Before the experiment has gotten off the ground, some critics have expressed concern about applications to operate domains referring to a "generic" product or service, like .car, .book, or .app. News reports indicate that Microsoft and other Google competitors have filed complaints about Google's applications, while authors' organizations have raised questions about some of Amazon's applications. These complaints assert that giving these applicants the right to operate these new domains would provide an unfair competitive advantage. more
Yesterday, in my post on three new threats in one day, I posed the question whether it was necessary to develop regulations that would set a minimum standard on cyber security for devices that connect to the Internet. I'm having second thoughts here, which I'll explain in this post, but also try to look at a way forward and ask you to engage. more
ICANN's board of directors has voted to put a March deadline on discussions concerning .amazon top-level domain. more
David Redl, head of U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) resigned abruptly from his position on Thursday. more
One of the great challenges has been to conceive a business model for next generation telephone companies. This is constrained by their limited core competences which do not match well with many of the opportunities that lie in entertainment and complex/customised bundles for consumers. Frost & Sullivan, a leading firm of industry analysts, notes the enthusiasm of service providers to offer connectivity, entertainment and information services, within a digitally connected world... more
It has been a while, nearly eight years since we have been in touch. I thought I would post an update to the DCA vs ICANN case, to the interested party of the global internet, towards the eight-year legal battle DCA had with ICANN. I believe there would be useful lessons learned that would shed some light on ICANN's activities in the Internet community. For those not aware, the DCA vs. ICANN case involved many twists and turns, spanning nearly a decade of DCA's efforts to hold ICANN accountable for the harm it caused to DCA over the delegation rights of the .Africa new gTLD Registry. more
Randall Stephenson, AT&T Chairman and CEO, published an open letter today urging Congress to "end the debate once and for all, by writing new laws that govern the internet and protect consumers." more
The new Administration in the USA laid out a $100 billion proposal for broadband investment as part of its $2 trillion infrastructure plan. Under the proposal, the plan is to provide national broadband coverage. The Administration will use better competition measures, such as price transparency, the use of public utility infrastructure, and subsidies for low-income households to achieve its goals. more
Of all the patently false and ridiculous articles written this month about the obscure IANA transition which has become an issue of leverage in the partisan debate over funding the USG via a Continuing Resolution, this nonsense by Theresa Payton is the most egregiously false and outlandish. As such, it demands a critical, nearly line by line response. more
There's more than a hint of theatrics in the draft PROTECT IP bill that has emerged as son-of-COICA, starting with the ungainly acronym of a name. Given its roots in the entertainment industry, that low drama comes as no surprise. Each section name is worse than the last: "Eliminating the Financial Incentive to Steal Intellectual Property Online" (Sec. 4) gives way to "Voluntary action for Taking Action Against Websites Stealing American Intellectual Property". more
In ICANN circles these days, accountability is the buzz word. Nearly everybody is talking about it. Generally everybody is in favor of it, but that's where the agreement ends. This paper urges action by ICANN to provide a means for redress of grievances as an essential element of accountability. I would like to review the ICM case (the delegation of the .xxx domain), and the role of ICANN's Independent Review Panel (the IRP). As you will recall, the ICANN Board had originally awarded .xxx to ICM, but in a subsequent reconsideration had reversed the award. more
State-run telecommunications firms in China are given until February 1 to block people from using VPNs, shuttering key ways both locals and foreigners still manage to access the global, unfiltered web on a daily basis. more
Steve Lohr has a nice piece in the New York Times ('Technology Gets a Piece of Stimulus,' 26 Jan 2009, p. C1) this morning about the role that technology and innovation will play in the economic recovery (aka stimulus) bill supported by the Obama Administration. In the past, health IT deployment has been approached as an engineering problem: what computers have to be part of which networks exchanging which types of data? This loses sight of the purpose of electronic medical records... more
Canadian Industry Minister Tony Clement has announced that the Harper government will overturn the CRTC's decision that effectively ends "unlimited use" Internet plans if the regulator doesn't rescind the decision itself. more
In a joint statement released today by Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, and Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless, the two companies have expressed their support for making existing 'net neutrality' principles enforceable. The joint statement was published as a blog post late Wednesday on both Google and Verizon policy blogs. more
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