Implications of Satellite Being Broadband

We've had a quiet policy change in the United States over the last year, where satellite broadband is starting to be considered broadband by the federal government. Any rural household that subscribes to and loves Starlink would wonder why this is news, but from a policy perspective, it is a big deal. I've been considering what this shift might mean in the future. The FCC decided that Starlink wasn't broadband when it rejected Starlink's long-form filing in August 2022, where Starlink wanted to claim the funding it had won in the RDOF reverse auction.

Have LLMs Broken Fair Use?

Two sets of authors sued Anthropic and Meta in San Francisco for copyright infringement, arguing that the companies had pirated their works to train their LLMs. Everyone agreed that a key question was whether fair use allowed it, and in both cases, the courts looked at the fair use issue before dealing with other aspects of the cases. Even though the facts in both cases were very similar, last week, two judges in the same court wrote opinions, coming to very different conclusions. How can that happen? Is fair use broken?

IS3C Report: Socio-Political and Technical Impacts of Post Quantum Cryptography Policies

At the 20th Internet Governance Forum in Lillestrøm, Norway, the UN Internet Governance Forum's dynamic coalition Internet Standards, Security and Safety (IS3C) released its new report on post-quantum policies. This report presents the findings of a collaborative study undertaken by IS3C and the French domain name registry Afnic and examines the critical need for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to achieve greater security in the ever-expanding global IoT landscape.

.PARIS : Can the Backend Registry Help Sales?

As published on June 24, 2025, it is with no surprise that the AFNIC was renewed as the backend registry provider of the .PARIS new generic Top-Level Domain. What caught my attention in the announcement was this paragraph: “Afnic’s remit will also be expanded to include communication and promotion of the .paris TLD, as well as the development of initiatives designed to increase its adoption by businesses and private individuals.”

Ignorance of History

An international institutional battle of sorts has been playing out in a segment of the trade press over the past couple of weeks over the venue of the Oct 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-27). The treaty conference held under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Radiocommunication Sector is part of a continuum of intergovernmental activities that began in Berlin in 1903.

Ossification and the Internet

Networks are typically built to provide certain services at an expected scale. The rationale for this focused objective is entirely reasonable: to overachieve would be inefficient and costly. So, we build service infrastructure to a level of sufficient capability to meet expectations and no more. In ideal conditions, this leads to a widely deployed and highly efficient infrastructure that is capable of supporting a single service profile.

OneWeb Can’t Come Close to Replacing Starlink in Ukraine, but It Could Complement It

Elon Musk assured us that he would not stop the Starlink service in Ukraine. But, given his feud with Trump, his criticism of President Zelensky, and his rash actions with DOGE, can he be trusted? (His termination of USAID is estimated to have resulted in 340,000 deaths so far.) When askedabout Musk's influence, Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, said he declined to comment on "the internal politics of the United States and who should influence these decisions" but added "If changes happen and if our US partners and friends are changing their plans, of course we will be ready for plan B.

Digital Sovereignty in a Fragmenting Internet: What Role Should WSIS+20 Play?

As the global digital order enters an era of intensifying geopolitical tension, debates over digital sovereignty have re-emerged as a defining fault line in Internet governance. At stake is not merely who controls data or infrastructure within national borders but whether the vision of a globally interoperable, open Internet, one of WSIS's founding principles, can be meaningfully sustained.

The WSIS+20 Roadmap: Baby Steps in the Right Direction

The final phase of the WSIS+20 review has started. The two co-facilitators, Ambassador Suela Janina from Albania and Ambassador Ekitela Lokaale from Kenia, published on May, 21, 2025, their road map. The WSIS+20 Roadmap will lead us to the WSIS High-Level Meeting of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), scheduled for New York at the UN HQ on December 16-17, 2025. The first intergovernmental consultations were held on May 30, 2025, in New York. Two online stakeholder consultations followed on June 9 & 10, 2025.

Should WSIS End? A Call for Discussion

The future of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process will be one of the main topics of the 2025 Internet Governance Forum. Many in the IG community are heavily invested in the renewal of WSIS. They imply that if it is not renewed, there will be major, negative effects on the way we govern the Internet. IGP believes that it is healthy and productive for the community to consider the possibility of ending WSIS.

The Growing Risk of Space Debris: How Satellite Proliferation Is Polluting Low-Earth Orbit

Low-orbit space is growing increasingly crowded. Starlink has over 7,100 satellites in orbit and has plans to grow to 30,000. Project Kuiper has plans for a constellation of 3,232 satellites. One Web's first-generation constellation has 648 satellites, with plans to grow to over 6,300 satellites. The Thousand Sails (Qianfan) constellation is planning for up to 15,000 satellites. Numerous countries and businesses are launching or planning for smaller constellations for a wide variety of purposes.

ICANN is Broken

The ICANN Board's recent resolution to suspend an accountability safeguard hardcoded in its bylaws may represent the final straw that breaks the community's trust in ICANN. Most community members, including its own Board Chair, acknowledge that its current policy development and implementation processes are not working efficiently. However, the Board's decision to suspend the mechanism that could address these inefficiencies only seeks to preserve the status quo and the economic interests of these dominant market participants.

DOTZON Study: Digital City Brands 2025

We have just released the 2025 edition of the DOTZON study "Digital City Brands." Since first presenting the study in early 2017, DOTZON has now analyzed for the ninth consecutive year how cities successfully use their Digital City Brands. The Digital City Brand represents the digital aspect of a city's brand and reflects how digitally advanced a city is. The emergence of the Internet was the reason Digital City Brands were created in the first place.

Censorship-by-Infrastructure: How DNS Blocking Threatens the Open Internet—and How You Can Help Document It

What happens when governments don't just regulate content, but forcibly repurpose the very guts of the Internet's infrastructure to enforce their policies? The chilling answer, increasingly evident worldwide, is widespread, devastating collateral damage. Around the world, neutral systems like Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers and IP routing, the bedrock of our digital lives, are being weaponized as enforcement tools.

Increasing Broadband Price Competition Across the US

Competition has been creeping into broadband pricing for the last several years as cable companies have been using low introductory rates to try to win new customers and offering similarly low prices to try to keep them. Anybody who competes against the big cable companies will tell you that cable companies have been competing for years by offering two-year promotional prices to keep customers. However, competition might have gone into a new gear recently...