ARIN is the Internet numbers registry for the North American region. It likes to present itself as a paragon of multistakeholder governance and a staunch opponent of the International Telecommunication Union's encroachments into Internet governance. Surely, if anyone wants to keep the ITU out of Internet addressing and routing policy,...
A policy change now being considered by the European IP address registry RIPE-NCC would completely eliminate needs assessments as an eligibility criterion for acquiring IPv4 number blocks. If successful, policy proposal 2013-3 would liberalize the allocation and use of IPv4 number blocks, and open the door to a much more...
A market has developed in which specialized firms discover new vulnerabilities in software and sell that knowledge for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. These vulnerabilities are known as “zero day exploits” because there is no advance knowledge of them before they are used. In this blog post, we...
There are hundreds of applications for generic words in ICANN’s new top level domain program. They include .BOOK, .MUSIC, .CLOUD, .ACCOUNTANT, .ARAB and .ART. Some of the applicants for these domains have chosen to make direct use of the name space under the TLD for their own sites rather than...
The release of the Mandiant report on "Advanced Persistent Threat 1" (APT1) marked a watershed in US-China relations on cybersecurity. We are glad the security company released the report: it is good that we are now discussing specific allegations backed with specific items of evidence instead of vague accusations about...
The "Independent Objector" (IO) is one of those unique ICANN creations that shows just how complicated and fraught with politics the simple act of coordinating top level domain name assignments can become. The IO is a special officer mandated by ICANN to review applications for new top level domains and...
In the wake of the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, we now have a campaign to de-fund the ITU. What's more, two House subcommittees will be holding a joint hearing to examine "international efforts to regulate the Internet" February 5. There are legitimate reasons to discuss...
New top level domain (TLD) applications raise high financial stakes for the applicants. Those seeking new TLDs will have invested at least half a million dollars to prepare and submit their proposal, and many of the companies involved have raised millions more in backing from investors or venture capital firms....
An important debate about the implications of BGPSEC - a new protocol that would use a hierarchical Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to validate Internet route announcements - is taking place in the IETF's Secure Inter-domain Routing (SIDR) Working Group. It's a highly technical discussion, but its significance for Internet governance...
“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.”
