Goldstein Report – Page 253 – Global Domain Name and Internet Policy News

How China Walled Off the Internet

Today, China has the world’s only internet companies that can match America’s in ambition and reach.

It is years ahead of the United States in replacing paper money with smartphone payments, turning tech giants into vital gatekeepers of the consumer economy.

And it is host to a supernova of creative expression — in short videos, podcasts, blogs and streaming TV — that ought to dispel any notions of Chinese culture as drearily conformist.

All this, on a patch of cyberspace that is walled off from Facebook and Google, policed by tens of thousands of censors and subject to strict controls on how data is collected, stored and shared.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-internet.html

With 1.2 Million Registrations, .ZA Cements Its Position As Africa’s Leading ccTLD

South Africaâs ccTLD has cemented its position as the leading ccTLD on the African continent passing the 1.2 million registrations mark across all their second level domains in recent days

South Africaâs ccTLD has cemented its position as the leading ccTLD on the African continent passing the 1.2 million registrations mark across all their second level domains in recent days.

âSouth Africaâs SLDs, with their impressive 1.2 million total registrations, have cemented .ZAâs standing as one of the worldâs most popular namespaces and successfully capped ZACRâs third decade serving the South African and global Internet consumer,â says ZACR CEO, Lucky Masilela. The co.za SLD alone currently has over 1,117,000 registrations.

South Africa, a country of 57 million people and the leading economy on the continent, is the leading domain name market on the continent. By way of comparison, Nigeria, a country of 190 million people, has notched up 102,000 registrations within its .ng country code top level domain.

Mr Masilela puts the runaway success of co.za down to the globally proven âTriple Râ model adopted in 2010 and to which the local domain name sector continues to adhere, with clearly obvious and positive results. The Triple R Model is based on the separation of functions and responsibilities by the Regulator the Registry Operator and the Registrar.

âOur current model is the reason South Africa boasts the highest number of Africaâs domain name registrations coupled with our intention to keep the domain costs as low as possible on the continent,â explains Mr. Masilela.

The ZACR as the Central Registry is responsible for the technical wellbeing of South Africaâs presence on the worldwide web, and their Central Registry model championed by the late Communications Minister, Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, has emerged as a local centre of excellence of which all South Africans can be proud.

ZACR has a solid history of pioneering achievements within the domain name sector. It is a previous winner of the Best African Registry category awarded by ICANN and was recently awarded the rights to administer the entire African continentâs presence on the worldwide web in the form of the .africa geographic Top Level Domain (gTLD).

Under .za the second level domains are co.za, web.za, net.za and org.za. ZACR also manages a number of new generic/geographic generic top level domains: .joburg, .capetown and .durban as well as .africa.

âEvery leading local brand has to register a co.za domain name or risk losing valuable IP and cyber real estate to competitors, speculators or worse,â concludes Mr Masilela.

UK ‘wholly’ unprepared to stop devastating cyber-attack, MPs warn

Ministers are failing to act with “a meaningful sense of purpose or urgency” in the face of a growing cyber threat to the UK’s critical national infrastructure (CNI), a parliamentary committee has warned.

The joint committee on national security strategy said at a time when states such as Russia were expanding their capability to mount disruptive cyber-attacks, the UK’s level of ministerial oversight was “wholly inadequate”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/19/uk-wholly-unprepared-to-stop-devastating-cyber-attack-mps-warn

‘Facebook Cannot Be Trusted to Regulate Itself’: By The Editorial Board

“Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself,” tweeted Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline on Wednesday night.

Mr. Cicilline, who is likely to chair the House of Representative’s Judiciary subcommittee that focuses on antitrust law, was responding to a Times investigation, one that painted a damning picture of how Facebook had handled the discovery of Russian misinformation campaigns on its platform. Based on interviews with more than 50 people, the investigation depicted Facebook’s top executives — including Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg — ignoring and downplaying the extent of Russian skulduggery, even going as far as to stall the publication of internal findings.

On Thursday, Facebook pushed back in a blog post that denied slow-rolling its response to foreign election interference.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/facebook-data-congress-russia-election.html

Learning to Attack the Cyberattackers Can’t Happen Fast Enough

In a technology lab full of graduate students huddled over laptops, Prof. Marios Savvides flipped through photos on a computer screen searching for one full of people whose faces were barely recognizable to the human eye.

“How about a riot?” Professor Savvides asked. He had just come upon an image of police officers wearing helmets and gas masks and rioters covering their mouths and noses with bandannas — all trying to shield themselves from the tear-gas- and smoke-filled air.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/business/learning-to-attack-the-cyber-attackers-cant-happen-fast-enough.html

New and African TLDs Growing Strongest, TLDs in Americas Weakest: CENTR

Globally domain name registrations have grown 5.7% in the year to the end of October to 344 million, with growth highest among new gTLDs (7.1%) and African ccTLDs (6.2%), while growth is lowest in the Americas (1.4%), Europe (2.6%) and Asia (2.9%), according to the latest CENTRstats Global TLD Report.

