If Ford built a private toll highway that only allowed Mustangs, Americans would be outraged. Infrastructure is the bloodstream of an economy; if powerful established players controlled roads, telephone lines, and Internet cables, they could favor the highest bidder at the expense of the savvy entrepreneur, choking off the meritocracy that makes market economies so …
A U.S. Appeals Court just invalidated the FCC’s net neutrality rules that would’ve made it illegal for telecom companies to favor certain types of traffic over others. The court ruled that the commission lacked the authority to implement and enforce such rules which were embedded in a complicated legal framework. The court describes its reasoning …
Fadi Chehade, as the President and CEO of ICANN, is frankly one of the more important people in the Internet world. His organization is responsible for two key aspects of the Internet. The first is managing the naming system of the Internet and how that system is used globally and how people reach it (ICANN …
Despite reports over the weekend claiming that Dropbox was hacked, the company has today released a post-mortem of its downtime, with the blame falling onto its update and database infrastructure. The company said that the weekend’s outage was due to a bug within an update script reinstalling a number of machines containing production traffic for …
The Alaba Market, in Nigeria’s commercial capital of Lagos, is a chaotic mass of noise, vehicles and electronics shops; open air stalls selling software and movies of dubious provenance and tiny dark rooms housing the country’s ruthlessly profiteering film producers. Financed at Alaba and filmed in houses-turned-sets, ‘Nollywood’ has become a $500 million-a year business, …
The Edward Snowden revelations on pervasive and dragnet surveillance over the internet by the US National Security Agency (and other allied security agencies) – coupled with the nature of control the US exerts over the internet and telecommunications the world over – make it imperative that there is a new international framework to govern the …
Germany is to further delay its implementation of the Data Retention Directive despite facing potential financial penalties of more than €300,000 for each day it fails to transpose it into national law, according to media reports. The country previously implemented the 2006 Directive but a court in the country ruled in 2010 that it was …
As various groups discuss their ideas for the Brazil Conference on the Future of Internet Governance in April, one issue is rising to the top of the agenda: stakeholder roles. Increasingly, it looks as if the Brazil conference will be used to challenge a definition of multistakeholder governance that assigns different ‘roles’ to state actors …
Snowden shed light on US’ surveillance system, PRISM; Google data showed US made 10,918 requests for information, followed by India’s 2,691 2013 has truly been a tumultuous year from every aspect, be it the Syrian unrest, the Snowden revelations or Typhoon Haiyan in Phillipines. However, 2013 has seen a lot of debate on issues related …
Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone, blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his arm for a handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before long he had guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view. During more than 14 hours of interviews, …