Keep your pants on: Governments want suspenders for secure routing

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...

Meltdown IV: How ICANN resists accountability

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...

Meltdown III: How top-down ‘implementation’ replaced bottom-up policymaking

In our third installment on ICANN’s accountability, we document the saga of the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH). The TMCH provides a clear example of the problem of staff-made policy. What was supposed to be a mere ‘implementation’ of a policy developed by ICANN’s bottom-up process suddenly became a different policy with...

The day the world agreed with IGP?

On the heels of the latest jaw-dropping revelations about NSA surveillance capabilities, security expert Bruce Schneier implores the engineering community to: ...influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the...

Meltdown II: The Unilateral Right to Amend

The multi-year fight over the unilateral right to amend registry contracts is instance #1 of this series. It’s also interesting because it shows that ICANN has the power and the propensity to abuse not just weaker civil society groups, but well-off businesses as well. One of the foundations of ICANN’s...