While growth is highest among new gTLDs, with many still launching, as well as African ccTLDs, both have the lowest average number of domain names registered per top level domain.

According to the report, ccTLDs made up 44% of the global domain market, most of which comes from the European market. And while ccTLD growth was highest in Africa in the 12 months to the end of October, it has been from a relatively small base. Growth among ccTLDs in Asia and the Americas have slowed down, particularly among Latin American and Caribbean ccTLDs where median growth was 1.4% YOY at October 2018.

For many European ccTLDs, the report notes 2018 has been focused around GDPR. This has no doubt left some with less marketing resources, but despite this, registrations have continued with relative stability. Although the long term growth average continues to decline, it is doing so at a much reduced rate. At the end of the third quarter however, the median growth hit a new low of 2.7% (1.5% for the top 10 largest ccTLDs). Driving this decline was a sharp slow down in rates of new adds between March and August 2018, particularly among some of the larger ccTLDs. This was aggravated by deletes which did not reduce at the same level. Despite this, the average renewal rate remained strong at a median of 84% (slightly lower at 81% among the top 10 largest ccTLDs).

Across Europe, the average local market share to ccTLDs is estimated at 58% for registrations and 37% for local web traffic. In both cases, the figures are higher when filtered to central and eastern European countries.

Among the new generic top level domains, registrations totalled some 22.5 million – up 11% from 1 year prior. While many new gTLDs are growing well, roughly one third of the top 300 have contracted over the year. Larger legacy gTLDs such as .net, .org and .info have also seen declines, while .com has been increasing its growth rates. The new .app exploded into the market in the middle of year and has around 320K domains so far.

Of the new gTLDs, 539 are for .brands according to the Dot Brand Observatory, 170 of which are active, for a total of 12,115 domain names, which makes for an average of just over 22 domain names per .brand gTLD. Which leaves 694 new gTLDs open to public registrations with an average of 276,495 registrations per gTLD. A note of caution, the numbers from different sources may not align in terms of dates, but they will be close.

For country code top level domains, the average number of domain names among the African ccTLDs is around 58,600, in the Americas 262,300, Asia 645,900 and in Europe 1,257,900.

Of the top 15 TLDs, at the end of October, there were 3 that recorded growth rates of more than 5.0% for the year – .com (5.1%), .uk (9.8%) and .ca (5.2%) while .fr had growth of 4.7%. There were also 3 that declined by more than 5.0% – .net (6.1%), .info (17.6%) and .ru (7.4%).

The full CENTRstats Global TLD Report is available to download with interactive charts and tables from:
https://centr.org/statistics-centr/quarterly-reports.html
https://stats.centr.org/stats/global

Prince William criticises social media firms

The Duke of Cambridge has accused social media firms of not being proactive enough about dealing with fake news, privacy issues and cyber-bullying.

In a speech given at the BBC, Prince William said social networks had allowed “misinformation and conspiracy to pollute the public sphere”.

“Their self-image is so grounded in their positive power for good that they seem unable to engage in constructive discussion about the social problems they are creating,” he warned.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46226743

Facebook says it removed a flood of hate speech, terrorist propaganda and fake accounts from its site

Facebook said Thursday it had removed more than a billion fake accounts and taken action against millions of posts, photos and other forms of content that violated its prohibition against hate speech, terrorist propaganda and child exploitation, the latest sign that the social-networking giant faces an onslaught of online abuse as it builds new tools to spot it.

The report shows that Facebook still struggles to identify hate speech and bullying, in particular, even at a time when social media companies are grappling with the rising tide of racist, sexist and anti-Semitic content online and the United States is experiencing a rise in hate crimes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/15/facebook-says-it-removed-flood-hate-speech-terrorist-propaganda-fake-accounts-its-site/

Also see:

Facebook says it’s better at detecting rule violations
Facebook said it’s making progress on detecting hate speech, graphic violence and other violations of its rules, even before users see and report them.

Facebook said that during the April-to-September period, it doubled the amount of hate speech it detected proactively, compared with the previous six months.
https://apnews.com/1e3dbb9561734b4da9b4d3a9ec5c509a

Mark Zuckerberg Defends Facebook as Furor Over Its Tactics Grows
On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and chairman, held a conference call with reporters to discuss how the social network manages problematic posts and its community standards.

The call quickly went sideways. For more than an hour, the 34-year-old billionaire instead fielded questions about how he and his No. 2, Sheryl Sandberg, obfuscated problems such as Russian interference on Facebook and how the company had gone on the attack against rivals and critics. In response, Mr. Zuckerberg — at times defiant and at times conciliatory — defended the social network, Ms. Sandberg and his own record.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-sandberg-tactics.html

‘No Morals’: Advertisers React to Facebook Report
Advertisers are the financial engine of Facebook, but lately the relationship had gotten rocky.

It got rockier on Thursday.

