On 10 July 2012, the ITU Council resolved that the Council Working Group on international Internet-related public policy issues (CWG-Internet) would hold online consultations for all stakeholders on certain policy issues to be decided by the Group. Council also resolved that all stakeholders could submit their responses to a reflector set up by the ITU and that all responses received from stakeholders would be posted, without edits, to the CWG-Internet website.

• Issue 1: Consultation on effectively countering and combatting spam.  
• Issue 2: Consultation on international public policy issues concerning IPv4 addresses. 
• Issue 3: Consultation on developmental aspects of the Internet. 

Read more and submit your views

It is with great surprise and disappointment that ITU notes the joint letter signed by Greenpeace International and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) which was addressed to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon regarding the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12).

The assertions in the open letter cannot go unchallenged, as many of the issues raised are misleading, inaccurate and grounded in conjecture.

It is unfortunate that this letter was drafted, dispatched and made public without any consultation with ITU Secretary-General, Dr. Hamadoun Touré or ITU as an organization.

A number of misleading inaccuracies which are contained in the letter could have been dispelled before being made public.

Read more...

In December in Dubai, ITU membership will meet to discuss possible revision of the International Telecommunication Regulations, a global treaty governing the way international telecommunications traffic is managed. On September 17, ITU held a second global media briefingentitled WCIT: Myth versus Fact. An audio archive and comprehensive presentation on challenges and opportunities of the WCIT event is available online.

WCIT-12 website

Telecompaper is reporting that Germany may have dropped its universal service plan, which sought to add a universal broadband service to the German telecom law change has been dropped. The plan had received a lot of criticism from network operators. German federal broadband operators association Breko welcomes the decision to drop the universal broadband service proposal and claims that a lot of regional network operators, who would not have survived the introduction of such service, will justify the trust they received.

Read the hfull article at http://www.telecompaper.com/news/german-universal-broadband-service-plan-is-dropped

African governments should utilise unused digital frequencies to propel the growth of mobile internet across the continent. This was among the various keynote observations made at a High Level Ministerial Forum on information technology held in Nairobi on Monday that was convened by the Kenyan Government in partnership with the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The gathering that was a preamble of the three-day Internet Governance Forum (IGF) that will run from Tuesday to Friday at United Nations Office in Nairobi heard that the continent had the potential to be a global leader in economic empowerment via mobile internet. “Africa should take advantage of the availability of digital frequencies to make mobile internet accessible to rural areas even before broadcasters making the digital migration,” Joseph Alhadeff, the vice-president of Global Public Policy said.

Read the full article at http://www.kictanet.or.ke/?p=3320

In its latest September edition, the ITU News magazine of the ITU examines the need for national broadband plans, their aims and relationship with national targets and goals.

A national broadband plan is as much a social contract as a plan of action to develop the industry base. It can be understood as bringing about a stronger foundation for effective governance, private investment and more active citizenship, leading to a desirable social and economic future.

The article draws on a discussion paper entitled “Setting national broadband policies, strategies and plans: A practical step-by-step approach”, written by Dr Bob Horton, consultant for the ITU Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU–D), and prepared for the 11th ITU Global Symposium for Regulators 2011, to be held in Armenia City, Colombia, on 21–23 September 2011.

For more information, please read here.

In a recent article by Wolfgang Kleinwachter on the forthcoming 41st ICANN meeting in Singapore, he raises the hotly debated question: "Will the booming Lion-City on the South-Asian Peninsula see a Shakespeare drama in June 2011, a shoot out between the ICANN Board and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to end the nearly 15 years of discussion on the introduction of more generic Top Level Domains (TLDs) into the legacy root of the Internet?"

read the full article at http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/05/18/high-noon-in-singapore

Tom Jowitt reported in eWeek Europe that ahead of the G8 economic summit in France later this week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has addressed a conference of tech leaders urging them to work with governments over internet regulations.

read the full article here: http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/french-internet-regulation-needed-president-sarkozy-tells-tech-bosses-30088

By Kevin Murphy, March 24, 2011, 13:22:24 (UTC), Domain Tech. Nortel Networks, the bankrupt networking hardware vendor, has sold 666,624 IPv4 addresses to Microsoft for $7.5 million, according to Delaware bankruptcy court documents (pdf). That’s $11.25 per address, more than you’d expect to pay for a .com domain name. According to the article, the total value of the entire IPv4 address space, if the price Microsoft is willing to pay is a good guide, is approximately $48.3 billion.

Read more at http://domainincite.com/microsoft-spends-7-5-million-on-ip-addresses/

ITU’s recent announcement on an OAM standard for MPLS in transport networks has seen considerable interest, but not always for the right reasons with claims from the Internet Society that it will jeopardize the Internet. Experts cast doubt on ISOC’s statement: “ ongoing evolution along this path will jeopardize the Internet”. They point to the fact that several interoperability tests have been successfully performed with no reported problems. In addition the solution being proposed by ITU conforms to the MPLS-TP architecture as defined by the IETF. When network equipment uses different protocols, interoperability of the functioning of that protocol, in this case OAM, may well be affected. However, since packets for different protocols are identified by pre-assigned different codepoints, protocols running behind these different codepoints will not interfere with each other. This means that the core functionality – in this case Internet traffic – will not be affected. Therefore various protocols can coexist without causing any confusion in the network.

