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...
ICANN's expedited policy development process (EPDP) to make Whois compatible with GDPR is making progress, albeit very slowly. Another round of face to face meetings will be held at ICANN 63 in Barcelona, Spain beginning Saturday October 20. But some participants in the group are becoming uneasy about ICANN CEO...
The Ostrom Workshop at the University of Indiana carries on the work of the late Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on governance and institutions. I was honored to be invited by the Ostrom Workshop to give the 3rd annual Ostrom Memorial lecture Wednesday, October 3. The lecture challenged the idea of...
The expedited policy development group that is trying to reform ICANN’s Whois system post-GDPR met face to face in ICANN's Los Angeles headquarters September 24 – 26. The same old conflicts of interest underlying Whois policy for the last 18 years resurfaced repeatedly, but this time important progress was made....
“Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms Most liberal internationalists, particularly in the United States, are thoroughly committed to the idea that the development of cyber norms is the key to resolving inter-state conflicts in cyberspace. This is the...
Ever since ICANN’s creation, there has been a clash between the protection of personal data and its contractually-required Whois service. Under ICANN contracts, registrars were required to publish sensitive information about domain name registrants. The email addresses, names and other contact information of domain holders was available to anyone in...
ICANN* has a problem. One could even call it a disease - an organizational version of Sydenham’s chorea. What are the symptoms? This: ICANN has in place elaborate, well-defined, and reasonably balanced representational mechanisms for making policies. But every time it has an important decision to make, ICANN tries to...
“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.”
