Press Release: EU Commission to pursue role as honest broker in future global negotiations on Internet Governance In the wake of large-scale Internet surveillance and reduced trust in the internet, the European Commission today proposes a key reform to the way the Internet is managed and run. The proposal calls for more transparent, accountable and …
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 …
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, …
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 …
It’s safe to say that with just a week to go before ICANN intended to sign the first contract for a new gTLD, the last thing anyone wanted was a 12-page document from the world’s governments with 16 new “safeguards”, six of which it wants to see applied to every new extension. But what …
The headlines out of ICANN’s meeting in Beijing may be all about new domains, but it is the quiet, systemic evolution of ICANN itself that holds the greatest promise for Internet users globally. ICANN President Fadi Chehadé opened the meeting by announcing that it was ICANN’s “season to evolve,” and setting forth a series of …