Beyond DUMs: The Case for Tracking What a Namespace Is Made Of

Domains Under Management (DUM) measures a namespace's size, but not its character. Structural composition could reveal whether growth reflects durable adoption, speculative holdings or noise, giving registries a richer view of namespace health and strategy. more

Same Shape at Every Scale: What a Larger Domnain Namespace Confirmed - and What It Didn’t

A larger namespace confirms the same four-layer structural pattern found across nTLDs, while revealing wider operator-to-investor variation and distinctive noise signatures that expose different registration dynamics hidden behind headline registration totals. more

Community Networks: The Missing Piece in Africa’s Digital Transformation

Community networks can bridge Africa's persistent digital divide by shifting connectivity from infrastructure alone to community ownership, supported by strong governance, sustainable financing and enabling policies that make last-mile access resilient, inclusive and locally driven. more

The AI Enclosure Movement

The battle over open-source AI echoes England's Enclosure Movement, pitting collaboration against proprietary control as technology firms compete to shape innovation, economic power and the future governance of the digital commons. more

Call for Participation: DNSSEC and Security Workshop at ICANN87 (21 October 2026)

ICANN is inviting proposals for its DNSSEC and Security Workshop at ICANN 87, offering experts and practitioners a platform to share insights on DNS security, routing security, browser security, and emerging Internet infrastructure challenges. more

Asia’s Invisible Tariff: Why AI Capital Is Underweighting the Markets That Want It Most

As trillions flow into AI infrastructure, Asia's biggest emerging markets remain underfunded. Beyond power and geopolitics, obscure internet governance, IPv4 allocation, and regulatory ambiguity may be quietly shaping where hyperscale capital chooses to build. more

ICANN Wiki, SHE.africa, AI, and the Integrity of Digital Platforms

As AI increasingly relies on digital archives, the quiet revision of ICANNWiki entries raises broader questions about platform accountability, historical integrity, and whether institutions can reshape the records that future researchers and machines will treat as fact. more

From Access to Agency: Why the IGF-DCAD Fellowship Should Become a Global Standard

The IGF-DCAD fellowship shows that meaningful inclusion requires more than open access. By funding accessibility, leadership and participation, it offers a practical blueprint for making Internet governance genuinely representative of the one-sixth of humanity living with disabilities. more

Digital Sovereignty Is More Than Data Sovereignty: Understanding Africa’s Digital Dependency Stack

Africa's pursuit of digital sovereignty demands more than keeping data at home. True resilience depends on controlling the infrastructure, platforms, cybersecurity capabilities, governance, and human expertise that underpin an increasingly interconnected digital economy across Africa. more

What Zone File Analysis Reveals About the Gap Between nTLD Registration Volume and Namespace Reality

Registration totals reveal size, not composition. Structural analysis of major new gTLDs finds strikingly similar architectures but meaningful differences in operator adoption, speculative holdings, and noise, suggesting namespace health requires more than volume metrics alone. more

The gTLD Registrar Market Is Uniform in Rules, Not in Structure

ICANN applies identical rules to every registrar, yet new research reveals a sharply unequal market where seven firms capture half of inflows, renewals dominate activity, and many accreditations barely operate at all in practice today. more

The Implementation Gap: Why Africa’s Digital Strategies Rarely Become Digital Reality

Africa has digital strategies in abundance, but weak institutions, inconsistent leadership, poor governance and limited execution keep ambitious policies from delivering trusted, interoperable public services and sustainable digital transformation across the continent in practice today. more

Public Data Is Not Public Infrastructure

Building infrastructure for public trademark data revealed a familiar lesson from Internet protocols: publishing information is only the beginning. The real challenge is engineering resilient systems that withstand inconsistent formats, unreliable sources, and organisational complexity. more

Can Orbiting Data Centers Solve Terrestrial Deal Breakers?

Orbiting data centers promise cleaner power, cheaper cooling and relief from terrestrial opposition, but formidable engineering, regulatory and orbital governance challenges may keep ambitious space-based computing grounded for years unless launch economics improve dramatically first. more

The End Of The Impression Economy

AI is dismantling the web's impression economy as users consume summarized information instead of visiting websites. Value is shifting from traffic and advertising toward trusted content, licensing, attribution and intellectual property that machines increasingly rely upon. more