The last Australian Internet Governance Forum (auIGF) was held in October 2016 before the annual event was cancelled as part of an auDA review. Three years on and the auIGF replacement – NetThing – was held in Sydney on 28 October 2019, though I was surprised to see that this Australian Internet event no longer had an associated .au domain name, instead choosing to go with NetThing.info. more
It can be hard to take a side. Especially when you are with a big organization. I know, I used to work for the United Nations and ICANN. Neutrality is a huge part of that work. Your role is not to take a stand; it's to create the space for other people to take stands. To create and protect a neutral platform. That's what we all thought the Internet Society (ISOC) was doing for us by running .ORG. more
Ten years ago, the most effective branding exercise the internet registry market has ever seen began. And to celebrate the anniversary, its owner is going to strangle it. At the ICANN meeting in Montreal this month, the Government of Colombia booked a meeting room, prepared a Powerpoint presentation and invited representatives of the world's largest registry operators to attend. Once there, they were offered a rare and valuable opportunity: to take over running of the .co registry. more
Internet Society CEO Andrew Sullivan released a statement today in response to the recent concerns raised by the community with regards to the sale of Public Interest Registry (PIR), the .ORG operator, to Ethos Capital. more
I run a business. For years I've been in the ICANN Business Constituency, holding a series of different positions including Chair. Suffice it to say, I'm absolutely ok with making money and generally speaking, letting markets work. I also care about NGOs. For years our firm worked with PIR on the .NGO project. We got to see up close the role PIR has played as a supporter of NGOs online -- encouraging best practice, helping push out DNSSEC to a global audience, working on DNS abuse issues, supporting the sector. more
The past week in the 5G world was notable because of some major events in Reno in the 5G race to roll out the full 5G specifications known as Release 16. A set of seven major concurrent industry standards meetings were hosted there over five days last week. The metrics are indicative of who really participates in and shapes the rapidly emerging 5G platforms. more
The Paris Peace Forum (PPF), established by the French president Emanual Macron, was picked by the Global Commission for Stability in Cyberspace (GCSC) to launch its final report "Advancing Cyberstability" for good reasons: The Internet isn't just a purely technical issue with some political implications anymore. On the eve of the 2020s, the management of cyberspace is a global problem, a matter of international security, a question of war or peace. more
The announcement of the intended Internet Society (ISOC) sale of the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital has caused a lot of frustration and anger while raising a lot of questions.
It's more than just about the money. It's more than who is behind it. It's about the soul of the DNS and the ICANN community with its multi-stakeholder model. Let's remember that the Public Interest Registry (PIR) was created, with ISOC as its sole legal owner, to provide ISOC with the funds to operate and to run the registry more-or-less as a Social Business. more
The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) in an open letter issued today, has asked ICANN to withhold the approval of the assignment of the .ORG top-level domain to the private equity company Ethos Capital. more
One of the most embarrassing and pernicious realities in the world of cybersecurity is the stark reality that some industry cybersecurity standards practices are themselves cyber threats. How so? Most industry and intergovernmental standards bodies serve as means for assembling the constantly evolving collective knowledge of participant experts and package the resulting specifications and best practices as freely available online documents to a vast, diverse universe of users. more
The 2019 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-19) is underway. It is the latest in a continuum of treaty-making gatherings that began in 1903 and is devoted to the now 116-year-old art of globally carving up the radio spectrum among designated uses that is instantiated in the Radio Regulations treaty agreement. Not unexpectedly, the event includes designation of 5G spectrum that flows from the requirements long set in 3GPP and GSMA. more
The Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will convene in Berlin three weeks from tomorrow. One of the highlights of the meeting could be the main session on Internet Governance and Digital Cooperation that is to be held on Day 1, 26 November 2019. The session is to consider some of the recommendations contained in the June report from the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, most notably the panel's proposal to revamp the IGF... more
Last Thursday, during VeriSign's Q3 2019 quarterly earnings call, CEO Jim Bidzos offered statements that seemed to be carefully calibrated to satisfy Wall Street's curiosity about protracted negotiations with ICANN on a Third Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement while also appearing to distance the company from the soon-to-be forthcoming product of that year-long effort. more
EFF's Senior Legislative Counsel, Ernesto Falcon, in a post on Monday has argued that major ISPs in the U.S. -- the likes of Comcast, AT&T;, and Verizon -- are aggressively influencing legislators to stop the deployment of DNS over HTTPS (DoH), "a technology that will give users one of the biggest upgrades to their Internet privacy and security since the proliferation of HTTPS." more
In the first section of this piece, I argued that the anti-Huawei litany only makes sense when one realizes that it is the Chinese state, not a global telecommunication equipment manufacturer based in China, is the target of this attack. China, in this view, is an integrated monolith, and any Chinese firm can be ordered to do the government's will without any legal, political, or economic checks and balances. more
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