The US-China Technology Cold War Battle Over Optical Communication in Space

The United States and its allies are in a technology cold war with China and its allies. This is evidenced by major battles like the US ban on Huawei and China's drive for technological independence and their global infrastructure program to create a digital silk road. (The cold war began under Trump, but President Biden is continuing it). There are other, less well-known battles like the battle over optical communication in space. more

5G Real Security Threats Lost in Trump’s Twitter Diplomacy

A new report on 5G and geopolitics by Oxford Information Labs details the complex landscape of 5G security. Importantly, it draws out how a variety of proven technical concerns around the quality of Huawei security practices and equipment are drowned out by the US' Twitter diplomacy. Critical international dialogue on genuine cybersecurity concerns relating to 5G and Huawei are being lost in the noise of the US-China trade war. more

IANA Transition Set to Disrupt ICANN Operations

The US Government's decision to transition its oversight of the IANA function to a multi-national, multi stakeholder organisation is set to impact ICANN's standard operations. On April 25, ICANN Board Chair Steve Crocker send an email to the ICANN community leaders suggesting changes to the agenda for the upcoming 50th International ICANN meeting, set to be held in London from June 22 to 26. more

ICANN, President Roosevelt And The Thralldom of Names

Former President Theodore Roosevelt is not one whose remarks are usually associated with the domain name industry, but his commentary in 1913 could just as easily have been written today:

"The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of 'liberty', while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure 'order'. Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word 'liberty' at the one time, and the use of the word 'order' at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many individuals, by a state or by a private corporation." more

Kentucky vs. 141 Domain Names

Yes, that is a title of a real, current legal case and controversy. And, no, the links in this post are not spam... mostly gambling news sites seem to be reporting on this. The Governor of Kentucky, through his Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, has moved in court to have 141 gambling-related domain names transferred to the Kentucky state government, partially because other legal gambling operations in Kentucky, like horseracing, lose revenue to online gaming. Yes, you read that right: by allegedly violating KY law, the state can move to have property used in these unlawful acts transferred to the state. In this case, the "property" in question is the domain names themselves. This case is definitely novel in the realm of cyberlaw, but also is a bit controversial for how it originally proceeded... more

New Top-Level Domains Emerging

With all the buzz surrounding new Top-Level Domain (nTLDs) at the last ICANN meeting in Mexico, I am sure many of you have already encountered or read information regarding the latest applications. For those who haven't been staying abreast of the latest, here is a quick review... There are two different general types of TLDs -- gTLDs and ccTLDs. ICANN is now opening the possibility of adding further TLD extensions, which can virtually be anything... more

No Summer Break for IPv6

In India we saw the Department of Telecommunications take action. Late July the Telecom Engineering Centre organized a seminar where the recommendations for IPv4 to IPv6 transition put forward by the regulator (TRAI) were adopted. The highlights of the plan reflect a traditional Indian non aggressive but nonetheless forceful persuasion. more

RIPE at 59!

RIPE, or Réseaux IP Européens, is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond... RIPE has been a feature of the European Internet landscape for some twenty years now, and it continues to be a progressive and engaged forum. These days RIPE meets twice a year, and the most recent meeting was held at Lisbon, Portugal, from the 5th to the 9th of October 2009. In this column I'd like to share some of my impressions of this meeting. more

The Freedom to Innovate Without Permission

In a speech this morning, widely heralded (and criticized) as a call for "network neutrality," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski: "Why has the Internet proved to be such a powerful engine for creativity, innovation, and economic growth? A big part of the answer traces back to one key decision by the Internet's original architects: to make the Internet an open system." Now "open system" doesn't mean anarchy. The Internet has rules, technical standards codified in the unassuming sounding "Requests for Comment." more

Are We Ready to Defend Our Freedom? Book Review: “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

It is not often that you read a book where afterward nothing seems the same again. Like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Shoshana Zuboff's book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,, puts what we do in these times into a context and gives a focus to ongoing issues of privacy and governance with regard to the Domain Name System. This is even more astonishing as the book does not even mention the DNS, the Internet ecosystem or even Internet Governance directly. more

The Rise of a Secondary Market for Domain Names (Part 1/4): A Tale of Competing Interests

The Trademark Act of 1946 defines trademarks and service marks to include "any word, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof." Marks composed of lexical and numeric elements (as opposed to images) also can be described as strings of characters. Before the Internet there was no commercial use of such strings other than as marks, but the functionality of the Internet depends on strings of lexical and numeric characters in the form of domain names that serve as electronic addresses. more

Going Dark: How the Increasingly Dark Network Is Creating Some Pretty Ugly Choices for Site Security Administrators

I'd like to reflect on a presentation by Dr. Paul Vixie at the October 2022 meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) on the topic of the shift to pervasive encryption of application transactions on the Internet today. There is a view out there that any useful public communications medium needs to safeguard the privacy and integrity of the communications that it carries.  more

The WiFi 6 Revolution

We're edging closer every day to seeing WiFi 6 in our homes. WiFi 6 will be bolstered by the newly approved 6 GHz frequency, and the combination of WiFi 6 and 6 GHz spectrum is going to revolutionize home broadband. I don't think many people understand how many of our home broadband woes are caused by current WiFi technology. WiFi has been an awesome technology that freed our homes from long category 5 wires everywhere, but WiFi has a basic flaw that became apparent when homeowners started to buy hordes of WiFi-enabled devices.  more

Whose Network is it Anyway?

In reading a Q&A with Verizon's Brian Whitten I found this striking Q and A: "Q. With a fiber connection being symmetric, many fiber providers such as Paxio are providing symmetric connections such as 5Mbit, 10Mbit, 30Mbit. Why is Verizon keeping this arbitrary asymmetric limit with Fiber? A. ...Indeed, our FTTP network can easily support a symmetric data service. As market dynamics change, we would re-assess the benefit to our customers of introducing a class of symmetric data services." My reaction is "No thank you, I'd rather do it myself". To understand my reaction you need to recognize the difference between wanting to build my own bridge across a stream and asking why I'm not allowed to cross it myself using my own boat. more

Is Secured Routing a Market Failure?

The Internet represents a threshold moment for the communications realm in many ways. It altered the immediate end client of the network service from humans to computers. It changed the communications model from synchronized end-to-end service to asynchronous and from virtual circuits to packet switching. At the same time, there were a set of sweeping changes in the public communications framework... more