A Mature Broadband Market? (Implications and Industry Shifts)

It is becoming clear that the broadband market is reaching maturity. This is already causing havoc in the industry for ISPs that relied on year-over-year customer growth to prop up stock prices. Earlier this year, the New Street Research, a company that specializes in research in the telecommunications and technology sectors, said that it estimated that new broadband customers would grow by about 1 million this year. more

RIPE 86 Bites: Gigabits for EU

Rudolph van der Berg presented on the latest updates from the ongoing tensions in the Internet industry between carriage infrastructure providers and content providers, with a European perspective. The carriage providers in the EU region are asserting that they're making major capital investments in augmenting the access network infrastructure to carry gigabit traffic volumes, which is largely streaming content, while at the same time the content providers were getting a free ride, or so goes the argument. more

Applicant Auction Announces Suggested Schedule for 8 Future Private gTLD Auctions

The Applicant Auction team is getting an increasing number of requests from applicants who are scheduled for ICANN's Last Resort auction and would prefer to participate in the Applicant Auction instead. A common question is: What is my last chance to participate in an Applicant Auction? To be able to give a clear answer for this, we are suggesting a schedule for future Applicant Auctions. more

ICANN Announces Newly Created Organization to Replace IANA

ICANN has announced the name of the newly incorporated organization, Public Technical Identifiers (PTI), as a nonprofit entity to begin operation as 'Post-Transition IANA'. more

Fifth Applicant Auction Concluded, 28 Contention Sets Resolved

After the successful conclusion of our fifth auction last week, the Applicant Auction has now resolved contention for a total of 28 strings. More than 20 gTLD applicants have participated in our auctions, ranging from many smaller companies with only one gTLD application in contention to large, publicly traded portfolio applicants like TLDH and Demand Media. more

Apple vs FBI: Apple and Others to Argue on the Hill

Tomorrow afternoon at 1pm EST Apple will be giving testimony to the House Judiciary Committee. The session that Apple and others will be taking part in is aptly named, The Encryption Tightrope: Balancing Americans' Security and Privacy In common with other hearings the various witnesses called to speak have already submitted their written testimony, so we can already look at it and analyse it. more

Brazil to Host Internet Governance Summit

Amidst reports of US, British and Canadian spying on the Latin American nation, Brazil has announced that it will host a global summit on Internet governance in April. President Dilma Rousseff made the announcement after a discussion in Brasilia with Fadi Chehadé, ICANN's CEO. Chehade heaped praise on Rousseff for using her UN General Assembly speech in September to demand measures to thwart the massive US cyber spying operation revealed by US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden. The summit will take place in Rio de Janeiro. more

The Internet’s Address Crisis: IPv4 Stalls, IPv6 Stagnates

Despite the long-anticipated exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, the Internet continues to function through clever workarounds, market transfers, and cautious optimism, while IPv6 adoption remains slow and the future of global connectivity appears uncertain. more

May 13 Deadline to Nominate People for 2022 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award

Do you know someone who has made outstanding contributions in service to the Internet community? Someone who has made the Internet better in some way who deserves more recognition? Maybe someone who has helped extend Internet access to a large region? Or wrote widely-used programs that make the Internet more secure? Or served in some capacity behind the scenes in Internet services? more

DDoS Mitigation: A Blend of Art and Science

As DDoS attacks become larger, more frequent and complex, being able to stop them is a must. While doing this is part science, a matter of deploying technology, there is also an art to repelling sophisticated attacks. Arbor Networks, Citrix and others make great gear, but there's no magic box that will solve all your problems for you. Human expertise will always be a crucial ingredient. more

WikiLeaks’ Vault 7: CIA Gives a Free Lesson in Personal Cyber Security

WikiLeaks' newly released Vault 7 trove is a tantalizing study in how one of the world's premiere intelligence agencies hacks devices. Analysts and experts have signaled that this leak appears authentic based on some clues in the content. But while it may ultimately be comparable in size to the Snowden or Manning leaks, it lacks the "wow" factor that made those landmark whistleblowing cases so important. What lessons are to be learned from the leaks, and how should we apply them to our personal digital lives? more

Botnet Takedowns Having Limited Impact on Overall Spam Volumes, Says Google

Google, which through its Postini email security and archiving service processes over 3 billion email connections a day, reports that despite recent series of major botnet takedowns, spam levels during the first quarter of 2010 have held fairly steady. "This suggests that there's no shortage of botnets out there for spammers to use. If one botnet goes offline, spammers simply buy, rent, or deploy another, making it difficult for the anti-spam community to make significant inroads in the fight against spam with individual botnet takedowns." more

Russian Lawmakers Pass Bill to Expand Government Control Over Internet, Protests Expected to Ensue

Russian lawmakers on Thursday passed a bill to expand further government control of the internet proclaimed by backers of the bill to be a defensive measure against internet disruptions by hostile nations. more

ICANN Getting More Control Could Mean Major Reform

Kieren McCarthy reporting in the Register: "Domain name overseer ICANN is likely to go through a radical reorganization if it wants to be given more control of critical internet functions, currently run under contract from the US government. Two recent papers -- one from independent legal experts hired by a group looking into the contract's transitioning, and a second from an internet governance think-tank -- have both highlighted the benefit to making ICANN a true member-led organization, with the internet community given real powers to effect change." more

The Changing World of Network Management in an Increasingly Cloud-Centric World

Over the past two weeks Andrew Lerner, Vice President in Gartner Research covering enterprise networking products, has put out two successive blogs that raise really interesting questions about the changing world of network management in an increasingly cloud-centric world. In "What Keeps Network Folks Up at Night?", Andrew writes about the worrisome challenges in the Banking/Financial industry related to frequent manual network configuration errors. more