Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News
The annual and largest domain name conference for the European German-speaking ccTLD registries, hosted alternately by nic.at, SWITCH and DENIC, Domain Pulse, will be held in the Swiss city of Winterthur in February 2023, barring COVID or other delays.
Ukraine’s continued access to the internet not only supports day-to-day life and the country’s financial system but it is also enabling the coordination of Ukrainian civil resistance – plus the ability of everyone, from the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to ordinary citizens, to communicate with the outside world.
The total number of domain names registered across all top-level domains across the world dropped by 2.8 million in the first quarter of 2021, or 0.8%, while in the year to 31 March they dropped 3.3 million, or 0.9%, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief released Thursday. It was the second consecutive quarter total registrations have declined, and probably the second quarter in many many years, and at least in the 11 years for which Verisign has DNIBs available.
Why did platforms take action when they did? The timing behind new content moderation policies tells the rest of the world everything it needs to know about platform priorities.
Parler, the alternative social media platform favored by conservatives, now finds itself virtually homeless on the internet as Amazon, Apple and Google have all booted it from their platforms in a span of a little more than 24 hours.
Days for Girls International was named 2020 .ORG of the Year as the final winner of Public Interest Registry’s 10 Days of .ORG last week. As well, Newcomer of the Year and Promoting a Safer Internet categories were also awarded during the final days of the awards.
YouTube on Thursday became the latest social media giant to take steps to stop QAnon, the sprawling pro-Trump conspiracy theory community whose online fantasies about a cabal of satanic pedophiles running the world have spilled over into offline violence.
Since 2016, when Russian hackers and WikiLeaks injected stolen emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign into the closing weeks of the presidential race, politicians and pundits have called on tech companies to do more to fight the threat of foreign interference.
QAnon followers were speculating on Tuesday night that Facebook’s new ban on all QAnon groups and pages was part of a complex plan by the Trump administration to root out the “deep state” and arrest their enemies. Or the social media company was trying to squelch the impending news that President Trump was about to crack down on his foes.
In January 2010, I sat in an auditorium at the Newseum in Washington and heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaim that “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.” Clinton announced that internet freedom would be a new pillar of U.S. diplomacy and that as a country, “we stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.” She described access to global information networks as being like “an on-ramp to modernity” and argued that “even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.” Paying tribute to Franklin Roosevelt’s “four freedoms” speech, she articulated a principle of the “freedom to connect”: