The Trump administration has unleashed a number of aggressive actions blocking China from access to those parts of the transnational digital economy anchored in the United States. These actions are based on the premise that exposure to Chinese ICT products and services are national security threats, because China’s Communist government...
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...
More than a year ago, ICANN adopted a policy that redacted sensitive domain name registration data from public view to bring Whois into compliance with GDPR. The key data elements shielded were registrant email addresses and street addresses. The loss of free, unrestricted access to all DNS registration data was a...
On February 7, ICANN released an initial report on the next step in the reform of Whois. The report will be open for public comment until March 23, 2020. In the analysis below, we make it clear what issues defenders of privacy and individual rights should address in their comments....
A presentation at the recent RIPE79 gives us some initial insight into the recursive resolution of Domain Name System (DNS) queries. Who performs recursive resolution and therefore has access to DNS query data is at the center the DNS over HTTPS (DoH) debate. But as we’ll explain below, the data...
DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is a new IETF standard that modifies DNS to encrypt its queries. The stated objective of the new standard is to improve the security and confidentiality of DNS queries and reduce latency. Ever since we did our first study on the use of PKI in routing,...
The European Commission (EC) has finally weighed in on the recommendations of ICANN's Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP). The EPDP is reforming WHOIS to make it consistent with GDPR and privacy rights. The EC comments, we are happy to report, are well aligned with the positions of privacy advocates. This...
March 4 was a landmark day in the history of Whois. The final report of ICANN’s Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP), setting out a new, more or less privacy-compliant Whois policy, was approved by the GNSO Council, ICANN’s policy development organ for domain names. The policy recommendations in that report,...
The ICANN policy process for bringing Whois into compliance with privacy law has just about reached the end of its first phase (we will report more on that when it releases the final report). The next phase will focus on what is sometimes called "access" but is more accurately described...
“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.”
