The big story for the 2012 Internet Governance Forum in Baku was the almost overwhelming (and overpowering) emphasis placed by the US government delegation and its corporate allies (primarily Google) and its associates in (primarily US based) Civil Society on what was termed “Internet Freedom” and Multistakeholderism as its primary governance modality. The campaign was …
It’s not easy to get a short, crisp Web address. In the twenty-eight years since the now-extinct computer maker Symbolics registered the first .com address, symbolics.com, the most economical and memorable Internet addresses have mostly been claimed. Even longer addresses, or domains, like a person’s full name, might not be available—or, more likely, there will …
There is a great deal of skepticism that the new gTLDs will add social value. After all, what is the social value of .book when there is already .book.com? Singer also raises cultural, expression, and competition concerns: There’s a larger issue at stake, however. Advocates of Internet freedom contend that such an expanded address system …
Someone once almost said “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.” The fact that the quote — by a former GM CEO-turned-U.S. Secretary of Defense — got garbled in the translation doesn’t negate the fact that many people feel the U.S. needs to protect its key industries and vendors. Just last week, for …
Developments over the past few months — and especially the revelations about the spying work of the NSA on friendly governments and their people and businesses — show how important it is to try and establish some high-level strategies relating to managing the governance of the internet. While companies like Google have been lobbying hard …
Temporarily freezes move that could have led to global corporates monopolising the WWW by privatising domains like .beauty or .book The Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN) has put on hold a controversial decision to allot closed generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) to applicants. Governments and activists had feared that allotting such …
Herman Melville’s character Bartleby the scrivener famously said he “would prefer not to,” and 160 years later the owner of Bartleby’s Books would prefer not to see Amazon (AMZN).com Inc. control Internet addresses ending in .book. “I would just hate to see the cultural process that books represent be controlled by a single firm,” John …
What they’re saying about the GAC’s safeguard advice The ICANN New gTLD Board Committee request for comment on the GAC’s safeguard advice has closed, and the reply period will open soon. Here are some select comments, along with links to the full comments. “Instead of Guidebook advice, the GAC has offered public policy advice and …
Syria’s Internet has gone down, according to wide reports. Umbrella Security Labs, a division of Internet security firm OpenDNS, reported that a Syria had a significant drop in traffic at around 6:45 p.m. UTC. The organization posted a graph showing that both top-level domain servers for Syria are “unreachable.” According to Google’s transparency report, all the …
The Anonymous Hactivist group has called for an internet blackout in protest of CISPA. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is a proposed law in the United States which would allow for the sharing of Internet traffic information. This is their plea; Dear citizens of the internet, We are Anonymous. The United States …