ICANN's Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) has published a new proposed governance model for the DNS Root Server System. Root servers are critical parts of the domain name system. While Public Technical Identifiers, which used to be known as the IANA, defines the contents of the root zone file,...
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is showing that it can be intimidated by governments. Such capture can only lead to more politicization of the domain name system and encourage more geopolitical tension over Internet governance. It is never the multistakeholder process that creates such problems, it...
In November 2018, US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added two Iranians to its sanctions list (known as the specially designated nationals), over a ransomware attack and blocked their access to their Bitcoin wallets. Specially designated nationals is a list of organizations and individuals with whom...
Facebook did not have a good 2018. Treating its customers' personal information as a commodity, it was revealed by New York Times that “For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners...
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...
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), held under the auspices of the United Nations, is mandated to facilitate discussions of global Internet governance stakeholders through its annual meetings and other activities. The Internet Governance Project has been involved with IGF since its inception and found it for many years a relevant...
Over a decade ago one of the key outcomes of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was the request for the UN to convene a forum to discuss (in a nonbinding fashion) global public policy issues related to Internet governance. The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was...
I’ve recently returned from the Cybersecurity and Cyberconflict: State of the Art Research Conference, organized by Dr. Myriam Dunn Cavelty and her colleagues at the Center for Security Studies, ETH, in Zürich, Switzerland. The conference brought together a mix of scholars researching “the strategic (mis)use of cyberspace by state and...
Public attribution of cyber incidents to nation-state actors is increasing. It is a challenging and important accountability function that is often performed by a combination of threat intelligence firms or other private actors and less frequently by states. But is it time to institutionalize cyber attribution? The cybersecurity community has...
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.”
