There has been much discussion in ICANN circles concerning auctions to resolve new gTLD contention sets. This article summarizes the discussion and events to date, and suggests there should be little worry for applicants seeking to resolve their contention sets via private auction, rather than ICANN's "last resort" auction. more
The United States government (USG) has provided its first official reaction to the October 2013 Montevideo Statement issued by organizations responsible for coordination of the Internet technical infrastructure, the upcoming April Internet governance conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil , as well as other matters related to Internet governance -- including the ITU Plenipotentiary meeting scheduled for October in Busan, South Korea. more
The recent decision regarding the end of Network Neutrality (NN) in the USA is based on a totally flawed telecoms policy. Once the foundation of a telecoms 'house' is fundamentally wrong, whatever is built on top of that will basically collapse at a certain point. The market fundamentals in the USA are so wrong that any initiative to improve broadband access, fibre roll-outs, infrastructure competition or telecoms and transactor innovation, will either fail or have a minimal impact. more
Not long after the message that Microsoft will stop updating Windows XP from 8 April onwards, after extending it beyond the regular life cycle for over a year already, came the soothing message that malware will be monitored for another year. That may be good news to some, but the fact remains that this is not the same as patching. Remaining on XP leads to a vulnerable state of the desktop, lap top and any other machine running on XP; vulnerable to potential hacks, cyber crimes, becoming part of a botnet, etc. more
The worldwide public discussion about surveillance produced by the Snowden revelations has so far largely missed a major strategic fault with national security arguments for continued mass surveillance: that economic damage to the technology sector but more fundamentally to the wider economy is a likely result. This damage is also likely to undermine security far more than any potential gains from continuing as we are - or continuing but with some transparency or narrowing that leaves the existing industrial scale surveillance system largely unchecked. more
The applicant community is working its will on the rules for generic top-level domain (gTLD) auctions published by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). But, as always, ICANN is no pushover. ICANN posted the new gTLD auction rules for public comment last month after community outcry over the preliminary rules during ICANN's Public Meeting in Buenos Aires in November. more
AT&T got critics' keyboards activated by announcing plans for a Sponsored Data service, enabling websites to pay for their end-users data consumption. The service has been characterized as a type of toll-free or "1-800? style service for mobile data. Does this contravene network neutrality principles? AT&T says the traffic from the sponsoring sites will be treated the same as other traffic on the network. A US public interest group, Public Knowledge, claims this is precisely what a net neutrality violation looks like. more
What does the crystal ball say for the Internet in 2014? Here are three scenarios for what could happen with the global Internet Governance Eco-System in the coming 12 months... In the worst case scenario the Internet gets more and more fragmented and re-nationalized. A growing number of governments start to define a "national Internet segment" and develop policies to surveil, censor and control access to and use of the Internet. National firewalls will separate the "domestic Internet" from the global Internet and an exit and entrance regime into networks is introduced where users need passwords, handed out by governmental authorities on an annual basis, to go from one domain to another... more
2012 will always be remembered as the Year of Wikileaks. Similarly, 2013 shall also be remembered as the year that Edward Snowden, a computer security specialist and former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor, leaked classified information regarding the NSA global surveillance programs. Whilst Wikileaks was about US diplomatic cables, the Edward Snowden disclosure of classified NSA information to private media organizations such as the UK Guardian newspaper has had graver implications for global Internet privacy. more
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Kingsbury Commitment which effectively established AT&T, a.k.a. The Bell System, as a government sanctioned monopoly. It was on December 19, 1913 that AT&T agreed to an out-of-court settlement of a US Government's anti-trust challenge. In return for the government agreeing not to pursue its case, AT&T agreed to sell its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph company... more
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