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Backlash Over Potential Firing of U.S. Election Cybersecurity’s Top Official

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with over forty other cybersecurity experts and organizations, are urging the White House to keep politics out of securing this month's election in the U.S. more

Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales

Garth Bruen reports on a paper published by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics of Boston University School of Law authored by Bryan A. Liang and Tim Mackey titled, "Searching for Safety: Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales". From the paper: "Online sales of pharmaceuticals are a rapidly growing phenomenon. Yet despite the dangers of purchasing drugs over the Internet, sales continue to escalate. These dangers include patient harm from fake or tainted drugs, lack of clinical oversight, and financial loss. Patients, and in particular vulnerable groups such as seniors and minorities, purchase drugs online either naïvely or because they lack the ability to access medications from other sources due to price considerations. Unfortunately, high risk online drug sources dominate the Internet, and virtually no accountability exists to ensure safety of purchased products."  more

Cloudflare Reverses Long-Held Policy to Remain Content-Neutral, Ends Service to the Daily Stormer

Cloudflare on Wednesday reversed its long-held policy to remain content-neutral and terminated its service to neo-Nazi site, The Daily Stormer. more

Policy Advisory Boards - A Cornerstone PICS (Public Interest Commitment Specification)

Six months following the April 11th issuance of the Beijing Communique by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), ICANN continues to wrestle with whether to accept the bulk of the GAC's proposed safeguards for new gTLDs as set forth in Annex 1 of that document. On October 1st ICANN Board Chairman Stephen Crocket sent a letter to GAC Chair Heather Dryden summarizing the results of the September 28th meeting of the New gTLD Program Committee (NGPC) that considered the remaining and still undecided advice received from the GAC. more

ICANN: Our Top 3 Policy Priorities for 2015

2014 was a big year for us and for our clients. The new gTLD program forced us to rethink, reprioritize and implement new and different strategies to protect our brands online. The uncertainty largely behind us, and with more information at our fingertips about just how well (or not) brands are faring in the new environment, it's time to look forward to what we can do in 2015 to fix what's broken, throw away what's useless, fight for what's important... more

Plentyoffish Media Inc. Fined $48,000 for Alleged Violation of Canada’s Anti-Spam Law

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today announced that Plentyoffish Media Inc. has paid $48,000 as part of an undertaking for an alleged violation of Canada's anti-spam legislation. more

Huawei’s Very Red World

The map below shows countries working with Huawei 5G in red and pink. As can be seen, Huawei is doing very well in 5G, although it's not as dominant as the colors here suggest. Ericsson is actually close to Huawei in 5G revenue, aided by the ban in the US and Australia. Years ago, Huawei was the price leader in order to break into the European market. more

Internet Governance: Why Africa Should Take the Lead

Recently during an afternoon meeting with a friend of mine, Bob Ochieng, who happens to work for ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Africa Operations, he lamented that at online Internet Governance discussions fora such as CircleID, and 1net.org, there is no serious frequent engagements from African Voices. This got me thinking and I realized that most African Internet Stakeholders would rather use a "wait and see approach" in matters as critical as Internet Governance. more

Balancing Digital Integrity: CENTR Critiques EU’s Insolvency Proposal

CENTR, the leading body representing European national domain registries, has voiced concerns over the European Union's insolvency proposal. The group emphasizes that the current proposal places an undue strain on country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registries by demanding excessive data about domain name holders. more

Selling DONA Snake Oil at the ITU

A venerable old ITU tradition got underway today. Its Telecommunication Standardization body, known as the ITU-T, gathered, as it has done every four years for much of the past 100 years in a conclave of nations, to contemplate what they should be doing at their Geneva intergovernmental standards meetings for the next four years. The gathering is called the WTSA... Old intergovernmental institutional habits still continue, so the participants are gathered in a remote location in Tunisia called Hammamet. more

Call Spoofing: Congress Calls on FCC, Russia and China Answer

It is both amusing and dismaying. Last year, Congress passed Ray Baum's Act telling the FCC to do something about those pesky incoming foreign SPAM calls and texts with the fake callerIDs. The FCC a couple of weeks ago responded with a chest thumping Report and Order claiming it has "extraterritorial jurisdiction" that is does not have, and promising it will do something. Don't hold your breath on that one. more

UK Government Planning on New Laws for IoT Devices Including a Mandatory Security Labelling Scheme

The UK government on Wednesday announced plans to introduce new laws for internet connected devices to better enforce the inclusion of basic cybersecurity features into IoT devices. more

U.S. Senators to Introduce IoT Security Bill

U.S. senators on Tuesday announced plans to introduce legislation seeking to address vulnerabilities in IoT devices. more

Flushing the ‘Net Down the Tubes

Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece framing the battle for the 'Net at Linux Journal. The piece is long, but if you take the time to read just one essay on the 'Net and the politics surround it this year, read this one. If you're involved in public policy, it's especially important that you take the time to understand what's at stake here. One of Doc's main points: we haven't framed the conversation correctly and our poor choice of words makes the argument seem overly technical and arcane when it's really about freedom, markets, and innovation. more

Powell Warns Net Neutrologists Not to Be Naive

Just got this email reporting the speech made by former FCC Chairman @ F2C organized by David Isenberg. "Former FCC chairman Michael Powell is up on the stage at the Freedom to Connect conference right now, and he warns the tech elite crowd here not to be naive about the dangers of asking Congress for legislation on Net Neutrality. As he explains..." more