The workshop entitled “The Future of ICANN: After the JPA, What?” will be held Thursday, December 4, 2008 from 11:00-12:30 (local Hyderabad time, 5:30-7:00 UTC) at the upcoming Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, India. Co-sponsored by the IGP, the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus, Pharos Global and The Go Daddy Group, Inc., the workshop brings together several experts and practitioners in the field Internet governance to explore future models for governance of critical internet resources. The event will be webcast and online attendees will be able to submit questions through the IGF host website.
IGF Panel: Manging Critical Internet Resources, the Transition from IPv4 to IPv6
The main session panel entitled “Transition from IPv4 to IPv6 ” will be held Friday, December 5 2008 from 9:30-11:00 (local Hyderabad time, 4:00-5:30 UTC) at the upcoming Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, India. The panel brings together experts and practitioners in the field Internet governance to explore the IP address governance regime and issues of IPv4 scarcity and the transition to IPv6. Operational, social and economic aspects will be explored, as well as policies and incentives being considered. The event will be webcast and online attendees will be able to submit questions through the IGF host website.
Economic analysis of Registry-registrar integration
From the ICANN does good department, ICANN has released a report by Charles Rivers Associates on the economic relationship between registries and registrars. All in all the report takes a fairly cautious approach to its recommendations and its main benefits lie in the introduction of more rigorous economic analysis into the ICANN policy dialogue. In the full post, we summarize the recommendations, and will review the whole report in greater detail and report anything of note later.
Bulgarian Group Challenges ICANN's restriction of IDNs to Governments
A Bulgarian group has proven that our earlier concerns about the connection between fast-track IDN country code top level domains (ccTLDs) and government control of the Web were not hypothetical. A group known as UNINET would like to become the manager of an IDN top level domain composed of two...
Inaugural Address: “The Future of Freedom on the internet: Security, Privacy and Global Governance”
Milton Mueller, appointed as professor to the Chair of Security and Privacy of Internet Users within the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology will present an Inaugural Address, "The Future of Freedom on the internet: Security, Privacy and Global Governance" on Friday, 17 October...
Conference: Privacy in Social Network Sites
Milton Mueller will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Privacy in Social Network Sites Conference to be held October 23-24, 2008 at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The program is available here. Recently, Social Network Sites (SNS) have been used to support the American presidential campaigns and to...
Privacy by design?
I just returned from the “Internet of Things, Internet of the Future” conference sponsored by the French Presidency of the EU. At a panel on the privacy implications of RFID, I was struck by the way so many panelists, perhaps 4 or 5 out of 7, invoked “privacy by design” as a way of responding to RFID privacy threats. They all seemed to agree that it was somehow possible to pre-configure the technology in a way that privacy is structurally protected. Appropriately enough, the next day one of the chief intellectual promoters of this myth, law professor Lawrence Lessig, keynoted the conference.
I think people who put such stock in the ability of “design” or constructed “architectures” to solve or forestall social problems are wrong. Our ability to solve privacy problems depends on how strongly people value privacy, how well they mobilize politically and economically and whether they have the legal and regulatory tools to intervene in strategic areas of the value chain. There is no magic shortcut that allows a social objective to be inserted into the “genes” of a technology at the outset to save us from all that laborious work.
Commerce Department asks the world to comment on its plans to retain control of the root
The U.S. Commerce Department used its presence at a French conference on the “Internet of things” to announce that it will hold a public consultation on the different proposals to cryptographically sign the DNS root zone file, and determine who will hold the root zone trust anchor for global DNSSEC...
ICANN's DNSSEC root signing proposal d.o.a.?
What is technical and what is political? Some of you may recall various members of the technical community scolding us about how implementation of DNSSEC at the root was a “purely technical issue” and that the world should ignore the governance questions and just “get on with it.” This plea of urgency gained steam this summer during the Kaminsky attack episode, with some blaming the Department of Commerce as the “the show-stopper.” What some technical experts failed to recognize was the underlying power struggle involving ICANN, the U.S. Commerce Department and VeriSign over the arcane business of how the root zone of the DNS might be signed, an important step in the implementation of DNSSEC. And more importantly, how the US Government is making sure this process unfolds in a way that keeps it in control of the root.
