A few days ago, ICANN announced that it had renewed Public Interest Registry’s (PIR) contract to run the .ORG top level domain. As an .ORG registrant, we are generally satisfied with PIR’s operation of the domain. Equally important, we approve of its use of .ORG revenues to support the IETF...
ICANN's Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) has published a new proposed governance model for the DNS Root Server System. Root servers are critical parts of the domain name system. While Public Technical Identifiers, which used to be known as the IANA, defines the contents of the root zone file,...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call for Internet regulation may be a turning point in Internet governance. In a blog post called “Four Ideas to Regulate the Internet,” the Facebook chief holds up a white flag of surrender regarding self-regulation of its own platform. It wants governments to come in to take over 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...
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...
David Clark’s new book, Designing an Internet (MIT Press, 2018) is an important new contribution to Internet governance studies. For the past 35 years, Clark been one of the deepest thinkers about the Internet’s architecture and design principles. He is also one of the few computer scientists to willingly stray into public...
On the day before the American Thanksgiving holiday, ICANN released the initial report of the policy development process that is trying to reform Whois. Jokes about turkeys were probably inevitable, but to the EPDP members who have spent months of practically non-stop work on it (including two IGP partners), that sign of progress was something to...
Next week comes the UN Internet Governance Forum, and alongside it, the French government’s noble project of a Paris Peace Forum. The conjunction of these events has led to a proliferation of cyber norms declarations. As nice as all these calls for good behavior in cyberspace are, they inspire a sense of...
“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.”
