“Net Neutrality” Protects New Monopolies from Old

Over the next decade which companies do you think will be better able to exercise monopoly power? Amazon, T&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Regional phone companies, or Verizon? If you'd asked me this question in 2000, I would've picked AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and regional phone companies. They are part of local duopolies for wired infrastructure. more

Is the Internet Becoming a Vast Wasteland?

I've written posts about trolls in Cuba, where Operation Truth is said to use a thousand university-student trolls and trolls in China where government workers fabricate an estimated 488 million social media posts annually. Now we are reading about Russian government trolls... The fake news and trolling revealed during the last few months of the US political campaign has sowed doubts about everything we see and read online. We're beginning the transition from "critical thinking" to "paranoid thinking." more

Time to Look Past ‘Net Neutrality’. Let’s Start a Fresh Post-Neutrality Debate…

Yesterday, as many of you heard, the European Parliament voted to reject the 'net neutrality' fundamentalist amendments to the already flawed proposals they had helped to create. That's the good news. The bad news is that the law that we now have is merely ludicrous, rather than insane. Furthermore, it doesn't properly protect end users, hold ISP feet to the service delivery fire, or truly encourage broadband ecosystem innovation. more

Call for Participation: Registration Operations Workshop at IETF-92

The next Registration Operations Workshop will take place at the start of IETF-92 on Sunday, March 22, 2015, at The Fairmont Dallas Hotel. The workshop will start at 12:30 p.m. CDT and will finish at 4:30 p.m. CDT. We are seeking proposals for Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) extensions to be featured as part of the workshop, including existing extensions that people wish to register with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)... more

ICANN CSG and NCSG Make Progress at ICANN81

The Commercial Stakeholder Group and Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (together, the Non-Contracted Party House, or NCPH) met for a daylong Day 0 session on 8 November 2024, immediately prior to the opening of the ICANN81 meeting in Istanbul. This meeting follows one of a similar nature conducted prior to ICANN78 in Hamburg, which was the first joint NCPH meeting following the pandemic. more

Apple Rumored Building Its Own CDN, Negotiating Paid Interconnect Deals With ISPs

Apple has reportedly formed a new internal group to work on building out their own content delivery network (CDN) to deliver Apple software updates, apps and other Apple related content. more

In Which We Consider the Meaning of ‘Authorized’: GIVAUDAN FRAGRANCES CORPORATION v. Krivda

What does authorized access mean? If an employee with authorized access to a computer system goes into that system, downloads company secrets, and hands that information over to the company's competitor, did that alleged misappropriation of company information constitute unauthorized access? This is no small question. If the access is unauthorized, the employee potentially violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) (the CFAA contains both criminal and civil causes of action). But courts get uncomfortable here. more

Computer Transactions, Not People, Are Driving the Need for All-Fibre Networks

Ever since we first became involved in developing policies and strategies for countries relating to what are now known as national broadband networks, we have argued that those taking part in the strategic decision-making processes of designing these networks should look, not at what broadband can do now, but at what high-speed broadband can do to assist countries to create the best opportunities for future developments. more

Back to the Future for Broadband in America

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

The State of RPKI as We Enter 2022

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a method to secure internet routing traffic by cryptographically verifying routes. As we begin 2022, we look back at 2021 and see how the year saw another significant step towards its adoption. High-profile issues with the old trust-based model of Border Gateway Protocol, designed several decades ago, have shown the continued importance of protecting popular networks from mistakes or hackers. more

Access to Safe and Affordable Prescription Medications Online is a Human Right

I recently served on a panel at the Toronto RightsCon 2018 conference (Making Safe Online Access to Affordable Medication Real: Addressing the UN Human Rights resolution for access to essential medicines), where I represented the perspective of Americans struggling to afford their daily medications and desperate to have safe, affordable Internet access to their prescriptions. more

Improvements in Undersea Fiber

We often forget that a lot of things we do on the web rely on broadband traffic that passes through undersea cables. Any web traffic from overseas gets to the US through one of the many underwater fiber routes. Like with all fiber technologies, the engineers and vendors have regularly been making improvements. The technology involved in undersea cables is quite different than what is used for terrestrial fibers. A long fiber route includes repeater sites where the light signal is refreshed. Without repeaters, the average fiber light signal will die within about sixty miles. more

Economics and Common Sense Deprecates the Common Argument for Lower Spectrum Prices

Outside of China, very few governments would expect a saving in spectrum costs would mostly go to investment. Corporations have other priorities, including advertising and executive salaries. Stockholders come above everything at most companies. Rarely would even 1/3rd of the saving go to capital spending. The U.S. under Trump had a massive tax cut, worth literally billions to Verizon and AT&T. Verizon actually cut investment. AT&T's increase in capex was far lower than the tax saving. more

The Early History of Usenet, Part V: Authentication and Norms

We knew that Usenet needed some sort of management system, and we knew that that would require some sort of authentication, for users, sites, and perhaps posts. We didn't add any, though -- and why we didn't is an interesting story. The obvious solution was something involving public key cryptography, which we (the original developers of the protocol: Tom Truscott, the late Jim Ellis, and myself) knew about: all good geeks at the time had seen Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column... more

Important Milestone in IANA Stewardship Transition: NTIA Says Proposal Meets Criteria

Today, the global Internet community reached an important milestone. The US Department of Commerce National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) announced that the community-developed proposal to transition the stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions meets the criteria it set out in March 2014. more