Ukraine’s representative to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) has sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to remove Russian-administered top level domains (.RU, .SU and .рф) from the DNS root zone. In a separate letter, Ukraine’s representative also asked RIPE NCC to withdraw the...
February 22, 2022 EARN IT Act moves forward The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a new version of the highly controversial Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act (EARN IT Act). First introduced in March 2020, EARN IT Act pares back the immunity protections under Section 230 of...
The Metaverse will be territorialized Metaverses are being promoted as a virtual reality universe where users can interact and feel present “no matter how far apart…” Well, some users, anyway. The technology in VR headsets seems to be so advanced that it’s use is restricted by those on various USG...
Europe’s industrial policy for recursive DNS The European Commission’s 2020 Data Strategy is intended “to make the EU a leader in a data-driven society [by] creating a single market for data.” As part of its misguided “digital sovereignty” effort, the plan budgeted an initial 14 million Euro for a recursive...
Representatives of the Biden administration are now saying that its “Alliance for the Future of the Internet” will be launched "in coming weeks.” Despite our earlier article indicating that the initiative might have some promise, the more we’ve heard, the more pessimistic we are about it. The Alliance has three...
1 January, 2022 Happy New Year! To start off 2022 we look back - and forward - at the granddaddy of Internet governance issues, domain names. TLDs go Hippety Hop ICANN is embroiled in a controversy about approving the transfer of a TLD (.HIPHOP) from its original owner (Uni Registry...
https://youtu.be/Gf9Mx7thSOA Jyoti Panday, Brenden Kuerbis, Milton Mueller and Daniel Perez Fernandez debrief on the 16th UN IGF. On the agenda: hybrid meetings, confusion about digital sovereignty, assessing multistakeholder initiatives in content moderation, the U.S. "announcement of a future announcement" of an Internet "alliance," and digital cooperation, UN-style.
The United States is attempting to assert moral leadership again in the field of internet governance. I refer here to the "new covenant" or "new alliance for the future of the internet" that Biden administration advisor Tim Wu is developing. Wu addressed the UN Internet Governance Forum Thursday in a...
Amid Covid concerns, IGF meets in Poland As of this moment, the UN Internet Governance Forum will still hold a hybrid meeting in Katowice, Poland. The hosts made an announcement affirming that "it goes ahead with the physical meeting as planned as it has taken all necessary precautions to make...
The UN Internet Governance Forum has been targeted for significant changes over the last 4 years, with the impetus coming from the office of the UN Secretary-General. Some of the proposed changes are well-intentioned attempts to make the IGF more relevant. But many of them are leading to increasing stratification...
“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.”
