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...
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...
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 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...
IGP is proud to serve as the host organization for a project on censorship funded by the U.S. Open Technology Fund (OTF). Karan Saini, an Indian citizen working in Delhi, is researching DNS-based web censorship. The 18 month project will involve collecting large-scale DNS measurements, both direct and remote, across...
At ICANN's 80th meeting, underway this week in Kigali, Rwanda, the board finally killed off an attempt by a few applicants for new Top Level Domains to use domain name registry contracts to regulate website content. Board director Becky Burr said that after consulting its lawyers, the ICANN board has...
The following is the text of the Keynote speech delivered at the GigArts 2024 conference, The Hague, Netherlands, June 4, 2024. We now have almost 30 years of experience with so-called multistakeholder governance. Sometimes it’s called the multistakeholder model. Sometimes it’s the “multistakeholder approach.” Sometimes, it’s an “ism,” like communism...
Is censorship something that only happens when state actors do it, or can private actors engage in it as well? That crucial Internet governance debate is taking place in two venues: The U.S. Supreme Court, which will rule on two state laws that try to regulate the way platforms moderate...
The Netherlands has a reputation for being a liberal, broad-minded place that is open to the world. Its scholars in Internet governance have emphasized the need for a globally recognized “public core” of the Internet. But apparently the virus of digital sovereignty has affected a significant portion of the Internet...
The Internet Governance Project has signed on to a Joint statement of scientists and NGOs in opposition to Article 45 of the European Union’s eIDAS (Electronic IDentification And trust Services) regulation. Security researchers, digital rights groups and industry all oppose the regulation, as it shifts decision-making authority over whom to...
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.”
