VoIP has been banned across most of Africa for a long time, feared by the state-owned telcos as a way for alternative service providers to bypass them with international calls, eroding a very lucrative part of their business. At profit margins of several thousand percent in some cases, it is not surprising that unlicensed operators have sprung up all over the continent, risking huge fines, confiscation of their equipment and even jail terms. more
A factual paper prepared in October 2009 for and endorsed by the Chief Executive Officers of ICANN and all the Regional Internet Registries that provides answers to commonly asked questions about IPv6 such as: How are allocations made, and to whom? How are IPv6 addresses actually being allocated? And why did such large IPv4 address allocations go to US organizations, including the US Government, and its Department of Defense? more
"Outside applications need to be on an equal footing with our own applications," John Donovan said at a SUPERCOMM keynote here in Chicago. "My jaw dropped," one of his colleagues told me a few minutes later, because this is a reversal of AT&T's long-standing position they needed to be able to favor their own applications. AT&T D.C. needs to listen closely to their own CTO, because they are throwing everything they have in D.C. at preventing "non-discrimination" being included in the FCC Net Neutrality regulations. more
When discussions with overseas colleagues made it clear to me how fast things are changing here in Australia compared with the rest of the world, I was prompted to write this update about the developments in Australia, particularly in relation to its incumbent telco, Telstra. Most people overseas have not yet fully caught up with the fact that the destructive regime of Telstra's former CEO is well and truly over -- in the past there has been plenty of international reporting of the shocking behaviour of Telstra under Sol Trujillo (former US West) and his persistent attacks on the government included suing Ministers and abusing the Regulator. more
Around the world governments, regulators and the industry are struggling with the old regulatory legacy systems. These have become a major stumbling block in the transition to a new environment. Increasingly countries are beginning to understand the social and economic benefits a national broadband infrastructure can offer, but it is impossible to bring that about while the systems are based on the present regulatory regimes. To take these broader benefits into account we will need to develop government policies to facilitate the digital economy... more
This post isn't about -- or isn't only about -- the use of computer technology to commit crimes. It's more about the use of computer technology to commit war. A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation about the legal issues cyberwarfare raises. We were talking about various scenarios -- e.g., a hostile nation-state uses cyberspace to attack the U.S. infrastructure by crippling or shutting down a power grid, air traffic control systems, financial system, etc. Mostly, we were focusing on issues that went to the laws of war, such as how and when a nation-state that is the target of a cyberattack can determine the attack is war, rather than cybercrime or cyberterrorism. more
Some of the root server operators post public statistics for their domain name traffic at the top-level. For example, the graph (which can take a bit of time to generate, given ICANN's slow servers) for the L-root server's most popular Top-Level Domain (TLD) queries demonstrates, to no one's surprise, that .com is king. What's more interesting, though, especially given the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) debate, is to look at the most popular invalid (non-existent) TLDs. more
Four senators (Rockefeller, Bayh, Nelson, and Snowe) have recently introduced S.773, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. While there are some good parts to the bill, many of the substantive provisions are poorly thought out at best. The bill attempts to solve non-problems, and to assume that research results can be commanded into being by virtue of an act of Congress. Beyond that, there are parts of the bill whose purpose is mysterious, or whose content bears no relation to its title. more
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the The Emerging Communications (eComm) 2009 conference in San Francisco which was packed with 3 days of fascinating conversations about the future of communications. I absolutely enjoyed talking to various speakers and attendees giving me a deep level of appreciation and perspective on technical, commercial and political issues at hand -- and what is likely to come in the next few years. And speaking of politics, Lee Dryburgh, who founded eComm in early 2008, has generously allowed us to share with you a fascinating panel discussion which took place on day 3 of the conference called "Spectrum 2.0 - What's really happening?" more
It depends on whose numbers you like. Andrew Odlyzko claims it's up 50-60% over last year, a slower rate of growth than we've seen in recent years. Odlyzko's method is flawed, however, as he only looks at public data, and there is good reason to believed that more and more traffic is moving off the public Internet and its public exchange points to private peering centers. Nemertes collects at least some data on private exchanges and claims a growth rate somewhere between 50-100%. more
As the institutions of Wall Street continue to crumble one after another, there's a lesson to be learned for those of us who want to make sure the Internet remains as free and open in the future as it has been in the past. The collapse of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG and the rest didn't happen overnight. The situation has been brewing for years. The subprime mortgage crisis may have precipitated the immediate tragedy, but underpinning the whole mess is a philosophy about business and government. more
When Kurt Pritz briefed the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council (and observers) in Los Angeles April 10th and 11th, the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) process model flows transition through an "auction" state in two of the three paths where two or more applications existed for the same (or similar) strings. At that time Kurt, speaking for Staff, was clear that the existence of a well-defined community was not dispositive, which surprised the Council members from the Intellectual Property Constituency... more
Today the FCC is condemning Comcast's practices with respect to P2P transmissions.I'm happy for FreePress and Public Knowledge today, and I know they have achieved a substantial change in the wind. The basic idea that it's not okay for network access providers to discriminate unreasonably against particular applications is now part of the mainstream communications discourse. That has to be good news. I'm concerned on a couple of fronts. The FCC has taken the view that it can adjudicate, on a case-by-case basis, issues that have to do with "Federal Internet Policy." They used that phrase several times... more
Hong Kong domains are the most dangerous in the world; this little factoid from a recent McAfee report generated quite a bit of media coverage, and even made TIME magazine's top stories list. But all is not as it seems, and aspects of the report may have been out of date before the report was even published. McAfee's study seems to be based on a year's worth of data, and last year was a particularly bad year for the Hong Kong domain, thanks to a gang of botnet spammers registering thousands of domains under the .hk ccTLD. These domains were most likely registered using stolen credit cards... more
Last Friday (HT: IPDemocracy), Google filed a petition [PDF] asking that the Commission ensure that Verizon understands what those "open platform" requirements for the C Block really mean. Verizon has taken the position in the past that its own devices won't be subject to the "open applications" and "open handsets" requirements of the C Block rules, and Google says it is concerned that Verizon doesn't plan to follow those requirements in the future. This is big. Here's the background... more
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