As various groups discuss their ideas for the Brazil Conference on the Future of Internet Governance in April, one issue is rising to the top of the agenda: stakeholder roles. Increasingly, it looks as if the Brazil conference will be used to challenge a definition of multistakeholder governance that assigns...
The European Commission is preparing a policy statement on Internet governance that elevates state power and multi-lateralism over the civil society-based open and participatory governance that has characterized the native Internet governance institutions. An early version of the policy document, obtained from sources in a national government, addresses “Internet Governance...
The improvised alliance between ICANN and the government of Brazil is now beginning to take shape. The “summit” that President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil announced last month now has a name: the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance. It’s no longer a summit, it’s a GMMFIG. (Shall...
When ICANN's Fadi Chehadé said that "The Affirmation of Commitments needs to change from being a contract between ICANN and the US Government, to a contract between ICANN and you" what exactly did he mean? Was it just another Fadi-esque appealing turn of phrase? Was it anything more than a rhetorical jab...
In her UN General Assembly speech denouncing NSA surveillance, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff said: Information and communications technologies cannot be the new battlefield between States. Time is ripe to create the conditions to prevent cyberspace from being used as a weapon of war, through espionage, sabotage, and attacks against systems...
It's 2004 again. Ideas and proposals for the reform of Internet governance are now flying all over the place, just as they did at the outset of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance. At the recently concluded Seoul Conference on Cyberspace, a memo was circulated calling for the creation of...
The reaction to last weeks announcement from the leaders of the "I* organizations" (ICANN, the RIRs, IETF, IAB, W3C and ISOC) on the future of Internet governance has been overwhelming. Judging from the 90,000+ visits to the IGP blog's brief analysis of the situation, there is a global groundswell of interest...
In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major Internet organizations – ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries – turned their back on the US government. With striking...
The difficulty of applying a hierarchically organized PKI to the decentralized world of Internet routing is being fully exposed in a new Internet-draft. The document represents a rational response to an RPKI that closely ties address resources to a handful of Internet governance institutions, nicely illustrates how governments and national...
If you wanted to make ICANN’s Board and Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) accountable, would you put the chairman of ICANN’s Board and the Chair of the GAC in charge of running a committee of ICANN decision makers to assess its accountability? Let's ask it in another way: if you wanted...
“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.”