Read more at http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/newslog/

Geneva, 28 February 2011 – In a big step towards leveraging existing MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) deployment in transport networks, ITU has agreed first stage approval of a key new standard. The ITU-T standard will give network operators the tools necessary to manage large scale deployments of MPLS-based networks. Network operators will now have a choice of OAM (operations, administration and maintenance) tools to best meet their specific transport network requirements. These OAM tools in the hands of network operators will, in particular, allow quick detection of defects and fault isolation.

The full article is available at: http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2011/03.aspx

The Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act, introduced by in the US Senete would explicitly deny the president or other U.S. officials "authority to shut down the Internet. Full article available on PCWorld at http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/220092/us_bill_would_prohibit_internet_kill_switch.html

The claims that internet IP addresses are running out worldwide are not true, and resources allocated to some regional internet registries are far from exhausted, said Mr. Zhao Houlin, Deputy Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in a recent interview with Xinhua. The in-use IP addresses still have potentials that can be tapped, not to mention that a great number of allocated IP addresses are currently not in use. Read the full article on XinhuaNet at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/business/2011-02/14/c_13730415.htm

In an interview with the World Trademark Review, ICANN’s chair Peter Dengate Thrush spoke about the ICANN board’s upcoming meeting in Brussels with its Government Advisory Committee (GAC). The GAC is hoping to resolve its concerns over, among other things, proposed trademark protection mechanisms for new gTLDs. But Dengate Thrush did not describe it as a negotiation. “For some people, even ordering dinner is a negotiation. But technically speaking, the GAC is going to give us advice, we’ll listen to it, and we’re either going to accept it or not and explain why.” Read the full interview on the WTR site at http://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/daily/detail.aspx?g=62470E83-F9B8-4921-9823-72D0FF149415

In a presentation made to attendees of the McCarthy Institute Symposium, Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN Chair, announced that the Final New generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Applicant Guidebook would be completed after the ICANN Meeting in Amman, Jordan which is scheduled for June 19 - 24, 2011.

Full article available on CircleID at http://www.circleid.com/posts/20110203_new_gtld_program_to_be_finalized_after_june_icann_meeting/

Wired Magazine, August 17, 2010

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting.

Watch out for silicon cockroaches. Network operators should prepare for an infestation of silicon cockroaches, a term used to describe Internet-connected devices such as mobile sensors, bio-medical systems and RFID-powered asset trackers that operate without human administration. Aaron Falk, chair of the Internet Research Task Force, listed silicon cockroaches as a key factor in the Internet becoming a network of things, rather than a network of computers, in the future. Falk said 15 billion devices could be hooked up to the Internet by 2015, a figure that will be "orders of magnitude bigger" than the number of Internet-connected people. Silicon cockroaches pose several threats to network operators, including naming, security and management headaches that require additional research, Falk said.

Full Story

A study conducted by RIPE Labs indicates that about 1.89% of spam are received over IPv6.

"With the increased deployment of IPv6, we were curious to see how much the amount of spam sent over IPv6 increases. We looked at the e-mail system of the RIPE NCC and produced some statistics that could be seen as an indication for the overall trend of spam sent over IPv6," says RIPE in a blog post explaining the analysis. Group also notes that the study was based on one week’s worth of data and that it excluded messages already rejected by blacklisting and greylisting.

RIPE Labs: Spam over IPv6

Full Story  

The expansion of internet domain names as proposed is worrying to trademark owners as a significant number cybersquatting cases continue to be filed in the World Intellectual Property Organization dispute resolution system, WIPO said this week. Meanwhile internet intermediaries should play a bigger role in the fight against trademark infringement, WIPO officials said.

Complaints filed with the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in 2009 decreased by 9.5 percent compared to the previous year. WIPO is the recipient of over half of global internet domain dispute cases, it said. However, complaints filed at WIPO in 2009, though down, covered “the highest number of individual domain names in a given year,” as opposed to collective filings, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said during an 18 March press conference at the United Nations.

Full Story

In a bid to cut down on fraud and inappropriate content, the organization responsible for administering Russia's .ru top-level domain names is tightening its procedures.

Starting April 1, anyone who registers a .ru domain will need to provide a copy of their passport or, for businesses, legal registration papers. Right now, domains can be set up with no verification - a practice that has allowed scammers to quickly set up .ru domains under bogus names. The changes will help Russia align its rules with international best practices, said Olga Ermakova, informational projects manager with the Coordination Center for the .ru top-level domain, in an e-mail interview. The .ru administrators care about the "cleanness" of the domain, she added. "We don't need negative content, and such content is often [created] by unknown users."

Loopholes in the domain name system help spammers, scammers and operators of pornographic Web sites to avoid detection on the Internet by concealing their identity. Criminals often play a cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement and security experts, popping up on different domains as soon as their malicious servers are identified.

