Policy & Regulation

Banning 5G Equipment is a Foolish Strategy

It has become popular today around Washington and the venues of its coerced allies to issue threats to ban telecommunications equipment from certain countries - especially equipment intended for 5G use. The guise is vague assertions of "national security." It is an old tactic dating back to the turn of the last century and recurrent for decades. A combination of treaty instruments and collaborative industry standards activity several decades ago largely put an end to the banning tactic - significantly benefitting the entire world. more

A Look at How Google, Verizon and the FCC Talks are Playing Out

Sam Gustin reporting in DailyFanance: "As Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Google forge ahead with highly publicized new plans to stream high-speed content like movies and TV shows to your living room, smartphone, telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast (CMSCA) have been intensely lobbying to maintain control over the broadband pipes they spent billions to build. Comcast is going so far as to buy a rich content factory, NBC Universal, a deal that would create a $35 billion media and delivery juggernaut." more

New Book on Domain Name Regulation

My book, "The Current State of Domain Name Regulation: Domain Names as Second Class Citizens in a Mark-dominated World" is now available by Routledge. The following is an overview of the book. more

Letter from EU to UN Secretary General

Today the Swedish IT Minister Åsa Torstensson together with the Commissioner Viviane Reding sent a letter to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I think the letter is extremely well written, but when I twittered about it, some people contacted me and asked what was so special with it? Let me try to explain... more

My Comment on Forbes - Why Is the UN Trying to Take over the Internet

Forbes just published this article that's being shared all over my facebook friends feed. I left a comment on the article that I've copied and pasted here, as it is just about long enough to qualify as a CircleID post by itself... The problem is that peering isn't always settlement free -- and even if it is, if and only if there's an equitable amount of traffic exchanged between two ISPs. And then there's transit, where you pay another network to carry your packets for you. more

US Should Take More Aggressive Counter-Measures On IP Theft, Including Use of Malware

A bipartisan Commission recently produced a report titled, "The Report of the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property". Karl Bode from dslreports.com writes... more

Ethiopia Shows That Congress Is Right to Be Worried About UN Control of the Internet

Today a key committee in the US Congress approved a resolution opposing United Nations "control over the Internet." While some in the Internet community have dismissed the bipartisan effort as mere political grandstanding, recent actions by some UN Member States show that lawmakers have good reason to be worried. Last month, UN voting member Ethiopia made it a crime -- punishable by 15 years in prison - to make calls over the Internet.  more

The Open Internet?

I'm sure we've all heard about "the open Internet." The expression builds upon a rich pedigree of term "open" in various contexts. For example, "open government" is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight, a concept that appears to be able to trace its antecedents back to the age of enlightenment in 17th century Europe. more

IPv6: Whose Responsibility Is It?

This text was originally meant to be read by the Swedish authorities and municipalities, but the problem is most probably similar all over the world. Along with others, I have repeatedly written and spoken about the need for municipalities and agencies to start with the roll-out of IPv6. Most of what I have written has been focused on IT managers. It might seem natural that it is the IT manager's decision to get the IPv6-project started. But what if perhaps it isn't...? more

Domain Name Issues In Russia

How are domain names dealt with in Russia? This article discusses current issues related to the registration and assignment of domain names in ".ru" zone (Russian top level country code domain) and trademark protection on Internet. more

An Open Letter to the ICANN Community: Not the Community Priority Evaluation We Intended

Today, I share a warning about serious changes to the Community Priority Evaluation (CPE) of the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook. They are not driven by public comment, but by a few voices within the SubPro Implementation Review Team - and they are very likely to lead to disastrous misappropriation of well-known community names, including those of Tribes, Indigenous Peoples and NGOs around the world. more

IETF Reaches Broad Consensus to Upgrade Internet Security Protocols Amid Pervasive Surveillance

Internet security has been a primary focus this week for more than 1100 engineers and technologists from around the world gathered at the 88th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Participants are rethinking approaches to security across a wide range of technical areas. more

New gTLD Fees Threaten the Diversity of the Name Space

The great promise of the new gTLD programme is not that it will spawn dozens of .COM clones, but rather that it will lead to the creation of a global constellation of unique names embraced by specific interest groups. As an ICANN community, our challenge now is to ensure that the policy framework we've created to manage new gTLDs advances that vision by not penalising the very sorts of domains that the programme was designed to encourage. more

Comcast-TWC: Why Compete and Innovate When You Can Buy Market Share?

Expect a charm offensive as Comcast and scores of sponsored researchers explain how acquiring Time Warner Cable will promote competition and enhance consumer welfare. You might not hear too much about two traditional concerns remedied by actual facilities-based competition: incentives to innovate and reduce prices. Comcast will frame its acquisition as necessary to achieve even greater scale to compete with other sources of video content and maybe to compete with the limited other sources of broadband access. more

Why Does A Technical Manager Function As A Regulator?

Unlike ICANN, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) responded graciously, promptly and substantively to inquiries from the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness (CRE) regarding governance of the internet. CRE sent a letter to NTIA in mid-March asking about public access to documents prepared by ICANN under Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with NTIA. NTIA provided a quick and clear response to CRE's questions. NTIA also reiterated its commitment to achieving transparency and accountability in ICANN's processes. NTIA's response to CRE, although clear and comprehensive, raised a number of important questions about ICANN and their governance of the internet. more