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...
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...
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...
In October 2013 Fadi Chehadi will have been President and CEO of ICANN for one year. (Yes, it does seem longer than that, doesn’t it?) His apparent sincerity, his enthusiasm, his cosmopolitan perspective and his talk of equality among stakeholders initially gave many people hope that the corporation would be...
The deadline for public comments to the United Nations' Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation is only about a week away. For those unfamiliar with the arcane details of Internet governance processes, 'enhanced cooperation' is an unfulfilled promise that emerged out of the 2002-2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)....
Ah, summer. Time to catch up on reading that backlog of documents sitting on the desk corner - including a court ruling about RIPE NCC's summons against the Dutch government concerning operation Ghostclick. If you remember, the U.S. FBI secured a U.S. court order in November 2011 compelling all RIRs...
The RIPE region is moving closer to removing needs assessment from its policies governing initial IPv4 address allocations and secondary transfers. While support for that change has steadily grown, there remains a vocal minority insisting that operators submit documentation to a central bureaucratic authority which reviews some technical indicators in...
Note: the paper posted here was initially presented at the GigaNet workshop The Global Governance of the Internet: Intergovernmentalism, Multistakeholderism and Networks, Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland, May 17, 2013. I first heard the Cyber Cold War concept applied to the Internet in the aftermath of the Dubai World Conference on International Telecommunications...
We've asserted before that the US government’s Internet governance policy has lost direction and become confused and self-contradictory. Yesterday the U.S. Commerce Department confirmed the diagnosis. In preparation for the upcoming ICANN meeting in Durban, South Africa, the NTIA released a bizarre statement about top level domain applications involving geographic...
As the IPv4 address transfer market continues to grow and the Regional Internet Registries deal with address leasing and eliminating needs assessment in the post-free pool era, we thought it would be useful to review the literature and development of another related secondary market: radio spectrum. Spectrum resources and their...
“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.”
