Internet governance

Finishing up the rules for new Internet extensions

September 24, 2010

Two very interesting things are happening today that may have an enormous impact on the Internet for many years to come.
First, the ICANN Board is meeting at a special two-day retreat in Trondheim, Norway, in an effort to finalise the rules for new Internet extensions. This process have been going on for more than five [...]

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IGF Day 4: The end is not nigh

September 18, 2010

Having spent the past three days grumbling and moaning about the Internet Governance Forum 2010, I pre-decided it was time to highlight the good stuff, the reason why people from 107 different countries bothered to attend.
If you asked pretty much anyone at the event if the numbers were up or down this year, everyone would [...]

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IGF Day 2 and 3: Silence the Lambs

September 16, 2010

If you were to list Internet conferences in terms of boredom, the IGF would come mid to top-table.
It doesn’t have the razzmatazz or micro-celebrities of Web2.0 conferences but then it also doesn’t suffer the long, drawn-out pondering of intergovernmental talk-fests.
That’s why it’s so important that the Critical Internet Resources main session at the IGF [...]

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IGF workshops: protecting the consumer and digital inclusion

September 15, 2010

I was the remote moderator for two workshops at the IGF today: Digital inclusion: reaching the most socially excluded people in society (workshop 114); and Protecting the Consumer in an on-line world (workshop 112).
I’m not going to give rundown here but I am going to stick videos of both below – highlighting the excellent live [...]

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IGF Day 1: The sound and the fury

September 14, 2010

Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania. And Lithuania is north-east of Poland and underneath Finland.
In an exhibition center on the outskirts of Vilnius, over the Neris river from the big, beautiful Vingis park, are currently the 1,000 or so people in this world who spend their lives obsessing about Internet governance. I’m one of [...]

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New ICANN Board members: painful progress

September 13, 2010

Last week, the independent nominating committee of ICANN choose three new Board members: Bertrand de la Chapelle, Erika Mann and Cherine Chalaby. It was the European round of the organization’s top-body renewal.
Rather frustratingly, no details were given of the new members’ background or skills in the official announcement so it’s been a bit of guessing [...]

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ICANN Board briefing materials: more cover pages than information

August 17, 2010

At its recent meeting in Brussels, the ICANN Board resolved that it would publish the briefing materials that are supplied to it in order to make decisions.
This decision was widely seen by those familiar with ICANN as an effort by the Board to pre-empt what would be a recommendation from the independent review team [...]

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.UK is 25 years old

July 27, 2010

The United Kingdom’s dot-uk Internet domain is now 25 years old. Which in the Internet world is ancient.
The first dot-uk registrations were in 1985 – a decade before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet. As one of the oldest, dot-uk is also one of the biggest registries in the world. [...]

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Calendar for ICANN ATRT meetings

July 23, 2010

ICANN is currently being reviewed by an independent Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT). Their meetings are open, but I have only been stumbling on them by accident.
A closer look at the ATRT’s webpage reveals at the very bottom of the page a PDF that contains details of their future meetings. Not exactly the [...]

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Reflection on ICANN (Brussels)

June 26, 2010

So I have an unresolved sadness about ICANN at the end of this Brussels meeting, so I figured I would type it out to figure out why.
Like so many people in the “community”, I feel a strange sense of loyalty to the organization and yet spend about half my time being critical of it. I [...]

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