Web

Berners-Lee Warns Rise of Dominant Platforms has Resulted in Weaponization of the Web at Scale

The World Wide Web turned 29 today and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, web inventor, has shared some stern warnings about the direction it is headed. more

ICANN Asked to Remake the Internet in Joseph Smith’s Image?

If there's one thing that scares the bejabbers out of me, it's when organized religion -- either directly or via proxies -- attempts to nose its way into technology policy issues. It appears that such a scenario is unfolding currently, with a concerted new effort to fundamentally remake the Internet in a manner befitting the sensibilities of top-down religious hierarchies. An Internet Pope? The Spanish Inquisition? Not exactly -- that's the incorrect religion for this particular case. more

Criss-Crossing AI With the Future of Work

Every few years; some self-proclaimed academic imparts an article on the future of work, with conflicting information from various experts leaving many uncertain about its impact on jobs, skills, and wages. In less than a year, these same scholars will be writing about the "future of labor," and given the speed of innovation, by the time these articles are published, they will be made obsolete. more

The Future of AI in Broadband: Impacts on Network Demand and Power Consumption

AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process. Nobody seems to be able to answer the big question of whether AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. more

Consumers Are the Serfs of the Feudal Internet Companies

In one of the email conversations with my expert colleagues from around the globe, an interesting article was discussed written by Bruce Scheier in Wired: When it comes to security, we're back to feudalism. An interesting aspect of the discussion was the conclusion that Google's and Facebook's consumers are not their customers. The distinction is important, because consumers are the product being sold to their actual customers who are their advertisers. more

Governments Changing Censorship Tactics as More Websites Adopt HTTPS

With websites and social media platforms moving from HTTP to secure HTTPs connections in recent years, a new degree of complication is affecting Internet censorship efforts around the world. more

So/Lo/Mo for Business

Lest you think the social + local + mobile (So/Lo/Mo) trend is just a fad, last week, Pew Internet released a new report that found that 18 percent of smartphone owners use a geosocial service to check in and share their location with friends. The report also found that 74 percent of smartphone owners get real-time location-based information on their phones -- up from 55 percent last May. Add to these impressive stats the finding from earlier this year... more

ICANN’s New gTLDs: The Game Changers Have Landed

The day after 'reveal day' two big questions will emerge; firstly was the advertising branding world so wrong or secondly, the parties behind the proposed names so invincible and can turn their $350 million dollars into many tens of billions. To be fair the jury may be out nevertheless, here are some facts... The Internet was never designed to solve the global business naming problems; it was the extension of DARPA, a failsafe military communication system later adventured into public use. more

Societies Running on Quicksand: A Critical Look at Today’s Networks

The last few weeks have reinforced the importance of modern communication networks to societies. Health care providers, schools, governments, and businesses all rely on networks that enable us to connect and collaborate remotely. Had we encountered a similar pandemic ten years ago, we would not have been able to continue our activities on the level that is possible today. more

ICT Sectors Are Merging Into a New Wholesale Platform for the Networked Economy

There certainly is a lot of interest in the IoT (personal devices) and M2M (industrial applications) market. But what we are seeing is only what is happening on the surface. Most of the IoT and M2M activities are taking place unseen. For example, all new electronic devices (smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, game consoles) are now IoT devices. Wearable technology has also become a thriving part of the IoT industry, with an ever-broadening range of possible uses and devices, including smart watches, glasses, clothing items, skin patches, and even implants for health monitoring. more

Death of the PKI Dragons?

The recent attack on the Comodo Certification Authority has not only shown how vulnerable the current public key infrastructure is, but also that the protocols (e.g., OSCP) used to mitigate these vulnerabilities once exploited, are not in use, not implemented correctly or not even implemented at all. Is this the beginning of the death of the PKI dragons and what alternatives do we have? more

The Global Internet Through a Local Lens

As the Internet grows, those countries and societies with mature systems of content development, innovation and entrepreneurism will continue to be better positioned to meet these needs. At the same time, such countries are also better positioned to take advantage of the efficiency, and capacity of the Internet to amplify and extend their cultural reach and economic capacity. The implication of this amplification and extension of cultural reach and economic capacity from developed markets, is that it can drown out indigenous content and restrict local economic opportunities in developing and under-developed markets. more

How Many of the New gTLDs Will Fail?

I was just asked the question: How many of the new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) will fail? This poor listener might have hoped for one sentence as response, but that subject is too interesting to be brief. In this scenario you can't look to historical data to measure or predict the success rate of the new TLDs because past new TLDs have been largely managed by big businesses who have strong revenue streams from other business lines that they could use to support a slacking TLD. more

Could You Go for a Year Without Internet Access? Paul Miller Reports on His Experiment…

Could you sign off of the Internet today -- right now, in fact -- and not come back online for 12 months? If you are a reader of CircleID, odds are pretty good that the answer is probably an emphatic "No!" This is, after all, a site for "Internet Infrastructure" and for most of us visiting the site (or writing here) the "Internet" is completely woven into the fabric of our lives... and we have a hard time thinking of a life without it. more

What Does the Future Hold for the Internet?

This is the fundamental question that the Internet Society is posing through the report just launched today, our 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The report is a window into the diverse views and perspectives of a global community that cares deeply about how the Internet will evolve and impact humanity over the next 5-7 years. We couldn't know what we would find when we embarked on the journey to map what stakeholders believe could shape the future of the Internet... more