IGP Alert: “Will the UN Take Over the Internet” Through ICANN?

Eight years after its creation, ICANN is finally closing in on defining a process for adding new top level domains to the root. But the procedure it is putting into place threatens to give any individual government complete veto power over the words, concepts or symbols ICANN permits to be used as a top level domain. ICANN's policy development task force has put forward as an overriding principle the notion that "[proposed TLD] strings should not be contrary to public policy as set out in advice from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)."

Net Neutrality and the Wireless Internet

Since September I have been working on research on the wireless Internet, and specifically on the application of net neutrality principles to the mobile internet. I began this work at the OECD while I was in Paris on sabbatical. This topic seems to be a hot one. In November Nokia caught wind of it and I was invited to speak in Finland January 18 to present the work in progress. I was also invited to speak on wireless NN at the University of Tilburg (Netherlands) Law and Economics Center (TILEC) February 9. Upon returning from Tilburg I learned that Columbia's Tim Wu had released a paper on…Wireless Net Neutrality. (Beaten to the punch, eh? My report involves a lot more data collection and analysis than Tim's and will have to be reviewed by OECD, so it will be months before it can be released.) One immediate effect of my “testing the waters” presentations was to convince me that net neutrality is no longer a US-specific issue.

Talking Internet core resources at the IGF

Monika Ermert, writing for IP Watch, has posted a great summary on the recent IGF Stocktaking. Her article finishes with the debate whether or not to discuss Internet critical resources at IGF, in particular: "Patrik Falstrom, former member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), said he personally would reject discussion...

IGF Stock-Taking and Remote Participation

The IGF Stocktaking meeting is up and running, and they have worked hard to faciliate some level of remote participation in the meeting. For example, they make all of the archives from the Athens IGF meeting available, which is the subject of much of the discussion. Next, they have live...

A “clean slate” redesign of the Internet: NSF/OECD Workshop

On 31 January the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the OECD held a joint conference on “social and economic factors shaping the future of the Internet.” Attendance was restricted to about 20 full participants selected by OECD/NSF and another 30 attendees who were allowed to ask questions.

For NSF, the meeting promoted their effort to incorporate “social and economic factors” into the research around their Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) initiative. GENI is a major new NSF initiative to fund a “clean slate” redesign of the Internet. The intellectual driver of this initiative seems to be David Clark, who was also one of the leading protocol architects of the old Internet. Suzi Iacono, the NSF program officer who concentrates on the social, economic and behavioral aspects of information systems within the NSF's CISE division, believes that GENI can create a “testbed” that will allow social scientists to experiment with the way various protocol or network designs interact with social factors.

My first observation about this meeting is that aside from David Clark's always-interesting ruminations on what problems a clean-slate resdesign of the Internet might involve, very few new ideas were bruited. Almost all of the discussion revolved around the social, economic and political problems of the “old” Internet. More importantly, I wonder whether the desire to link analysis and understanding of social problems to the engineering or redesign of a new Internet is unambiguously a good thing.