusual for this industry. It was unusual in that it was informative in detailing their understanding of the root cause of the problem, describing the response that they performed to rectify the immediate problem, the measures being undertaken to prevent a recurrence of this issue, and the longer-term measures to improve the monitoring and alerting processes used within their platform. more
What do Europeans interested in Internet policy think about cybersecurity, network neutrality, IANA, improving Internet access and other topics? Tomorrow the second day of the European Dialog on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) 2015 in Sofia, Bulgaria, will cover all those topics and many more. I've listed some of the sessions that either I or my Internet Society colleagues are participating in. I will personally be involved as a panelist on the two sessions about cybersecurity. more
The National Broadband Plan that the FCC will present on 17 March will set the USA on a completely different telecoms path. This plan will hopefully show Congress that it is worthwhile making the legislative changes that will deliver the social and economic benefits of a national broadband infrastructure. more
Schneier's insight is considered particularly important according to EFF, as more and more is learnt "about the unconstitutional surveillance programs from the National Security Agency and the depth and breadth of data the NSA is collecting on the public." more
The fourth quarter of 2014 closed with a base of 288 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of four million domain names, or 1.3 percent over the third quarter of 2014, according to Verisign's latest Domain Name Industry Brief. Registrations have grown by 16.9 million, or 6.2 percent, year over year. Total country-code TLD (ccTLD) registrations were 134.0 million domain names, a 1.5 percent increase quarter over quarter, and an 8.7 percent increase year over year. more
In an entry in the ICANN blog, Paul Levins says they've arranged to move Registerfly's domains to another registrar. They won't say who the other registrar is beyond "an existing accredited Registrar with a demonstrated record of customer service" which could be just about anyone other than Registerfly. They have "most" of the registrant data. All is to be unveiled next week. In the meantime, read the comments on the blog... more
In my last post I blogged about greylisting, a well-known anti-spam technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets. When a mail server receives a an attempt to deliver mail from an IP address that's never sent mail before, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail senders always retry, badly written spamware often doesn't. I found that even though everyone knows about greylisting, about 2/3 of IPs don't successfully retry. more
In a statement released today, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has criticized ICANN for not being proactive on privacy matters, saying the organization "can't seem to wrap its head around" the issue. more
"The latest development in Yemen's long-running civil war is playing out in the global routing table," Doug Madory reports in a blog post today from Oracle's Internet Intelligence unit. more
The proverbial Pandora's box that is opened whenever the topic of online copyright infringement is raised throws into sharp relief a host of challenges that have confounded policy makers, internet service providers and consumers for many years. Chief amongst them is how to strike an appropriate balance between protecting the rights of content owners while continuing to promote the interests of the public and preserving the benefits of the internet, given its unprecedented ability to facilitate the rapid dissemination of copyrighted content. more
Back in September a number of domain name industry leaders wrote to ICANN to express deep-felt concerns about some companies' declared plans for generic domain name extensions. We have sent ICANN another letter this week which is also planned to be distributed in a press release included here in this post. more
Virgin Media announced its intention of restricting BitTorrent traffic on its new 50Mbps service according to an article by Chris Williams in The Register. Does this mean that net neutrality is endangered in the UK? The question is important because advocates of an open Internet like me hold the UK up as a positive example of net neutrality achieved through competition rather than through regulation. more
Of all the candidates for the Democratic nomination, Howard Dean raised the most amount of money over the Internet. On March 15th, the Dean campaign launched the first official weblog in presidential campaign history, six days after Dean himself first stumped in the blogosphere. What follows are Dean's principles for Internet Policy.
This nation -- and not just this nation -- needs to have an honest conversation about what's real, possible and desirable when it comes to the gift of the Internet. Conversations need shared ground. Here are the beliefs we think should guide the development of a fact-based federal policy. We put these forward as part of a continuing Great American Conversation. more