Last Friday’s Department of Commerce announcement means that the process of globalizing the governance of the DNS root zone has officially begun. Almost immediately, ICANN began spinning the NTIA announcement to re-scope what is actually up for debate. Not surprisingly, the spin goes in a direction calculated to subtly strengthen...
We applaud the recent statement from the NTIA announcing its intention to “transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multistakeholder community.” This is a historic moment in the evolution of Internet governance. IGP has been leading the call for the US government to be consistent about its non-governmental...
The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History, by Richard Hill Reviewed by Milton Mueller This recent book starts out with the question: Did the United Nations (UN) attempt to take over the Internet in December 2012 so as to control it and establish censorship?...
Today IGP releases an innovative proposal to resolve the 15-year controversy over the United States government’s special relationship to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The proposal, which involves removing root zone management functions from ICANN and creating an independent and neutral private sector consortium to take...
Editors note: This blog post is based on a talk given at the New America Foundation December 5, 2013. Thanks to Tim Maurer and Kevin Bankston for hosting the talk The evolution of Internet governance has been characterized by a tension between the Internet’s organically evolved governance institutions and nation-states....
Last week, we covered the RIPE community's passing of ripe-604, focused on removing ex ante needs analysis from market transfers of IPv4 addresses. In yet another sign of a liberalization, RIPE nearly simultaneously passed policy ripe-605, which opens to door to legacy holders in order to maintain accurate registration records. Importantly, ripe-605...
Despite a title tweak to assuage a few stakeholders' sensitivities, policy proposal 2013-03 "Post Depletion Adjustment of Procedures to Match Policy Objectives, and Clean-up of Obsolete Policy Text" has been accepted by the RIPE community and is now policy. The gist of the proposal removes the requirement for organizations engaged...
In 1983, Paul Dimaggio and Walter Powell authored what would become a seminal article in sociology, The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.[1] They argued that, because of constraints imposed by the state and professions, "rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they attempt...
On January 23 Daniel Sepulveda, the State Department’s Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, gave a notable speech in Washington on Internet governance. This is the first US official statement on the topic since the NSA spying scandal broke and altered the landscape. Entitled "Internet Governance 2020 - Geopolitics...
You're hearing a lot about the upcoming Brazil Conference on the Future of Internet Governance. Trying to make sense of it? A new paper by IGP’s Milton Mueller and Ben Wagner of the Center for Global Communication Studies analyzes what it might mean for the future of global Internet governance. Entitled...
“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.”
