The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its defeat call attention to a delicious irony in public discourse on Internet governance. Even those who don’t want the Internet to be an exception from traditional forms of regulation and law are forced to admit that something new and exceptional must be done to bring it under control. Reinforcing the irony, these attempts by the anti-exceptionalists to subordinate the Internet to established institutions immediately locks them into conflict with a highly mobilized, highly transnational community of Internet users and service providers who vow to resist those controls. The resistance comes precisely because the mobilized community believes that the controls threaten to fundamentally alter its status as an open, innovative and – dare we say it – exceptional space. In other words, we are all Internet exceptionalists now.   more »

The January 5 issue of BNA’s Bankruptcy Law Reporter (24 BBLR 32) contains a remarkable article by the attorneys for the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). It poses as a neutral, informative article about how trustees for firms entering bankruptcy court can “obtain the highest value” for their Internet Protocol address blocks when they are put up for sale. But one should be cautious of free legal advice to third parties when it is offered by lawyers hired by ARIN and keenly attuned to its organizational self-interest. The advice will not help IP sellers maximize their value; it is designed, instead to help ARIN preserve its monopoly on brokering the transfer market.   more »

National Public Radio in the U.S. did a feature piece on ICANN, presumably because January 12 is the day it starts its program to open up the domain name space to hundreds of new top level names. Yet what should have been a story about the pros and cons of new TLDs and ICANN’s political struggles with U.S.-based intellectual property interests and the legislators they influenced, became yet another story about…wait for it… how the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is threatening to take over the Internet!   more »

ICANN’s plan to open up the domain name space to new top level domains is scheduled to begin January 12, 2012. Now there is a cynical, illegitimate last-second push by a few corporate interests in the United States to derail that process. That group’s demands must be rebuffed, unambiguously and finally. ICANN must start implementing the new TLD program on January 12 as scheduled. ICANN must keep its promise to those who participated in its processes in good faith.   more »

A new article by Bloomberg exposes the presence of bandwidth optimization equipment in the network of an Iranian Internet Service Provider. The equipment comes from an Israeli company, Allot Communications. This is treated as a perfect example of how governments need to crack down on the sale of threatening technology to dictatorships by Western companies. But when the actual facts of the case come out, you will find that it proves the opposite.   more »

Activists and investigative journalists are highlighting the linkage between modern surveillance technologies and repressive governments. The emerging narrative around surveillance technology provides the perfect frame for public activism. You have a clear bad guy – a Gadhafi, an Assad, the Iranian theocrats, the Chinese Communist Party. You have a symbolic token, a technology, which links the bad guys and their bad actions to reachable actors – the corporate vendors – who are part of our own society and jurisdiction. You can then campaign on a simple moral impulse – the reachable actors must not be allowed to aid, abet or profit from the violence and political injustice of the bad guys. This in turn leads to what seems like a simple and effective policy response – to sever the link between reachable actors and the bad guys by somehow banning or regulating the transfer of this technology on a global basis. This blog post offers a critique of this budding movement, turning a critical eye upon a righteous cause.   more »