Category: ICANN and Governance

As a contribution to the 2007 UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), IGP has released a new paper showing how network neutrality can serve as a globally applicable principle to guide Internet governance. The paper defines network neutrality as the right of Internet users to access content, services and applications on the Internet without interference from network operators or overbearing governments. It also encompasses the right of network operators to be reasonably free of liability for transmitting content and applications deemed illegal or undesirable by third parties. Those aspects of net neutrality are relevant in a growing number of countries and situations, as both public and private actors attempt to subject the Internet to more control.

[AP] Debate over U.S. control of core Internet systems threatens to overtake an international meeting in Brazil next week that was meant to cover topics including spam, free speech and cheaper access.The Internet Governance Forum is the result of a compromise world leaders reached at a U.N. summit in Tunisia two years ago. They agreed to let the United States remain in charge.But they established an annual forum to discuss emerging issues, including whether control of how Internet addresses are assigned — and thus how people use the Internet — should remain with the U.S. government and ICANN.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/11/09/1194329453336.html
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/09/1194329453336.html
http://iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/08/business/NA-FIN-US-Internet-Governance.php

[news release] A meeting on Internet governance in Rio de Janeiro later this month will bring together participants from around the world to discuss issues ranging from open standards to child protection and child pornography, a senior United Nations official said today.Speaking to the press in Geneva ahead of the second Internet Governance Forum meeting, to be held from 12-15 November, Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator of the Forum Secretariat, said more than 1,500 participants had registered 10 days before the event was set to begin.This turnout was a demonstration to the “richness and wealth” of the meeting, which would gather representatives of government, the private sector, civil society and the Internet community to address a wide range of issues concerning the Internet.The issue of security had attracted most attention, Mr. Kummer said, with 19 out of 70 parallel events devoted to it, many of them focusing exclusively on child protection and the fight against child pornography.He stressed that international cooperation was the key, citing the example of a British-run watchdog programme on Internet child pornography which resulted in the establishment of a self-regulation mechanism where consumers could alert the watchdog of any illicit content.In close cooperation with the Internet industry, the watchdog in turn alerted Internet service providers and the police, and removed the content from the Internet. As a result, the United Kingdom had reduced locally-originated child pornography to zero.The Forum was neither a decision-making body nor an intergovernmental meeting, Mr. Kummer said, but a setting where all participants attended as equals.”The Forum is more than a talking shop. It is a gathering of interested people who care about the Internet and who can give direction… and prepare the decisions that will be taken into consideration by other organizations that do have the decision-making power.”This news release was originally sourced from http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=24520 and is also available online from http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0711/S00108.htm

The upcoming second Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro will have a very broad agenda with over thirty workshops, 22 best practice forums and 10 meetings of dynamic coalitions specialising in key issues such as access, diversity, openness and security.One outstanding issue at the 12-15 November forum is the renewed debate about critical Internet resources like IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, domain names and the overall functioning of the domain name system. After nearly causing a failure of the predecessor UN-led World Summit on the Information Society, it was kept off the agenda of the first meeting of the IGF in Athens last year. Now it is back and might overshadow the forum once more.
http://ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=805

In the discussion about net neutrality, the phone and cable companies in the United States never said they would charge some companies more money for better access to their networks. They just said they don’t want rules to prevent them from doing so.Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, a telecom newsletter, just came back from Europe where he found that Deutsche Telekom is preparing to charge a fee to companies that want to deliver video to its Internet service customers.
bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/deutsche-telecom-prepares-for-two-tier-internet/

[AFP] After expanding across Earth, the Internet is now set to spread into outer space to reach parts no network has gone before, one of its co-creators predicted Wednesday.Vinton Cerf said the proposed “interplanetary” Internet would allow people an ability “to access information and to control experiments taking place far away” from Earth.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/10/17/1192300852020.html
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/17/1192300852020.htmlAlso see:The future of the Internet by Vint Cerf
As intellectual phenomena go, the Internet is still very young. If we look at other innovative technologies that fundamentally transformed human communications-the printing press, the telephone and television, to name a few-we are confronted with the fact that it takes generations for their full effects to be understood.
http://www.donga.com/fbin/output?f=b0_&n=200710170178Cerf: Internet Will Expand Into Outer Space
Astronauts would never again be without Google. But that’s just one of the benefits that could come from expanding the Internet into space, which is where Vint Cerf says it’s going to go.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/10/17/cerf-internet-will-expand-into-outer-space
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90781/6285211.html
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-10/17/content_6897022.htm

