Gartner Says Worldwide IaaS Public Cloud Services Market Grew 31.3% in 2018

The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 31.3% in 2018, reaching $32.4 billion, up from $24.7 billion in 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. more

Competition for Monopoly gTLDs

The essay examines some of the new domain name managers' unjustifiable obsession with owning monopoly gTLDs when they should devote more energy and thought to making domain names more value adding. For the last three decades, the discourse regarding competitive advantage has focused on the need to rely on rare/unique resources and capabilities. However, more recently, the focus has shifted to the imperatives of efficient utilization of nonunique resources... more

Cyber Infringement of Trademarks by Typosquatting

A fabled, serial cybersquatter of the early Internet argued that typographical errors in domain names were not cybersquatting at all because they had their own distinct identities. Moreover, "I have" (he argued) "just as much right to own the [misspelled] Domain Names as the person who owns the correct spelling of [a] domain name." That dispute involved and <wallstreet journel.com>. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. and Dow Jones LP v. John Zuccarini, D2000-0578 (WIPO September 10, 2000). more

Petition to Decrease US Government Funding to the ITU

I have a "We the People" petition up on the White House website to decrease the US government funding to the ITU from $11M/year to the minimum $22K/year and minimize the USG head-count at meetings, with all of the reclaimed resources going to support Internet governance and diplomacy supporting the multistakeholder Internet governance model. more

First Broad Internet Census Since 1982 Reveals Surprising Number of Unused IPv4 Addresses

In the upcoming Internet Measurement Conference being held next week in Vouliagmeni, Greece, a team of six researchers will be presenting a paper called "Census and Survey of the Visible Internet," based on a comprehensive census of more 2.8 billion allocated IP addresses on the Internet. The research is claimed to be the first comprehensive census of its kind in more than two decades. more

Neustar Analysis Shows ICANN Study Overstates Risk of Harmful Domain-Name Collision

As we blogged about recently, Neustar is committed to ensuring that the domain name system is secure and stable and has been operating top-level domains (TLDs) for over a decade. Tuesday, Neustar submitted comments to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in response to ICANN's proposal to delay the launch of hundreds of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN's decision to delay the launch is based on a study it commissioned that measured the potential frequency of domain-name collision. more

The Economics of Hacking an Election

There have been many news stories of late about potential attacks on the American electoral system. Which attacks are actually serious? As always, the answer depends on economics. There are two assertions I'll make up front. First, the attacker -- any attacker -- is resource-limited. They may have vast resources, and in particular, they may have more resources than the defenders -- but they're still limited. Why? more

Plumbing Neutrality

I've been having arguments about Network Neutrality with a lawyer. My position is that you can't adequately regulate ISPs to be neutral, because there's no agreement what "neutral" means in practice. He points out that the courts aren't interested in technical details like what packets are dropped, it's that all traffic has to be treated the same, and ISPs should just figure out how to do that. So I contemplated a city with Plumbing Neutrality with the simple rule that all people must be treated the same... more

The Fight Over 12 GHz Spectrum

For an agency that has tried to wash its hands from regulating broadband, the FCC finds itself again trying to decide an issue that is all about broadband. There is a heavyweight battle going on at the FCC over how to use the 12 GHz spectrum, and while this may seem like a spectrum issue, it's all about broadband. 12 GHz spectrum is key to several broadband technologies. First, this is the spectrum that is best suited for transmitting data between the earth and satellite constellations. more

Happy Birthday BGP

The first RFC describing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), RFC 1105, was published in June 1989, thirty years ago. By any metric that makes BGP a venerable protocol in the Internet context and considering that it holds the Internet together, it's still a central piece of the Internet's infrastructure. How has this critically important routing protocol fared over these thirty years, and what are its prospects? Is BGP approaching its dotage or will it be a feature of the Internet for decades to come? more

Nationalizing the Imaginary 5G Network?

To put it bluntly, the proposal cited in Axios story on "Trump team considers nationalizing 5G network" doesn't make sense on a number of levels. The real danger comes if this indeed represents the NSC's failure to understand Internet style connectivity. The proposal may just be the work of an NSC staffer who accepted all the 5G hype as if it were real. I credit the Axios article for having some skepticism... more

.AI You Ready? A Domain to Add to Your Portfolio… Before Someone Else Does

On the sunny beaches of Anguilla -- a small island of just 35 square miles -- I'm sure artificial intelligence (AI) is the last thing people are thinking about. The primary industries of Anguilla, set in the Leeward islands in the Caribbean, are tourism and offshore banking. However, this nation has been assigned the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .AI -- which is being repurposed to represent artificial intelligence. more

CERN Celebrates 20 Years of The Free And Open Web

Of all the many applications and services that run on top of the Internet, arguably none has been more successful than that of the World Wide Web. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee back in 1989 while he was a physicist at CERN, the "Web" has fundamentally changed almost every aspect of our life... and become a part of basically every aspect of our life. Think of a part of your life... and then think of the websites that are part of that. more

Valuing Trademarks in Domain Names

My new essay, "Valuing Trademarks in Domain Names," outlines the various approaches to valuing trademarks, pointing out the approaches’ different strengths and weaknesses, with emphasis on domain names. Using court cases, the essay points out that there is no one right way to value intangible assets but there are wrong ways. more

Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Internet Service Developments for 2020

I posted reviews of important LEO-satellite Internet service developments during 2017, 2018 and 2019. I've updated those posts during the years and have 18 new posts for 2020. In 2020 we saw increased effort from China, OneWeb's bankruptcy and restructuring with new ownership and prospects, Amazon investng in space-related infrastructure, Telesat making steady progress, SpaceX making rapid progress and satellite and debris tracking and collision-avoidsnce service startups. The following are brief summaries of and links to the 2020 posts. more