Policy & Regulation

Policy & Regulation / Most Viewed

Extraterritoriality

Black's Law Dictionary defines it as "the extraterritorial operation of laws; that is, their operation upon persons, rights or jural relations, existing beyond the limits of the enacting state, but still amenable to its laws. The term is used to indicate jurisdiction exercised by a nation in other countries, by treaty..." Extraterritoriality is also the most significant emerging development today in the law shaping virtual network architectures and services that includes OTT and NFV-SDN. more

New Zealand’s Domain Name Commission Wins Injunction in a Lawsuit Against DomainTools

New Zealand's Domain Name Commission today won a motion for preliminary injunction in a US lawsuit against the company DomainTools. more

Framing the Internet Governance Debate: The Long Road to WSIS+20 (2025)

Since the early 2000s, the global debate about Internet Governance did have its ups and downs. We did see the establishment of ICANN, the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the making of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and the failure of the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT). We did see NetMundial and the IANA transition. more

Last Decade in Spam

CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, has looked back at the notable events of the last decade in our industry. Each year/link in the post explodes to a discrete blog entry with a month-by-month break-out of notable events. more

The Accountable Net: Who Should Be Accountable?

Two weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission held a summit on e-mail authentication in Washington, DC; the community of people who handle bulk mail came together and agreed on standards and processes that should help reduce the proliferation of spoofed mail and fraudulent offers. This was a big, collective step in the right direction. But e-mail sender authentication alone won't solve the Net's fraud and phishing problems - nor will any single thing. It requires a web of accountability among a broad range of players. Yet this week there's another meeting, in Cape Town, South Africa, that could make even more of a difference...but it probably won't. more

Will VeriSign Be Able to Engage in Tiered Pricing for .com Soon?

According to the draft of new Generic Top-level Domains (gTLD) contracts for Section 7.3, "Price controls have been removed for 2008 in favor of the transparent pricing model outlined above." Section 3.2.b) of the .com registry agreement states: "ICANN shall not apply standards, policies, procedures or practices arbitrarily, unjustifiably, or inequitably and shall not single out Registry Operator for disparate treatment unless justified by substantial and reasonable cause." In my opinion, VeriSign (and other existing gTLD operators) are almost being invited to ask for their contracts to be amended... more

From Connecting Computers to Connecting Stakeholders: Stanford Univ. Hosts NetMundial Initiative

1974, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf checked in the Crown Plaza Hotel in Palo Alto, worked a couple of days and presented to the world the TCP/IP protocol. Stanford hosted one of the four computers connected on equal footing (ARPANET) in 1969... A framed document in the hotel lobby remembers the historic moment. On March 31, 2014 a crowd of about 30 people from all over the world checked in the same Crown Plaza hotel for the first working meeting of the new Coordination Council (CC) of the NetMundial Initiative (NMI). more

Hot Legal Action in Canada!

The best part is ... this isn't one of those 'now that I've got your attention' tricks, like one of those old "free beer" posters; there really is a ton of stuff happening above the 49th parallel this summer. To begin with, as a precursor to Canada's Anti-spam Law coming into effect later this year, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, and Industry Canada have all issued regulations, the latter two in draft form with an RFC. more

Is NIST’s Recent Letter on o.com a Bureaucratic Coup d’Etat?

Verisign recently informed ICANN that it had received a letter from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, regarding the proposed auction of o.com described in the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement agreed to by ICANN and Verisign in March 2019. This letter, which doesn't appear to be on official letterhead, is from a NIST Grants Officer and purports to overturn a letter raising objections to the auction... more

A Sustainable Framework For The Deployment Of New gTLDs

At the Fourth Annual Meeting of the ICANN Board in Amsterdam, the ICANN Board asked the DNSO Names Council (who have since become "the GNSO Council") to provide the Board with advice and input on the issues that surround the creation of new generic top-level domain names. Based on the Council's publicly documented conversations thus far, it is becoming clear that Council is moving in directions that do not seem to be consistent with the continued health of the namespace or development of a competitive market for registration and DNS services. more

The Brewing Internet Governance Storm

The Internet has been growing at 115% per year, more than doubling annually, for thirty years. Today, over two billion people are connected to the Internet. The openness of the Internet has been the main catalyst for many social and economic advances. It has enabled a level of human communication and interconnection unprecedented in human history, as demonstrated by the staggering global popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It has also spurred new levels of innovation, fueling significant economic activity. more

Occupy IG - Internet Social Forum to Torpedo NETmundial Initiative and Disrupt Davos Discussions

As we have previously observed, the efforts undertaken by ICANN, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and CGI.BR to launch a NETmundial Initiative (NMI) to follow up on last spring's NETmundial meeting in Sao Paulo has encountered heavy skepticism and substantial resistance from the major civil society and technical groups from which endorsement and participation was sought. more

The State of the Internet

The Mozilla Internet Health Report is packed with interesting statistics about the state of the Internet. Reports like this one remind us that broadband is a worldwide issue that is much larger than the US broadband industry I write about every day. The report contains a lot of interesting facts: A little more than half of the planet is still not connected to the Internet. As a planet, we still have a long way to go. While the largest percentage of a region still not online is in Africa, by sheer numbers, most of those still not connected are in Asia... more

WHOIS Users Facing Serious Challenges Caused by Post-GDPR Fragmentation

On May 25, 2018, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect, meaning that European data protection authorities (DPAs) can begin enforcing the regulation against non-compliant parties. In preparation, the ICANN Board passed a Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data - essentially a temporary policy amendment to its registrar and registry contracts to facilitate GDPR compliance while also preserving certain aspects of the WHOIS system of domain name registration data. more

China Continues VPN Crackdown, Targets Alibaba and Other Ecommerce Sites

In the latest series of measures taken by China to clamp down on use and distributions of VPNs, Chinese authorities have issued warning to the country's top ecommerce platforms, including Alibaba's Taobao.com, over the sale of illegal virtual private networks that allow users to skirt state censorship controls. more