The Ostrom Workshop at the University of Indiana carries on the work of the late Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on governance and institutions. I was honored to be invited by the Ostrom Workshop to give the 3rd annual Ostrom Memorial lecture Wednesday, October 3. The lecture challenged the idea of...
The expedited policy development group that is trying to reform ICANN’s Whois system post-GDPR met face to face in ICANN's Los Angeles headquarters September 24 – 26. The same old conflicts of interest underlying Whois policy for the last 18 years resurfaced repeatedly, but this time important progress was made....
Ilona Stadnik and Braxton Moore have recently joined the Internet Governance Project. Ilona is a Fulbright visiting researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, Internet Governance Project. During her stay, she will be focussing on her Ph.D. thesis about Russia-US cybersecurity relations and will also contribute to IGP's cybersecurity research, including...
“Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms Most liberal internationalists, particularly in the United States, are thoroughly committed to the idea that the development of cyber norms is the key to resolving inter-state conflicts in cyberspace. This is the...
Ever since ICANN’s creation, there has been a clash between the protection of personal data and its contractually-required Whois service. Under ICANN contracts, registrars were required to publish sensitive information about domain name registrants. The email addresses, names and other contact information of domain holders was available to anyone in...
Public attribution of cyber incidents to nation-state actors is increasing. It is a challenging and important accountability function that is often performed by a combination of threat intelligence firms or other private actors and less frequently by states. But is it time to institutionalize cyber attribution? The cybersecurity community has...
ICANN* has a problem. One could even call it a disease - an organizational version of Sydenham’s chorea. What are the symptoms? This: ICANN has in place elaborate, well-defined, and reasonably balanced representational mechanisms for making policies. But every time it has an important decision to make, ICANN tries to...
The Internet Governance Project has prepared a draft response to a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) issued by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on "International Internet Policy Priorities." We were happy to see that the NOI asked specifically about challenges to free expression and the free flow of...
As we anticipated, ICANN the organization, under the pressure of powerful interest groups, decided to come up with its own model for access to personal information of domain name registrants data. It is a draft for "discussion." But there is a timeline as well: Phase 1: Community discussion and consultations on...
Now that Whois has been changed to become compliant with the GDPR, the battleground over Whois and privacy has shifted to the question of how people can get past the restrictions and gain access to all the personal information about domain name registrants that used to be there. This process...
“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.”
