LinkedIn Outage Due to DNS Issue

Users of LinkedIn were unable to access the site for several hours due to what the company has reported to have been a DNS issue. The site is claimed to have been accidentally pointed to a domain name parking page and some users were greeted with a domain for sale page when trying to access LinkedIn's homepage. According to downrightnow, LinkedIn's outage began around 6 pm PST on Wednesday and is continuing, though website has gradually resumed for some users. more

Hilyard Has a Historic Chance to Activate ICANN At-Large

The .ORG sale has placed Maureen Hilyard – ICANN's At-large Chair – squarely between the largest outpouring of individual user sentiment that the Internet community has ever seen, and the people who can do something about it. For At-large, the stakes are high. ICANN has spent years building up a user organization to balance corporate and government interests. At-large could be a key bulwark against the capture of Internet resources by those with capital and political power. more

Those Who Remember History…

Tom Wheeler, the new Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gave a speech today at Ohio State University. It was a good speech on his regulatory philosophy. But that's not so interesting. There's nothing out of the ordinary about a government official giving a speech. The unusual development was that the Chairman also released an ebook, called Net Effects. Even more unusual, it's not a bland ghostwritten policy whitepaper; it's a deeply researched work of history. more

DNSChanger Trojan Still Running on Half of Fortune 500s, US Govt

More than two months after authorities shut down a massive Internet traffic hijacking scheme, the malicious software that powered the criminal network is still running on computers at half of the Fortune 500 companies, and on PCs at nearly 50 percent of all federal government agencies, new research shows," reports Brian Krebs. more

Speaking up for the Internet

For most of this year governments from outside the G8 have not wavered from their essential themes on the Internet: they regard it as a shared resource that works in part as a result of their own investment in infrastructure, they want to be included in its governance through a decision-making process that is transparent, accessible and, in broad character, multilateral, and they want to be able to trust it and know that as much as it is a tool of growth for others, it can also be for them. more

China’s New Cybersecurity Law Will Be in Effect Starting Thursday

According to the official news agency, Xinhua, implementation of China's controversial Cybersecurity Law will begin on June 1, requiring strict data surveillance and storage for companies operating in the county. more

Facebook’s Internet.org Delivers Free Internet to Colombia

Facebook's Internet.org has launched a free Internet application in Colombia as part of a drive to bring developing markets online. Colombia is the first nation in Latin America and the fourth in the world to receive the new Internet.org service, in partnership with local mobile phone provider Tigo, but the aim is to push the app globally. The mobile app, aimed at low income and rural users, offers more than a dozen tools via the Android operating system... more

.COM Contract Amendment Coming Soon for Public Comment

Last Thursday, during VeriSign's Q3 2019 quarterly earnings call, CEO Jim Bidzos offered statements that seemed to be carefully calibrated to satisfy Wall Street's curiosity about protracted negotiations with ICANN on a Third Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement while also appearing to distance the company from the soon-to-be forthcoming product of that year-long effort. more

Creating, Protecting and Defending Brand Equity - Part 3

In the final of my three-part post series about how to protect your trademark against misuse, I will focus on proactive searching and policing and the benefits these can provide to brand owners. ... Proactive searching and policing of your brand is a prudent step in making sure your name is protectable. This is an advisable first step in naming a product or service. more

5 Broadband Predictions for 2020

The 2010's have been nothing short of transformative in the broadband space. Despite disappointing deployment rates across the U.S., the past decade has been a period of exponential change and innovation. As we look toward the new decade, here are five key predictions based on current trends and developments in the broadband industry. more

International Fibre Bandwidth Hubbing, a Lucrative Business

The small West African country of Benin has been working quietly over the past few years to become a regional hub for international fibre bandwidth. The national telco, Benin Telecoms (BT) has been building terrestrial fibre routes to landlocked neighbouring countries such as Burkina Faso and Niger, allowing them to connect to its landing station for the SAT-3/WASC cable, the only one serving the region. more

How to Move Telecoms Forward in the USA

In the last few weeks courts in the USA have carried on business as usual. They continue to provide the two major telcos in the USA, Verizon and AT&T, with extraordinary protection -- basically retaining the outdated regulatory system in the USA that identifies the duopoly between the telcos and the cablecos as the best way forward for the development of telecoms competition in this country. This is rather different from the position taken by the new Obama Administration, which has indicated that it will break with past regulations... more

US House Subcommittee to Hold Hearing for ICANN’s New TLD Rollout

Kevin Murphy reporting in DomainIncite: "The House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet will hold an 'ICANN Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) Oversight Hearing' on Wednesday May 4 at 10am local time. The hearing has been called at the direction of the committee's chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte." more

DOTZON Study: Digital City Brands 2021

DOTZON presents the fifth edition of the Digital City Brands study. After introducing the study in early 2017, DOTZON expanded further and enhanced the data to display how cities successfully use their Digital City Brands. The Digital City Brand is the digital dimension of the City Brand and mirrors the "Digitalness" of a city. However, the Digital City Brand is much more than a mere extension of the City Brand. more

Verizon and AWS Expand Network Ties to Meet AI Data Demands

Verizon and AWS have deepened their collaboration to build dedicated fiber infrastructure, addressing the growing need for low-latency, high-capacity connectivity to support the rapid expansion of enterprise-scale artificial intelligence workloads. more