At the Toronto ICANN meeting, the Council of Europe, which participates in the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) as an observer, released a report on the relationship between freedom of expression rights and new top level domain applications. The report emphasizes the link between freedom of expression, freedom of association and...
The ICANN Toronto meeting marks the beginning of the tenure of Fadi Chehade as the organization's CEO. Chehade has impressed almost everyone he has encountered with his conciliatory spirit and his willingness to listen. He is making a concerted effort to signal the changes in the organization and its direction...
Public interest groups involved in ICANN will gather on Friday 12 October 2012 at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto, Canada. The event, "ICANN & Internet Governance: Security & Freedom in a Connected World," is sponsored by the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC), the voice of civil society in ICANN....
In response to a letter from ICANN's Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) to data protection authorities concerning overreaching requests of law enforcement agencies in ICANN's ongoing Registrar Accreditation Agreement negotiations, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party has written the ICANN Board. Their comments focused on two new requirements proposed by...
A company that holds a legacy address block recently sought an opinion from the General Counsel of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) about the legal status of its IPv4 address holdings.The answers make for an explosive entry in the emerging IPv4 address market. IGP Blog has obtained a copy...
Yet another controversy has struck ICANN's new TLD program, leading to yet another call to change the rules in the middle of the game. This time, however, the protests do not come from trademark owners but from registrars, who are making misleading appeals to freedom and human rights. This blog...
Today IGP releases its study of the market for IPv4 number blocks. It is the first independent academic analysis of an emerging market in number resources. The commoditization of IP addresses is likely to have a major impact on the governance of the Internet. Although the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)...
Based on calculations that I have recently done, nearly a third of IPv4 address space is not in active use. The IP address calculations refer to consecutive IP blocks not advertised by any of the autonomous systems on the global Internet routing tables, not to individual addresses in existing subnets....
Did you know that .BABY is an evil domain name? The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia thinks so, and wants to censor it. Not just in their little kingdom but globally, by insisting that ICANN not allow it. Never mind that the applicant for .BABY is the staid Johnson & Johnson...
Finally, what you’ve all been waiting for: the right way to fit governments into what is supposed to be ICANN’s bottom-up, multi-stakeholder policy development process. The ideas in this blog post came out of some fascinating discussions we had at the European Summer School on Internet Governance. In particular, I’d...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
