The controversy over the sale of ORG has taken an ugly turn. As we have made clear in several blog posts related to the sale, what registrants need is not emotional cries to “stop the sale” but an ICANN-mediated renewal of the commitments made in the original grant, and some...
ICANN's Noncommercial Stakeholders Group (NCSG) has sent a letter to the ICANN board asking it to enter into negotiations with Ethos Capital to ensure that its operation of the ORG domain conforms to criteria upon which the original award of ORG was made. Invoking the original Request for Proposals in...
The UN Internet Governance Forum demonstrated its utility as a forum for bringing together relevant parties for negotiations and discussions yesterday. A snap "town hall" meeting convened about 50 civil society members and representatives of the Internet Society (ISOC) and ICANN to express concerns about the sale of .ORG. Notably...
On November 13, the Internet Society announced that the .ORG domain registry will be sold to a for-profit private equity firm. Much of the community that pays attention to ICANN is in an uproar about it. There is now a movement to “Save .ORG;” there are claims that the sale...
Next week is the 14th annual meeting of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. The event will be held in Berlin and is hosted by the German government. IGP has put together round table discussions on two of the hottest current problems in Internet governance: 1) the rising tide of...
In the first section of this piece I argued that the anti-Huawei litany only makes sense when one realizes that the Chinese state, not a global telecommunication equipment manufacturer based in China, is the target of this attack. China, in this view, is an integrated monolith and any Chinese firm...
On May 29, I attended an AEI event on “International economics and securing next-generation 5G wireless networks,” with Ambassador Robert Strayer, who heads the US State Department’s CIP team. But the focus of the talk was not really on 5G security, international trade or 5G development. In fact, there was no constructive agenda at all. The talk was an extended attack on China and the Chinese-based telecommunications...
DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is a new IETF standard that modifies DNS to encrypt its queries. The stated objective of the new standard is to improve the security and confidentiality of DNS queries and reduce latency. Ever since we did our first study on the use of PKI in routing,...
The Swiss-based advocacy organization ICT4Peace held a workshop late last month to discuss ongoing efforts to build an independent network of organizations engaged in attribution activities. There were approximately two dozen attendees, from US and European universities (including Georgia Tech’s IGP), industry, a handful of European government agencies, and a...
New fuel was added to the moral panic around social media last week when the New York Times published an article purporting to show that YouTube was responsible for a rightwing takeover of an entire country, Brazil. The new theme being pushed is that social media algorithms produce “online radicalization.”...
“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.”
