Last week we began a review of the Council on Foreign Relations’ recent report on “Defending an Open, Global, Secure and Resilient Internet.” Judging from our web statistics, neither the CFR report nor our review of it is setting the world on fire. But we doggedly adhere to our plan...
U.S. policy toward Internet governance has not been innovative, or even clearly focused, since 1999. With its wholesale liberalization of telecommunication and information services in the 1980s and '90s, its 1996 Framework for Global Electronic Commerce and its (semi-) privatization of DNS via ICANN, the US took bold moves that...
At the RIPE 66 meeting in Dublin, the bold, long-overdue proposal to eliminate needs assessments for IPv4 number allocations got an interesting response. RIPE-NCC is the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, and almost everyone in Europe supported the proposal. Vocal opposition came from two policy tourists from North America: ARIN...
The following comments represent the personal views of He Baohong, China Academy of Telecommunications Research, Ministry of Information Industry and Technology, Peoples Republic of China, on the topic of “One World One Internet? Integration vs. fragmentation.” That was the title of a panel held at the NCUC Policy Conference at...
A video was posted of an ICANN staff member interviewing the Chair of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee, Heather Dryden of Canada. The interview appeared on the ICANN website one day before the deadline for public comments about the Beijing advice issued by the GAC. The Beijing Communique, hammered out in...
In a "policy implementation and experience report" presented at ARIN 31 in Barbados, ARIN's staff noted that they are seeing "circumstances" related to the leasing of IPv4 number blocks. At the recent INET in Denver, ARIN's Director John Curran alleged that there is a "correlation" between address leasing activity and organizations...
Remember all the businesses, internet techies and NGOs who were screaming about an “ITU takeover of the Internet” a year ago? Where are they now? Because this time, we actually need them. May 14 – 21 is Internet governance week in Geneva. We have declared it so because there will...
On Wednesday, April 10, a bill "to Affirm the Policy of the United States Regarding Internet Governance" was marked up in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill is an attempt to put a formal policy statement into statute law. The effective part says simply: It is the policy of...
If anyone doubted our recurring warnings that ICANN’s GAC is evolving into an intergovernmental organization, they should have come to Beijing for ICANN 46. A new GAC communique was released in the middle of the public comment forum. As people downloaded and read it, they discovered that GAC’s “advice” is...
ICANN's Noncommercial Users Constituency, which represents civil society and individuals in the domain name policy making process, has established a traditional of holding policy conferences at ICANN meetings that are usually far more interesting and creative than the official workshops put on by ICANN. The Beijing meeting is no exception....
“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.”
