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...
On May 24-25, 2018, the Internet Governance Project (IGP) at Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy held its 4th Annual Workshop in Atlanta. This year’s workshop theme was “Digital Free Trade or Cyber Nationalism? Setting the Course for a 21st Century Digital Trade Policy.” The workshop explored the scientific and...
The collision between ICANN’s Whois regime and the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took a decisive turn May 25, 2018, when ICANN filed injunction proceedings against EPAG, a German registrar affiliated with Tucows. EPAG had notified ICANN that as of May 25 it would no longer collect administrative and technical...
At the International Studies Association convention in San Francisco, at an especially interesting panel on cybersecurity, we were privileged to hear excerpts from a forthcoming book by Michael Warner, Historian for the United States Cyber Command, and John Childress. Warner examined the last 20 years of U.S. Russia relationships in...
What's going on in China? I was invited there for a series of lectures at Beijing’s Communication University of China (CUC) during the week of March 18. Thanks to Professor Xu Peixi, who organized the tour, I got a chance to meet most of the academics, researchers and policy analysts...
The conflict between ICANN’s contracts and data protection law is dominating discourse and policy making at the ICANN 61 meeting in San Juan Puerto Rico. ICANN requires registries and registrars to provide a public directory service, known as Whois, that gives anyone in the world immediate access to personal data...
Probably few people involved with the Internet, either as users or suppliers, have ever heard of the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC). In fact, on January 31 this United Nations-based working group with grand ambitions for making “global public policy” for the Internet terminated its activities without accomplishing anything....
My last blog emphasized the importance of defining a purpose for Whois consistent with ICANN’s mission. It is impossible for ICANN to comply with GDPR unless this is done. Why doesn’t ICANN already have a defined purpose for Whois? Therein lies an interesting story - a story with a hero,...
ICANN Corp seems to have finally taken the tension between Whois and privacy rights seriously, thanks to the impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. In preparing for the advent of GDPR, ICANN has solicited legal advice from Hamilton Advokatbyrå, a Swedish law firm, regarding possible conflicts between its...
A profoundly important development in digital trade took place this week – and it was not a very good one. But it attracted much less notice and protest than it should have. We are referring to the decision by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. to erect a...
“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.”
