Policy & Regulation

State of Broadband Infrastructure: Lagging or Leading?

I have found a disturbing lack of context in respect of some reports examining the state of Canada's telecommunications industry, especially those that have cited various OECD studies released over the past few months. It has become increasingly clear that the OECD's analysis is flawed. The failure by so many to analyse the data appears to confirm what President Barack Obama said recently in a newspaper interview... more

Caring About Cybersecurity or Preparing the Ground for an I-Patriot Act?

Few months ago in a talk given at the Institution of Engineering and Technology organised here in London by the Society for Computers and Law, Professor Lessig recounted a conversation he had with former US Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, where Larry asked the question that many had in mind... how the US Government managed to conceptualize, design and draft a piece of legislation as vast and complex as the USA PATRIOT Act in such a short period of time (a month and 15 days after 9/11), and the answer was what many people had imagined... more

Video Interviews of IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) Members

Want to know more about what is going on with the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG)? ICANN recently published a set of video interviews with members of the ICG. Here, for instance is the interview with Alissa Cooper who represents the IETF on the ICG... While this is certainly not the complete list of ICG members, it is a good sampling of the variety of people involved with the ICG and does provide a range of different viewpoints into what is going on within the ICG process. more

Internet Governance Survey: What You Told Us

What do people perceive to be the top issues facing the Internet today? How can stakeholders work more effectively together to strengthen the governance mechanisms meant to address these issues? And when it comes to the Internet Society, what should our role be and where should we focus our attention? To help inform our work in Internet governance, we posed these and other questions to our community in February. We had an overwhelming response with over 800 people taking a few minutes of their time to answer our survey. more

The ICANN Board by the ICANN Board

A self-appraisal of the ICANN Board has just been posted on the organization's website. In it, Board members rate 89 different measures of their own performance according to a seven-measure rating from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". Unfortunately, despite plenty of figures in the documents, there is zero analysis of what this all means, so I have gone through them and prepared one. more

Hong Kong ISPs Oppose Government Plans for Internet Restrictions Without Industry Consultation

A statement released by the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association (HKISPA) denouncing any plans that would restrict Hong Kong's open internet network. more

From Crisis to Resilience - the Path to Sustainable Communications Infrastructure in the Caribbean

The Caribbean suffered six major storms in 2017, including the record-breaking Category 5 hurricanes Irma and Maria. In the unprecedented destruction, the islands of Dominica and Barbuda lost all communication and telecommunications service, and eight other Caribbean countries were severely disrupted. Each hurricane season wreaks greater devastation than the last, yet decreased telecommunications competition, inadequate regulation, and high national debt burdens in the region yield ever-diminishing infrastructural investment. more

TMCH Review Recommends Status Quo

On July 25th ICANN announced the publication of the Draft Report of the Independent Review of the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH). This study was coordinated for ICANN by the Analysis Group, in conjunction with researchers from the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford as well the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School... while public comments on the draft report will be accepted through September 3rd, this Report was triggered by GAC concerns expressed before the Applicant Guidebook for the new gTLD program was even completed, and is not the work product of a GNSO-created working group and therefore will not directly result in the establishment of any new ICANN policy. more

The Growing Importance of Language in UDRP Proceedings

An increasing number of domain name disputes are being conducted in languages other than English, a trend that presents a new challenge for some trademark owners. In 2015, 85.77% of all domain names disputes at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) were conducted in English - down from an all-time average of 88.01% and a record high (in 2000) of 99.84% (disregarding 1999, the first year of the UDRP, because only one case was filed - in English -- that year). more

NTIA Directs Smoke Signals Toward LA

On September 25th-26th the Cross Community Working Group developing enhanced accountability measures to accompany the IANA functions transition, and replace the "backstop" role played by the U.S., will meet in Los Angeles to review the 90 comments filed on their second draft Proposal and consider responsive modifications... As NTIA will be the primary evaluator of whether the transition & accountability package that is eventually forwarded by ICANN meets the criteria it set when it announced the transition in March 2014, CCWG participants in LA will be carefully reading the tea leaves of this latest NTIA statement. more

Protests Erupt Over EU’s Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

In a blog post today, Michael Geist writes: "The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules), but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia). This has generated a flurry of furious protest..." more

Encryption, Our Last Line of Defense

Encryption is fundamental to our daily life. Practically everything we do online makes use of encryption is some form. Access to our financial transactions, health records, government services, and exchanged private messages are all protected by strong encryption. Encryption is the process of changing the information in such a way as to make it unreadable by anyone except for those possessing special knowledge (usually referred to as a "key"), which allows them to change the information back to its original, readable form. more

Russia Targeted British Telecom, Media, Energy Sectors, Reveals UK National Cyber Security Centre

Speaking at The Times Tech Summit in London, Ciaran Martin, chief of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), warned Russia is seeking to undermine the international system. more

Seattle Restores ISP Privacy Rules. Could be First of Many Cities to Defeat FCC’s Privacy Roll Back

The city of Seattle this week will move forward with its own plan to restore broadband user privacy rules despite the recent law passed by U.S. Congress, signed by President Trump in April, which gave ISPs the green light to collect customer data. more

ICANN New gTLD Auctions - Apparently No Antitrust Concerns?

There has been much discussion in ICANN circles concerning auctions to resolve new gTLD contention sets. This article summarizes the discussion and events to date, and suggests there should be little worry for applicants seeking to resolve their contention sets via private auction, rather than ICANN's "last resort" auction. more