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...
The Internet Governance Project has prepared a draft response to a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) issued by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on "International Internet Policy Priorities." We were happy to see that the NOI asked specifically about challenges to free expression and the free flow of...
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect on 25 May 2018. As a result, ICANN allowed registries and registrars to cloak the personal information of domain name registrants in WHOIS, with a caveat that those who had legitimate and proportionate purpose should be allowed access to this cloaked,...
What can we do to stop the militarization of cybersecpace by States? One answer might be convening a transnational cyber attribution organization. States need to be held accountable if they carry out cyber attacks. However, up until now, this has not been feasible. The infeasibility does not mean that cyberattribution...
“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.”
