Tag: Managing the Internet
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ICANN Cut Secret Domain Deal
According to Michael Froomkin at ICANNWatch, evidence has come to light that ICANN secretly cut a deal with IATA, an airline industry association, to create a new “.travel” domain and give control of it to a front organization controlled by IATA. If true, this is a serious breach of ICANN’s own rules and undermines ICANN’s…
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BSA To Ask For Expansion of ISP Liability
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a software industry group, will ask Congress to expand the liability of ISPs for infringing traffic that goes across their networks, according to a Washington Post story by Jonathan Krim. The campaign to modify the law is part of a broader effort by the BSA to address a variety of…
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FCC Tome on Net Wiretapping
The FCC has released its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Internet wiretapping. (Backstory here.) The NPRM outlines a set of rules that the FCC is likely to issue, requiring certain online service providers to facilitate (properly authorized) government wiretapping of their customers. The document is a dense 100 pages, and it touches on issues…
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Wiretapping the Net
Another interesting day at the Meltdown conference. John Morris of CDT gave an eye-opening talk about online wiretapping and the policy debate over how to apply CALEA to VoIP services. Let me explain the jargon. CALEA is the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which says that telecommunications providers must design their networks…
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Gleick on the Naming Conundrum
James Gleick has an interesting piece in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine, on the problems associated with naming online. If you’re already immersed in the ICANN/DNS/UDRP acronym complex, you won’t learn much; but if you’re not a naming wonk, you’ll find the piece a very nice introduction to the naming wars.
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Solum's Response on .mobile
Larry Solum, at Legal Theory Blog, responds to my .mobile post from yesterday. He also points to a recently published paper he co-authored with Karl Mannheim. The paper looks really interesting. Solum’s argument is essentially that creating .mobile would be an experiment, and that the experiment won’t hurt anybody. If nobody adopts .mobile, the experiment…
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Why We Don't Need .mobile
A group of companies is proposing the creation of a new Internet top level domain called “.mobile”, with rules that require sites in .mobile to be optimized for viewing on small-display devices like mobile phones. This seems like a bad idea. A better approach is to let website authors create mobile-specific versions of their sites,…