When Edward J. Snowden, the disaffected National Security Agency (NSA) contract employee, purloined tens of thousands of classified documents from computers around the world, his actions—and their still-reverberating consequences—heightened international pressure to control the network that has increasingly become the world’s stage. At issue is the technical principle that is the basis for the Internet, …
Writen By Frederick Harris for CircleID The survival thesis mentioned in Part 2 goes like this. ICANN’s imaginary mandate is global. But the mind set is provincial. The latter is defensive; focused on keeping power and therefore control over internet policy. But the evidence points to policy actions that contradict policy rhetoric. Discrepancies disclose the …
The European Commission is preparing a policy statement on Internet governance that elevates state power and multi-lateralism over the civil society-based open and participatory governance that has characterized the native Internet governance institutions. An early version of the policy document, obtained from sources in a national government, addresses “Internet Governance and Policy: Europe’s role in …
Advocates for the open, lightly governed Internet were shocked last month when the European Union aligned itself with countries like Iran, China and Brazil in calling for world governments to assert control over the Internet’s core technical management functions. The EU proposal, offered near the end of a two-week UN conference on the Internet, appeared …
Is ICANN forming too many panels to risk its own inundation? This week in the midst 17 November 2013 at the start of ICANN Buenos Aires, ICANN has released a ICANN High-Level Panel Organizes to Address Future of Internet Governance, this comes barely 6 months after there was announcement during the ICANN 47 Durban meeting …
In recent days, the community has asked for more information about the background of events in Internet governance including the Montevideo Statement, meetings in Brazil and the Internet Governance Forum and so I wanted to write this blog as another way to complement my ongoing discussions with various community groups. Since I joined ICANN last …
That’s how some are interpreting a statement released in October by 10 organizations central to the Internet’s operation. “With striking unanimity, the organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards and resources initiated a break with three decades of U.S. dominance of Internet governance,” writes Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. “A …
It’s late in the new gTLD day and the program looks to be inching ever closer to the finish line. Yet last minute hiccups seem to be a recurring theme for this ambitious project to expand the Internet namespace far beyond the 300 odd active TLDs in existence today (counting generics and country codes). A …
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 …
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 …