The Case for Making 3G Mobile Internet Access Free in Cuba

Last week ETECSA began offering 3G mobile access to Cuba's national intranet and the global Internet and President Diaz-Canal tweeted the news. His tweet has received 216 comments so far and reading through them, many are effusively positive... Others were critical, noting that the prices are high relative to Cuban incomes (one said "absurd") and the technology is obsolete -- "Congratulations, but they're 20 years late." more

Calling Stumps at WCIT: Win, Lose or Draw?

The problem with setting expectations is that when they are not fulfilled the fallout is generally considered to be a failure, and while everyone wants to claim parenthood of success, failure is an orphan. In that sense it looks like the WCIT meeting, and the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) that were being revised at that conference this month are both looking a lot like orphans. There have been a number of reports of the outcome of the two week... Most of the blogs were quick to characterize the outcome as a loss for the dark forces that lurked somewhere in the closets of the ITU's headquarters in Geneva. But there is more to it than that. more

The UDRP “Celebrates” Its 500th Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Case

Today, for the 500th time, an expert panel under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy or "UDRP", issued a decision finding a Complainant guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking or "RDNH". RDNH is an attempt to egregiously misuse the UDRP to unjustly seize a domain name from its lawful owner... To-date, the UDRP has adjudicated over 80,000 domain name disputes. The vast majority of them result in the transfer of a cybersquatted domain name to the rightful trademark owner. more

Former ICANN Security VP Joins CAUCE Board of Directors

The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) has announced that Dave Piscitello, formerly VP of Security at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has joined the CAUCE Board of Directors. more

AT Kearney Takes Side With Incumbent Telcos to Defend the Old World

In my job as part of a consultancy company, I know there are two types of reports our clients are interested in - those that are written for the customer to be used internally and those that are to be used externally. Quite often, instead of well thought out and researched pieces, these last-mentioned reports are created simply to underscore the opinion of the party paying for them. So when I received research by AT Kearney on A Viable Future Model for the Internet, I immediately checked who had paid for that report. more

An Astonishing Collaboration

Wow. It's out. It's finally, finally out... So there's a bug in DNS, the name-to-address mapping system at the core of most Internet services. DNS goes bad, every website goes bad, and every email goes...somewhere. Not where it was supposed to... I'm pretty proud of what we accomplished here. We got Windows. We got Cisco IOS. We got Nominum. We got BIND 9, and when we couldn't get BIND 8, we got Yahoo, the biggest BIND 8 deployment we knew of, to publicly commit to abandoning it entirely. It was a good day... more

Alphabet’s Loon Goes Live With Its Commercial Internet Service in Kenya

Alphabet's Loon on Monday announced that its high-altitude balloons are now providing internet service in Kenya to subscribers of Telkom Kenya.  more

PRISM and the Administration State Strikes Back

It is a safe assumption that if you are reading this post, you like technology. If that is the case, then you understand the tremendous economic, cultural, and human rights benefits an open, universal, and free Internet provides. That freedom is under attack. And it is our responsibilities, as stakeholders in a successful Internet, to balance governments and have an open dialog on the topic. more

March 2019: Which New gTLDs Are Becoming Mainstream?

I went through the exciting exercise of checking all March 2019 new gTLD reports to extract which domain name extension shows an interesting learning curve (or something strange happening). This is what I noticed for the 20 categories of TLDs... In the list of new gTLDs for Politics, the first new gTLD to have been delegated from the ICANN new gTLD program - .GURU (63,000) - lost 2,000 registrations since January 2018 (not 2019). more

APNIC Labs Partners with Cloudflare for Joint DNS Research Project

APNIC Labs, the research arm of Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre, is partnering with Cloudflare for a joint research project relating to the operation of the DNS, reports Geoff Huston, APNIC's Chief Scientist. more

Cloud Computing on Linux Has Microsoft Blogging

The Cloud Manifesto, a collaborative document prepared jointly by Amazon, Google, IBM and others has apparently upset Microsoft. In a blog post entitled "Moving Toward an Open Process on Cloud Computing Interoperability" and penned by the senior director of developer platform management for Microsoft, Steven Martin, Mr. Martin stated his position that the Cloud Manifesto and the process of creating it was biased to benefit its authors, and unfair to their competitors – such as Microsoft... more

Series of New African TLDs Fail to Go Live, Get Termination Notice from ICANN

Nine of the 17 African new Top-level Domain (TLD) applicants have received termination notices this week as a result of missing their deadlines to go live. more

The Cycle of E-Mail Security

Stepping back from the DMARC arguments, it occurs to me that there is a predictable cycle with every new e-mail security technology... Someone invents a new way to make e-mail more secure, call it SPF or DKIM or DMARC or (this month's mini-fiasco) PGP in DANE. Each scheme has a model of the way that mail works. For some subset of e-mail, the model works great, for other mail it works less great. more

The New TLD Registry Example to Follow

With lessons learnt from the first Round, what does a new applicant need to know to prepare for the coming Round? Which example should he follow to increase his chances of success? I have had the chance to read about new domain names sales figure expectations, prior to the launching of Round one of the ICANN new gTLD program. Comments that I read and feed-backs that I have today are: "our expectations are the one we wrote on the paper and we are happy with them". more

Internet Security and the Multistakeholder Approach: Is It Attainable?

Internet Security is a topic that has drawn a lot of attention over the past year. As awareness grows that cooperation is necessary, it dawns on people that there are many and very different stakeholders involved, stakeholders that may never have met before. Let alone have cooperated. An example of an approach is the National Cyber Security Council (NCSC) that was installed in The Netherlands on 30 June. This is a high level council that will give advice to public as well as private entities on how to better secure themselves and society at large against cyber attacks and how to become more resilient. However, without the right approach it is doomed to become a talking shop. more