Several top marketers were openly critical of the tech giant, a day after The New York Times published an investigation detailing how Facebook’s top executives — Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg — made the company’s growth a priority while ignoring and hiding warning signs over how its data and power were being exploited to disrupt elections and spread toxic content. The article also spotlighted a lobbying campaign overseen by Ms. Sandberg, who also oversees advertising, that sought to shift public anger to Facebook’s critics and rival tech firms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/business/media/facebook-advertisers.html

‘Alarming’: Soros calls for investigation of Facebook after report of a smear campaign
Liberal philanthropist George Soros has called on Facebook to initiate an independent, internal investigation of its lobbying and public relations work.

The call comes after the New York Times published a report claiming the company had hired an opposition research firm to discredit critics by linking them to Soros, a frequent target of conservatives and anti-Semitic vitriol from the far right.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/15/alarming-soros-calls-investigation-facebook-after-report-smear-campaign/

Facebook defends Russia response, updates plan to curb misbehavior
Facebook Inc Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday defended his response to Russian election meddling on the world's largest social media network and issued a new plan aimed at stifling misbehavior while maintaining a vibrant hub for online speech.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-content/facebook-defends-russia-response-updates-plan-to-curb-misbehavior-idUKKCN1NK2MO
https://in.reuters.com/article/facebook-content/facebook-defends-russia-response-updates-plan-to-curb-misbehaviour-idINKCN1NK2NF

It’s official: Aussies have broadband envy

Our Australian cousins look down their noses at us on so many fronts. Broadband used to be one. No longer. The Aussies are now envious of our internet.

Our Australian cousins look down their noses at us on so many fronts.

Broadband used to be one.

No longer. The Aussies are now envious of our internet.

“New Zealanders will soon be getting internet speeds 20 times faster than those enjoyed by most Australians for just a few dollars more a month, further widening an already-huge gap between the two countries' broadband networks,” the AFR reports.

The paper notes that while the fastest speed available on Australia's public-private National Broadband Network (NBN) is 50 megabits per second (Mbps), New Zealanders can already get a one gigabit (1000 Mpbs) plan, which Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) network operator Chorus wholesales to ISPs for $65 a month.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=12160785

More needs to be done to bridge the digital gender divide

Barriers to access, education and skills, as well as ingrained socio-cultural biases, are driving a digital gender divide that is holding back women’s participation in the digital economy, according to a new OECD report.

Bridging the Digital Gender Divide: Include, Upskill, Innovate says women are not currently empowered to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the digital transformation. While G20 economies have taken important actions to narrow gender gaps in general, more needs to be done to increase the participation of women and girls in the digital economy so that they too can contribute to and benefit from the digital transformation that is under way.

Based on analysis of datasets on skills, innovation as measured by patents, venture capital, start-ups and contributors to an open-source software package, the report says women have less access than men to key technologies and services. They also face discrimination, negative stereotypes or social and cultural biases. Women are also less likely to pursue, or have more limited access to educational opportunities in information technology, limiting their options for a career in ICT. The report calls for concrete actions including investments in broadband infrastructure, education and skills, and actions to tackle gender stereotypes and address social norms that lead to discrimination.

“Women are not benefitting from the digital transformation as much as they could be,” said OECD Chief of Staff and G20 Sherpa Gabriela Ramos, presenting the report at Chatham House in London. “The significant gender gap in the access, use, ownership and design of digital technologies is holding back women everywhere. Action to close the gap requires providing the right skills, encouraging women into entrepreneurship and innovation, STEM and software development, and providing the right conditions to enable women to participate fully in the labour market.”

The report, which will contribute to the implementation of the 2017 G20 Roadmap for Digitalisation, notes that:

The global gender divide in Internet usage (calculated by the ITU as the difference between Internet penetration rates for men and women relative to the rate for men) has risen from 11% in 2013 to 11.6% in 2017. The divide is over 25% in Africa and 33% in least-developed countries.

Women are on average 26% less likely than men to have a smartphone, and worldwide 327 million fewer women than men have smartphone access to mobile Internet.

Only 10% of innovative start-ups seeking venture capital investments were founded by women. Women-owned start-ups receive 23% less funding and are 30% less likely to be bought up or issue an IPO than male-owned businesses.

At age 15, only 0.5% of girls in OECD countries want to become ICT professionals, compared to 5% of boys. Twice as many boys as girls expect to become engineers, scientists or architects.

Despite the fact that more women than men completed tertiary education in 2015, only 24% of engineering graduates and 25% of ICT graduates were women.
Women-only teams accounted for just 6% of a popular open-source programming language for data analysis (R) packages over 2012-2017; 77% were male-only teams.
Women’s participation in inventive activities is increasing, but in G20 economies only 10% of patents are invented by women. At current rates women will only catch up men in 2080.

Download a PDF of the report

For further information please contact the OECD Media Office (+33 1 45 24 97 00). Gabriela Ramos may be contacted on gabriela.ramos@oecd.org.

Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.

www.oecd.org/going-digital/more-needs-to-be-done-to-bridge-the-digital-gender-divide.htm