[news release] The School of Information Studies (iSchool) is playing a lead role in the Second Annual Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) Symposium on November 11 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The academic community involved in GigaNet is anticipated to be a substantial contributor to Internet policy discussions occurring at the global level. The symposium’s program committee was chaired by iSchool Professor Milton Mueller and is sponsored by four research groups, including the Internet Governance Project (IGP), which involves four professors from Syracuse University and is based out of the iSchool at Syracuse.The conference covers a variety of topics relating to how the Internet policy is being made around the globe. Experts from academia, government, international think tanks, and intergovernmental organizations will present in three sessions.The first session, A Development Agenda for Internet Governance, will be moderated by iSchool Professor Derrick L. Cogburn, who also served as communication chair of the symposium. The four speakers will examine how the interests of developing countries and developed countries clash over Internet policy, similar to the issues of trade, debt, and intellectual property.The second session, The Changing Institutionalization of Internet Governance, will examine the various stakeholders interested in how the Internet is managed, ranging from countries and non-governmental organizations to transnational businesses and other entities. Syracuse iSchool doctoral student Y.J. Park will be among the five featured speakers and will present her paper, “National ccTLD Regimes: Market Orientation and State Control.”Third session, Critical Policy Issues in Internet Governance, will investigate some of the burning issues related to the Internet such as privacy, security, and network neutrality. Mueller, one of four internationally known speakers, will present his paper, “Net Neutrality as Global Norm for Internet Governance.”Internet Governance Project (http://internetgovernance.org) partners and staff, including Mueller, Cogburn, and Ph.D. student and IGP operations manager Brenden Kuerbis, were instrumental in the initiation and formation of a global network for research on Internet governance, the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) in 2006 (www.igloo.org/giganet).This news release originally appeared at ischool.syr.edu/about/news.aspx?recid=472

As the second Internet Governance Forum approaches, it is an appropriate moment to take stock of how the Internet Governance dialogue has evolved since the conclusion of the WSIS Summit in 2005. One year after the first IGF in Athens, it is clear that government, industry and civil society stakeholders are still grappling over the direction and focus of the IGF. For skeptics who view the IGF as little more than a talk shop that kicked the Internet Governance “can” down the road five years, the evolution of this dialogue is of minor consequence. For those who view the IGF as something more, it is clear that the IGF dialogue will indeed evolve and, along the way, will impact the conceptual approach governments take to the Internet itself. There is little doubt that some governments will choose to borrow concepts from the IGF when developing law and policy and will ultimately apply them to the Internet within their respective jurisdictions. Given the global nature of the Internet, this should be a fundamental concern.

Sending queries to about 2.8 billion IP addresses over two months, the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) have produced a map that shows the density of computers around the world. Their internet census is the first since 1982 “when the Internet consisted of 315 allocated addresses.” One of the aims of the census is to improve internet security with the Department of Homeland Security supporting the project.”Many (61 percent) of the pings received no response at all. Many others got a ‘do not disturb’ or ‘no information available’ response that many network administrators program into their routers and firewalls. Some of the non- replies were probably also due to firewalls intentionally blocking the pings. Still, as the census went on, millions of sites did respond, positively and negatively, and a unique Internet atlas took shape.”For more information and links to a detailed account of the research and a full-scale map, see the ISI announcement at isi.edu/news/news.php?story=178

[AP] It took two months and nearly 3 billion electronic probes for researchers to create a map of the Internet. Now comes the task of making sense of their data – and figuring out what they missed.The Internet census comes from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif.Over two months, ISI computers sent queries to about 2.8 billion numeric “Internet Protocol,” or IP, addresses that identify individual computers on the Internet.Replies came from about 187 million of the IP addresses, and researchers used that data to map out where computers exist on the Internet. At one dot per address using a typical printer, the resulting map was about 9 feet by 9 feet. The top finally was taped onto the 8-foot-high ceiling.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/10/11/1191696034588.html
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/10/11/1191696034588.html
http://www.thestate.com/technology-wire/story/197225.html
http://cbs8.com/stories/story.105435.html