Guest blog by David R. Johnson The Cross Community Working Group on ICANN Accountability (CCWG) spent part of its second meeting discussing a proposal to convert ICANN into an organization with "members," potentially including the heads of Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees (including GAC!??) who might be given the power...
Late Thursday the House of Representatives passed a consolidated appropriations bill to fund the majority of government through fiscal year 2015. Contradicting their ‘Internet freedom’ rhetoric, Republicans attached a rider to the gigantic ($1.014 trillion) federal funding bill that defunded any attempt by the NTIA to set the domain name...
The latest entry in the IANA transition/ICANN reform process is a bill introduced in the U.S. Congress by Representative Kelly (R., Pa.). It is called the “Defending Internet Freedom Act of 2014.” Before it can effectuate the IANA transition, the law requires NTIA to certify to the appropriate Congressional committees...
Political people like to compare the making of laws to the making of sausages. In the IANA transition, we can now claim to have produced a Frankfurter. The most difficult part of the IANA transition plan – changes regarding the management of the domain name system root – took significant...
Who will inherit the legacy of the NetMundial meeting? A one-off meeting in April of this year that successfully brought together governments, business, civil society and the technical community to produce a set of principles and a 'road map' was lauded as a major success for multistakeholder Internet governance. The question...
It’s Hallowe’en and, appropriately enough, there are scary things going on in Internet governance land. Let’s begin with the western world’s favorite Internet bogeyman, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU is holding its quadrennial Plenipotentiary in Busan, South Korea. Booo! It is now impossible for the ITU to have...
The previous blog post described the progress of the IANA transition in the IETF-led protocols space and the lack of progress in the numbers space. Feeling the pressure, the Numbers Resource Organization has since announced a more developed process for the numbers space. The names part of the IANA transition is...
By now it should be clear to everyone that the IANA functions have three distinct stakeholder communities. Sometimes called “the customers of the IANA,” they refer to 1) those directly affected by the management of the domain name system’s root zone file (mainly top level domain registries); 2) those who...
Guest blog post by Farzaneh Badii, University of Hamburg The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is more than just a forum for the exchange of ideas and for networking among Internet operators, policy makers and advocates. It is the only institution that aggregates, openly and inclusively, the entire multistakeholder community. Or...
The following is the speech delivered by IGP's Milton Mueller at the closing ceremony of the 9th Annual Internet Governance Forum I thank our host country and the IGF Secretariat for the excellent facilities and well-organized event. I also want to shout out to the Turkish alternative informatics activists for...
“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.”
