Policy & Regulation

Section 3.18 of the 2013 RAA: Reasonable Investigations, Appropriate Responses

Section 3.18 of the ICANN 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) contains language requiring registrars to investigate and respond to abuse complaints. Nearly one year into the new RAA's effective period, what do we know about Section 3.18? If a person or entity wants to submit a complaint, what should they keep in mind? This article reviews the meaning of Section 3.18, how to leverage it, offers a list of do's and don'ts for complainants, and offers a few recommendations for registrars. more

The Web is Dead: What This Means to ICANN, New gTLD Program and the Domain Industry

While we are spending years figuring out how to create the perfect generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) launch and guidebook, the Internet is moving along at an extraordinary pace without any care about ICANN policy-making. The fact of the matter is ICANN is a ghost to the ordinary person or Internet company. You can not imagine how many times I had to explain what ICANN is, what ICANN does and why ICANN is important. more

EFF Resigns from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) over EME Decision

In an open letter to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced on Tuesday that it is resigning from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in response to the organization publishing Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as a standard. more

Law Enforcement Agencies Will Have Authority on Registries and Registrars

Accessing Whois information and acting on a litigious domain name is becoming a nightmare for law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement agencies must have an access to the information provided by registrants in the Whois database and, in specific cases, have authority to act FAST on a domain name. The EU has a solution for this and it's coming in 2020. more

Market Forces Should Control Registry Services?

Sonia Arrison, a director of the Center for Technology Studies at the California-based non-profit Pacific Research Institute, writes an interesting op-ed piece in the Internet news publication CNET News.com. She argues that the job of privatizing the domain name system should be completed and that market forces should control registry services such as SiteFinder deployed by VeriSign for about three weeks in September...While not a position I would agree with, as I would prefer more government control and additional regulation, it is definitely insightful and well written. She makes some interesting quotes... more

Lessons from the O2 Network Outage: The Real Cost of Manual Processes

More than 30 million people lost their data connectivity on December 6, 2018, in the United Kingdom as O2's network suffered from a nationwide service outage. Based on several reports, the incident was caused by a human error at Ericsson, the telecoms supplier responsible for operating certain parts of the O2 network. To compensate for the downtime and tarnished reputation, the O2 management is now reportedly seeking damages of up to a hundred million pounds from Ericsson. more

The Demand and Supply Imbalance in Telecoms

You can't open a newspaper today, listen to the radio, or watch TV without hearing about the enormous explosion in the use of telecommunications technology - be it fixed or mobile broadband, the internet, social media, smartphones, tablets, wearables, IoT, cloud computing, the list is endless... Yet, at the same time, many telcos and ISPs are struggling to maintain their profitability. This defies economic logic. more

The ITU and IPv6 Transition: Controversy at the IGF

At today's "Managing Critical Internet Resources" session of the Internet Governance Forum 2009, the ITU agenda on taking a role in IPv6 distribution once again reared its ugly head. In a heated exchange, Professor Dr Sureswaran Ramadass, the Director of Nav6 an ITU consultant/fanboy squared off with the new ICANN CEO about competition in IPv6 address distribution. more

Knowing Less

The announcement yesterday morning in the Times that New York State AG Andrew Cuomo had reached an agreement with three US network operators (Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner) about blocking child pornography was both less and more important than it appeared. It's less important in that part of the agreement covers something ISPs already do... more

The US DOJ Rogue Internet Pharmacy Settlement: Implications for Registrars

In the wake of Google's settlement with the Department of Justice for permitting advertising by illegal online pharmacies, what are the legal implications for Domain Name Registrars and ISPs in the US and elsewhere? In short, if you're a Registrar or ISP, it's a new ballgame. Here's why it's critical for you to steer clear of criminal and civil liability by making sure your registration services aren't used by rogue online pharmacy criminals. (And, here's how to do it.) more

Network Neutrality in the Wireless Space

There's been a tremendous amount written about the Google-Verizon joint proposal for network neutrality regulation. Our commentary at the EFF offers some legal analysis of the good and bad in this proposal. A lot of commentary has put a big focus on the exemption for wireless networks, since many feel wireless is the real "where it's gonna be," if not the "where it's at" for the internet. more

Notes from NANOG 83

The network operations community is cautiously heading back into a mode of in-person meetings, and the NANOG meeting at the start of November was a hybrid affair with a mix of in-person and virtual participation, both by the presenters and the attendees. I was one of the virtual mob, and these are my notes from the presentations I found to be of personal interest. I hope you might also find them to be of interest as well... The year 2021 has not been a good year for Internet outages. more

Proxy-Privacy User Higher for Illicit Domains

WHOIS issues are looming large for the ICANN meeting next week, starting with an all-day WHOIS Policy Review on Sunday (background). WHOIS is a subject that has been the recent topic of a number of issues including a debacle over potentially disclosing the identities of compliance reporters to spammers and criminal domainers. more

Special Interests Circulating Draft Legislation to Cut Short ICANN’s Whois Policy Process

Special interests who oppose privacy are circulating draft legislation to cut short ICANN's Whois policy process, warns Milton Mueller in a post published today in Internet Governance Project. more

FCC and Comcast: Reasonably Vague

So, the FCC will recommend that Comcast be "punished" or receive "sanctions" for its peer-to-peer throttling practice. And the network neutrality debate goes on, as does its ambiguities and vagueness. Even if you hate Comcast and agree with the net neutrality argument and the FCC's decision, one thing Comcast is correct in saying is that "reasonable network management" specified by the FCC in network neutrality policy set in 2005 is vague. Actually, the term "network management" by itself is broad before you even try to interpret what is meant by "reasonable", and it is not exactly correct in its application here... more