The Justice Department Sues Georgia Tech: A Teachable Moment in Cybersecurity Management

Georgia Tech, a world leader in cybersecurity research and education, is now in the news for not complying with federal cybersecurity contractual obligations. This sounds funny and embarrassing until you look deeper into the story and understand what this case is really about. It’s not about security. It’s about compliance....

The U.S. FCC’s intrusion into routing security: A comment

The Internet Governance Project (IGP) has submitted comments in response to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Matter of Reporting on Border Gateway Protocol Risk Mitigation Progress, FCC 24-146 and Secure Internet Routing, FCC-24-62. Internet routing was for many years left network operators to...

The First Amendment and Platform Content Moderation: The Supreme Court’s ‘Moody’ Decision

Moody v NetChoice is an important new entry into the century-long debate over how new technology affects legal standards protecting free speech. It was decided July 1, 2024. The case began in 2021 when state legislatures in Florida and Texas, both dominated by conservative Republicans, passed laws regulating large social...

In Victory for Free Expression Online, ICANN Refuses to Enforce “Registry Voluntary Commitments”

At ICANN's 80th meeting, underway this week in Kigali, Rwanda, the board finally killed off an attempt by a few applicants for new Top Level Domains to use domain name registry contracts to regulate website content. Board director Becky Burr said that after consulting its lawyers, the ICANN board has...

The Power to Govern Ourselves: (Multi)Stakeholders, States and Collective Action

The following is the text of the Keynote speech delivered at the GigArts 2024 conference, The Hague, Netherlands, June 4, 2024.  We now have almost 30 years of experience with so-called multistakeholder governance. Sometimes it’s called the multistakeholder model. Sometimes it’s the “multistakeholder approach.” Sometimes, it’s an “ism,” like communism...

The Disappointing NETMundial+10

The NETMundial 10th anniversary event was held April 23 and 24 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. As we wrote earlier, “Netmundial was a transformative moment in global internet governance. Inspired by the Snowden revelations, and amplified by the U.S. government’s announcement that it would relinquish its control of ICANN and the DNS root,”...

Surprise! National Security Controls on Drones are Harming National Security

Many government controls on the digital economy are justified by national security claims. Too often, these controls are motivated not by sound cybersecurity principles, but by an archaic economic nationalism. The prevailing idea in the U.S. Defense Department, for example, seems to be that something “made in the USA” is...