The ever-entertaining Fifth Circuit has recently upheld a strange Texas law that forbids most kinds of social media moderation. (Techdirt explains many of the reasons the court is wrong, so I won't try.) This brings us to the trendy question of whether Facebook, Twitter, et al. should be treated as common carriers. You can make a good argument to separate the point-to-point data transport from the ISP and make the former common carriage. more
United Nations Human Rights Council today adopted resolutions condemning measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access or dissemination of information on the Internet in violation of international human rights law. more
After some turmoil, Facebook won the war with the Australian Government as the necessary changes were made to the legislation that avoided them needing to change their business model. Those subtleties are lost in the general press. What counts for the popular media is that they were able to spin some great stories around the fact that Australia stood up to the giants. That brought international attention, which boosted the ego of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. more
A fresh & transparent, community-led, bottom-up, public debate has now become unavoidable and undeferrable. "....we need limited and smart regulation" were the clear and unambiguous words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the launch of the final report of his UN Panel on Digital Cooperation last week in New York. Last November, I wrote about President Macron throwing down the gauntlet at UN IGF Paris challenging IGF and Multistakeholderism to become more relevant. more
Chinese President, Xi Jinping, in response to concerns about China's new Internet regulations and restrictions, says "rule of law also applies to the Internet, with the need to safeguard a country's sovereignty, security and development interests as relevant as in the real world." more
For generations, large pockets of Africa were isolated from things many of us take for granted: access to medical treatment and advances that can make the difference between a healthy, productive life or debilitating illness -- or even an early death. These problems still persist, but over the last two decades technology has helped break through and enable medical professionals to reach the poorest and most remote populations and offer some hope. more
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed that the US standard for broadband be redefined to a minimum of 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload speeds, up from the current 25Mbps/3Mbps. more
Network security experts from across the U.S. government told a U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Tuesday that federal networks have been thoroughly penetrated by foreign spies, and that current perimeter-based defenses that attempt to curb intrusions are outdated and futile. more
Organizations who fail to implement effective cybersecurity measures could be fined as much as £17 million or 4% of global turnover, as part of Britain's plan to prevent cyberattacks. more
The Aspen Institute released the IDEA Common Statement and Principles as a do no harm Hippocratic Oath for Internet governance. The Aspen report describes the present moment as an inflection point for "the most robust medium of information exchange in history". Reed Hundt outlined the risks associated with Internet governance changes favored by China and a group of developing nations through the ITU. more
Over the next few months, major discussions at the United Nations will shape the future of Internet governance. In order to prepare with our community for the ten-year Review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+10), in New York, USA, on 15 to 16 December 2015, we are publishing today a matrix of the countries' positions on WSIS+10. The matrix draws from their written contributions to the UN this summer, and is designed to help all stakeholders better understand the key issues at the the heart of the negotiations. more
While in recent years, HTTPS has become integral part of protecting social, political, and economic activities online, widely reported security incidents -- such as DigiNotar's breach, Apple's #gotofail, and OpenSSL's Heartbleed -- have exposed systemic security vulnerabilities of HTTPS to a global audience. more
In a statement delivered during the ICANN63 in Barcelona, David Redl,
Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information (NTIA) said that while the community has greatly improved ICANN's accountability there is still room left for improvements. more
The conventional wisdom in the world of legacy standards-making is that monolithic standards produce, if not accelerate, better products and services. Conformance, certification, and associated labelling schemes to implement those standards were believed essential to trust. Although competition law seems now evolving in the other direction, regulatory standards-making bodies themselves have been accorded considerable anticompetitive cartel liability protection. more
Over the last ten years, Andrew Odlyzko has been writing about a pricing algorithm that would assure reasonable service levels at reasonable prices. If you're going to F2C, you might want to read that brief article or this slightly more complex one to learn (or refresh your sense of) PMP -- Paris Metro Pricing models to deal with network congestion. You'll also get a sense of why throwing bandwidth at the network will not be sufficient. Here's a great article from 1995... more