This year's Canadian IGF was quite nostalgic. Its approach was similar to some of the past United Nations Internet Governance Forum. A couple of years ago at the UN Internet Governance Forum, the narrative that shaped the human rights discussions was more about our rights on the Internet than the...
March 4 was a landmark day in the history of Whois. The final report of ICANN’s Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP), setting out a new, more or less privacy-compliant Whois policy, was approved by the GNSO Council, ICANN’s policy development organ for domain names. The policy recommendations in that report,...
Today the Internet Governance Project published a new report indicating that the transition to a new Internet standard may get stuck somewhere between the old and the new. The data communications protocol supporting the Internet (IPv4) is almost 40 years old, and its 32-bit address space is too small for...
The ICANN policy process for bringing Whois into compliance with privacy law has just about reached the end of its first phase (we will report more on that when it releases the final report). The next phase will focus on what is sometimes called "access" but is more accurately described...
Not a day goes by without hearing that Russia wants to nationalize the Internet, fragment the Internet or block its citizens' access to the global Internet. Just yesterday, media sources announced that Russia will be testing its Internet shut down capabilities, which is a rather inaccurate account of Russia’s move...
In November 2018, US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added two Iranians to its sanctions list (known as the specially designated nationals), over a ransomware attack and blocked their access to their Bitcoin wallets. Specially designated nationals is a list of organizations and individuals with whom...
The most recent World Internet Conference/Wuzhen Summit (WIC-Wuzhen) took place in Wuzhen China from November 7-9 of 2018. This was the fifth iteration of an event intended to provide “an international platform for China and the world to communicate” and a “Chinese platform for sharing and co-governing the Internet.” WIC-Wuzhen...
Facebook did not have a good 2018. Treating its customers' personal information as a commodity, it was revealed by New York Times that “For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners...
Last year Georgia Tech's Internet Governance Project teamed up with ICANN's Office of the Chief Technology Officer to research the economic factors affecting the decisions of network operators to deploy Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The study was commissioned because we both believe that the Internet community needs a better...
Wow, has 2018 flown by! Hopefully, you're in a restful and reflective holiday mood. We want to look back at the top developments in Internet governance we covered, and offer some thoughts on issues that are heating up and what will be happening in the coming year. In the past...
“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.”
