Looking at Centrality in the DNS

The Internet’s Domain Name System undertakes a vitally important role in today’s Internet. Originally conceived as a human-friendly way of specifying the location of the other end of an Internet transaction, it became the name of a service point during the transition to a client/server architecture. A domain name was…


Dark

I’d like to reflect on a presentation by Dr. Paul Vixie at the October 2022 meeting of the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), on the topic of the shift to pervasive encryption of application transactions on the Internet today. There is a view out there that any useful public…


Walking the Policy Tightrope

In policy work nothing is ever truly simply black and white. The means to achieve one outcome may well act to impair the work to achieve different outcomes, and the resultant effort often requires some difficult decisions to balance what appears to be some fundamental tensions between various policy objectives.…


DNS Evolution: Innovation or Fragmentation?

There is no single name system that is necessarily bound to the Internet. Unlike IP addresses which are in every IP packet, names are an application construct, and, in theory, applications have considerable latitude in how they handle such names. There could be many name systems that could coexist within…


Fragmentation

One of the discussion topics at the recent ICANN 75 meeting was an old favourite of mine, namely the topic of Internet Fragmentation. Here, I’d like to explore this topic in a little more detail and look behind the kneejerk response of declaiming fragmentation as bad under any and all…


Sender Pays

In September 2012 ETNO, the European Telecommunications Networks Operators’ Association, or most notably Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom and fellow legacy telcos in Europe published a contribution to the 2012 World Conference in International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) with a proposal for regulatory reform that in ETNO’s words would compel content providers…


Bigger, Faster, Better (and Cheaper!)

Let’s take a second to look back some 50 years to the world of 1972, and the technology and telecommunications environment at that time. The world of 1972 was one populated by a relatively small collection of massive (and eye-wateringly expensive) mainframe computers that were tended by a set of…


Content vs Carriage – Who Pays?

There was a common catch cry in the early 1990’s that “the Internet must be free!” Some thought this was a policy stance relating to rejection of imposed control over content. Others took this proposition more literally as in “free, like free beer!” It might sound naive today but there…


The Politics of Submarine Cables in the Pacific

I must admit that I’m a keen follower of the analysis work done by Jon Brewer. He manages to pull together excellent research with valuable insights, and I look forward to his presentations. Jon can be found at Telco2. The second half of this article, looking at the inventory of…


Some Notes from RIPE 83

The RIPE community held a meeting in November. Like most community meetings in these Covid-blighted times it was a virtual meeting. Here’s my notes from a few presentations that piqued my interest. All the material presented at the meeting can be found at https://ripe83.ripe.net/. Vulnerability Disclosure Responsible Disclosure is a…