Judging from IGP blog's readership, which grew by about 25% compared to last year, the most interesting and important topics we covered were China's impact on Internet governance and the nexus between internet censorship and new Top-Level Domains. Wikileaks was third, with ICANN accountability rounding out the top of the pack. Individual posts on COICA, the Bredolab botnet prosecution, vertical integration and the move away from multistakeholderism at IGF also found their way into IGP's most popular blog posts (see below for a list of the top 15).
Our 8 December post framing the Wikileaks controversy as an Internet governance issue was the single most-read blog post in 2010 by far. Apparently, our emphasis on the continuing tension between nation-states and networked information via the Internet struck a chord.
But the “cyberwar” over Wikileaks only happened in the last month of the year. China and the Internet, on the other hand, was an unfolding series of events we covered throughout the year, and generated more traffic. Readers flocked to our discussion of China's attempt to implement “real name registration” requirements for online bulletins, especially after Blizzard Entertainment, producer of World of Warcraft, tried to follow their precedent (and backed off). But the Google-China and US-China conflicts also contributed great interest to this topic.
The TLD/censorship story was also an ongoing story only marginally less popular than China. It dealt with the the fate of the .xxx domain – still controversial and still targeted by some governments – as well as the attempt of the GAC to impose more general “morality and public order” restraints on new TLD applicants. We think we've made substantial progress in convincing more people that institutionalizing censorship via ICANN is an important – and potentially dangerous – precedent for global governance of the Internet.
