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...
When ICANN's Fadi Chehadé said that "The Affirmation of Commitments needs to change from being a contract between ICANN and the US Government, to a contract between ICANN and you" what exactly did he mean? Was it just another Fadi-esque appealing turn of phrase? Was it anything more than a rhetorical jab...
The reaction to last weeks announcement from the leaders of the "I* organizations" (ICANN, the RIRs, IETF, IAB, W3C and ISOC) on the future of Internet governance has been overwhelming. Judging from the 90,000+ visits to the IGP blog's brief analysis of the situation, there is a global groundswell of interest...
The difficulty of applying a hierarchically organized PKI to the decentralized world of Internet routing is being fully exposed in a new Internet-draft. The document represents a rational response to an RPKI that closely ties address resources to a handful of Internet governance institutions, nicely illustrates how governments and national...
On the heels of the latest jaw-dropping revelations about NSA surveillance capabilities, security expert Bruce Schneier implores the engineering community to: ...influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the...
Ah, summer. Time to catch up on reading that backlog of documents sitting on the desk corner - including a court ruling about RIPE NCC's summons against the Dutch government concerning operation Ghostclick. If you remember, the U.S. FBI secured a U.S. court order in November 2011 compelling all RIRs...
The RIPE region is moving closer to removing needs assessment from its policies governing initial IPv4 address allocations and secondary transfers. While support for that change has steadily grown, there remains a vocal minority insisting that operators submit documentation to a central bureaucratic authority which reviews some technical indicators in...
As the IPv4 address transfer market continues to grow and the Regional Internet Registries deal with address leasing and eliminating needs assessment in the post-free pool era, we thought it would be useful to review the literature and development of another related secondary market: radio spectrum. Spectrum resources and their...
Declaring Independence in Cyberspace tells the story of the struggle between governments and the global Internet community over control of the Internet registries (IANA). It offers new insights into a pressing question with profound implications: is state sovereignty the immutable foundation of global governance, or can new technological capabilities change the model?
“This is a book that needed to be written, and no one is better placed to write it than Milton Mueller. This full, rigorous account provides researchers and policymakers with a precious resource on global internet governance.”