Criminals in eastern Europe have used .ru domains for a while, registering domain names under fake identities and using them to send spam or set up command-and-control servers to send instructions to networks of hacked computers. With the new domain registration requirements, it will be more difficult for criminals to continue with business as usual. At the very least, the requirement that registrants must submit paper documents will make setting up domains a more costly and time-consuming process.

Full Story

Egypt has begun enforcing a ban on international calls made through mobile internet connections, the head of the telcoms regulator told Reuters on Tuesday, potentially boosting voice revenues at landline monopoly Telecom Egypt. The ban will apply to the three mobile operators in Egypt -- Mobinil, Etisalat Egypt and Vodafone Egypt -- who offer internet access for computers via USB and other mobile modems, as well as via mobile phone.

"The ban is on Skype on mobile internet, not on fixed, and this is due to the fact it is against the law since it bypasses the legal gateway," said Amr Badawy, the executive president of the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA).

Full Story

The internet is among a record 237 individuals and organisations nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

The number of nominations surpasses last year's record of 205 nominations. The internet's nomination has been championed by the Italian version of Wired magazine for helping advance "dialogue, debate and consensus". The director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told BBC News that the organisation had received "thousands of nominations" for the coveted prize.

Full Story

The US government’s policy of leaving the Internet alone is over, according to Obama’s top official at the Department of Commerce.

Instead, an “Internet Policy 3.0” approach will see policy discussions between government agencies, foreign governments, and key Internet constituencies, according to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, with those discussions covering issues such as privacy, child protection, cybersecurity, copyright protection, and Internet governance.

The outcomes of such discussions will be “flexible” but may result in recommendations for legislation or regulation, Strickling said in a speech at the Media Institute in Washington this week. The new approach is a far cry from a US government that consciously decided not to intrude into the internet’s functioning and growth and in so doing allowed an academic network to turn into a global communications phenomenon.

Full Story

Shopping comparison site Foundem this week fired the opening shots in the coming Google antitrust battle, with a complaint to the European Commission and a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission accusing Google of posing "an immediate threat to competition and innovation." The US filing is in response to the FCC's net neutrality enquiry, and seeks to have search neutrality included in FCC rule-making.

German shopping site Ciao, which has been owned by Microsoft since 2008, and French legal search service ejustice.fr have also filed complaints with Europe. The data in the filing has also been passed to the Commission, Foundem co-founder Shivaun Raff told The Register. In it, with the help of data commissioned from ComScore, Foundem seeks to show that what Google calls "Universal Search" places Google services in prominent and preferential positions within its search results, giving the company an unassailable competitive advantage. " They're turning an ostensibly neutral search engine into an incredibly powerful marketing channel for their own services," said Raff.

Full Story

A plan to create a specific area of the Internet for pornography has been given a reprieve by a distinguished panel of judges.

The panelists - who included a former International Court of Justice judge - told Internet overseeing body ICANN in a majority decision that it was wrong to reject an application for the top-level domain dot-xxx three years ago.

That decision made by ICANN’s Board in March 2007 was “not consistent with the application of neutral, objective, and fair documented policy,” the panel concluded. It also decided in favor of the company behind the dot-xxx application, ICM Registry, in three of the remaining four issues under dispute and ordered ICANN to pick up fees and expenses totaling $475,000. As a result of the panel’s declaration, the ICANN Board will now reconsider the dot-xxx application and decision at its meeting in Nairobi next month, opening the way for dot-xxx’s possible inclusion into the Internet’s “root.”

Full Story

New domain name registrations in the fourth quarter of 2009 reached 3.7 million domain name registrations per month totaling close to 11 million new domain name registrations across all of the Top-Level Domains (TLDs) in the last quarter of 2009, according the latest Domain Name Brief by VeriSign. "The base of country code Top-Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) rose to 78.6 million domain names, a three percent increase quarter over quarter and a 10 percent increase year over year. In terms of total registrations, .com continues to have the highest base followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net and .uk (United Kingdom)."

The VeriSign Domain Report (Feb. 2010)

Full Story

.Info registry Afilias is asking ICANN to approve a plan to offer one and two character .info domain names for registration. As with other newer gTLDs, ICANN originally reserved all one and two character domains from being registered.

Afilias is modeling its plan after Neustar’s launch of one and two character .biz domain names. There will be a three step process:

1. Requests for Proposal, where anyone can submit a proposal for developing a particular name. Afilias will award domains to RFPs that meet its goal of broadening awareness of .info.

2. Auction of any domain not given during the RFP

3. Open registration

During Neustar’s one character auction, the top sale was e.biz for $66,001. Many other one character .biz domains sold for $5,000-$15,000. It is still running two character auctions, with most sales under $1,000. The biggest deal to come out of the RFP process was Overstock.com, which picked up O.biz.

Full Story

Google is in court later today New York to face critics of its agreement with US publishers to digitise the world's books.

Judge Denny Chin will hear evidence from 26 critics of the deal. These include Amazon and Microsoft, along with several publishers. France and Germany will also give evidence, the Beeb reports. The case is seen by some as granting Google an effective monopoly on the world's literature.

The search giant's massive book scanning scheme is also under investigation from Department of Justice and European regulators.

Full Story