In Chinese online discussions, many people are using the expression “one sword throat-slashing strike.” [一剑封喉] This forbidding term refers to the United States’ seven-year export ban on China’s second-largest telecom supplier, ZTE, which threatens its very existence and has put the company “in a state of shock.” In the Chinese...
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...
There is a constant drumbeat of Russian threat stories these days, but none is more important to Internet governance than the legal battle between Kaspersky Labs and the United States. It highlights the dangers of nation-states inserting themselves into cybersecurity governance, and shows why the alignment of cybersecurity with nation...
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....
The cyber norm panel that took place in early February at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sheds light on how “cyber norms” came about. States’ negotiations over international cybersecurity strategy evolved from focusing on 'control of weaponization of information technology' to 'managing states’ behavior through cyber norms'. Moreover, it...
Nowadays the Internet community has a laundry list of things to be frightened about. In the Internet Governance Project’s new paper, we try to reduce that list by one. With the governments' attempts to localize data, increase surveillance and curb freedom of expression, civil society especially is concerned with how...
In a victory for fairness and rule-based Internet governance, an independent review panel (IRP) has decided that ICANN was wrong to deny retailing giant Amazon, Inc. the top level domain AMAZON. Key elements of the decision were unanimous, particularly the conclusion that the Board “cannot accept GAC consensus advice as...
ICANN is a California nonprofit headquartered in the United States. ICANN’s accountability reforms included a discussion of how U.S. jurisdiction affects ICANN’s accountability and domain name users. Not satisfied with ending U.S. control over the DNS root, a few stakeholders wanted to get ICANN out of the U.S. altogether. It...
Will the Internet fragment? Professor Mueller gave a talk about his book "Will the Internet Fragment?" at Clemson University (his talk starts around 4:30). He says the network effects of global compatibility are powerful enough to defeat a technical fracturing of the web. The real threat comes from governments' attempts to align...
“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.”
