1 January, 2022 Happy New Year! To start off 2022 we look back - and forward - at the granddaddy of Internet governance issues, domain names. TLDs go Hippety Hop ICANN is embroiled in a controversy about approving the transfer of a TLD (.HIPHOP) from its original owner (Uni Registry...
AFRINIC is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa: a nonprofit, nongovernmental Internet governance organization. Like RIPE, ARIN, APNIC and LACNIC, it operates a registry for unique internet protocol (IP) numbers that serve as network addresses. The registry records which organizations hold rights to which IP address blocks on that...
Ever since the GDPR thwacked it on the side of its head, ICANN has been trying to bring its registry of domain names into compliance with basic privacy principles. The good news is that ICANN has largely succeeded in doing that. Go to this URL, enter our domain name, internetgovernance.org,...
India and other Asian countries are asserting control over content on platforms. The European Commission tries to explain to the ICANN community how and why it is asserting jurisdiction over domain names. The Biden administration makes a clean break with the Trump Administration’s State Department on handling cyber issues. India’s...
We focus on India and Europe, where frameworks for the regulation of non-personal data are emerging. We add a bit of SolarWinds followup, and peek at ICANN hiding in the corner Governance of Non-Personal Data Although most data governance efforts in recent years have been focused on the collection, storage,...
Many large American businesses – notably, Facebook and the intellectual property interests – are strongly interested in retaining free and unrestricted access to domain name registrants’ personal information (known as Whois data). As it became clear that ICANN’s multistakeholder process would restrict that access to comply with Europe's privacy regulation,...
ICANN’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) has published a useful paper on the so-called “New IP” coined by Huawei technologists. So-called New IP's link to Huawei is a guarantee, in the current geopolitical environment, that it will be politicized. The “ITU is taking over the Internet” narrative that...
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which will be held online in 2020, opens officially November 9. IGP has organized a panel on DNS over HTTPS (DoH): Human Rights, Markets, and Governance. The aim of the panel is to build awareness of how the Internet’s technical standards and transnational governance impact...
ICANN's attempt to reconcile privacy law with its collection and disclosure of domain name registration data appears to have run into a snag. The surveillance interests wanted a centralized and standardized system for requesting redacted Whois data. They got one. But they are now pretending to reject it. “The value...
Although few people are aware of it, ICANN and the domain name system are on the front lines of the transnational data governance issues raised by the clash between European privacy law and American (and eventually Chinese and Indian) information industries. Prompted by Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ICANN...
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.”
