For the past four years, AFRINIC, the Regional Address Registry (RIR) for Africa, has been paralyzed by its legal conflict with Cloud Innovation in the Mauritius courts. The root cause of the conflict was a policy dispute over the inter-regional use of IP addresses. (see this article) Keep that root...
What should become of the World Summit on the Information Society? The WSIS+20 review process, culminating at the UN General Assembly in December 2025, will assess progress made since the original WSIS and chart a course for its future. The UN is preparing a "Zero draft" and asked for comments...
From June 23 to June 27, 2025, the Technical Meeting on Public Communication in Emergencies: Tackling Misinformation and Retaining Public Trust in Disruptive Information Environments was held at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. The event aimed to gather expert advice, operational knowledge, and research insights on the...
No one will complain about the operation of the 2025 Internet Governance Forum. The Norwegians did everything right. Even their controversial decision to offer a rather small number of workshop rooms turned out rather well: it gave us a smaller number of better-attended, easier to find and (usually, but not...
AfriNIC, the Internet Protocol address registry for the African continent, has been operating without a Board since 2022. The election for a new AfriNIC board is currently underway, with electronic voting having commenced on June 18, 2025, and in-person voting scheduled for Sunday, June 23, 2025. This election is the...
The future of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process will be one of the main topics of the 2025 Internet Governance Forum. Many in the IG community are heavily invested in the renewal of WSIS. They imply that if it is not renewed, there will be major, negative...
As we approach the 20th Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Lillestrøm, Norway, a pivotal question looms: how will the United Nations system reconcile two competing efforts to shape global digital governance—the legacy of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the newly adopted Global Digital Compact (GDC)? Behind...
What is the role of the state in the governance of global cyberspace? For the past 25 years, that problem has led to conflict, negotiation and governance innovations. A new book by Milton Mueller now covers a critical part of that story: the end of the U.S. government's control of...
The UN Internet Governance Forum will be held June 22-27 in Oslo, Norway. The Program Committee for the conference, known as the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), released its selection of workshops for the 2025 IGF. The number of workshops was more limited than ever this year, with over 400 applications...
The US government has issued a Request for Information” (RFI) regarding the maintenance and management of the .US top level domain. Dot US is a country code domain (ccTLD) in a country dominated by generic top-level domains. Unlike the rest of the world, where at least half of the...
Declaring Independence in Cyberspace tells the story of the struggle between governments and the global Internet community over control of the Internet registries (IANA). It offers new insights into a pressing question with profound implications: is state sovereignty the immutable foundation of global governance, or can new technological capabilities change the model?
“This is a book that needed to be written, and no one is better placed to write it than Milton Mueller. This full, rigorous account provides researchers and policymakers with a precious resource on global internet governance.”
