RIPE 86 Bites – Gigabits for EU

RIPE held a community meeting in May in Rotterdam. There were a number of presentations that sparked my interest, but rather than write my impressions in a single lengthy note, I thought I would just take a couple of topics and use a shorter, and hopefully more readable bite-sized format.…


Failed Expectations

In a recent workshop I attended, reflecting on the evolution of the Internet over the past 40 years, one of the takeaways for me is how we’ve managed to surprise ourselves in both the unanticipated successes we’ve encountered and in the instances of failure when technology has stubbornly resisted to…


The Internet as a Public Utility

I recently attended a workshop on the topic of Lessons Learned from 40 Years of the Internet, and the topic of the Internet as a Public Utility in the context of national regulatory frameworks came up. For me 40 years is just enough time to try and phrase an answer…


The Internet Twenty-Five Years Later

This article resulted from a request by The Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ), which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in June 2023. Another version of this article will appear in the June edition of IPJ. The Internet not quite as young and spritely as you might’ve thought. Apple’s iPhone, released in…


Notes from IETF 116

The IETF had its 116th meeting in Yokohama, Japan in the last week of March. Here’s some notes I made from some of the working group sessions I attended that I found to be of interest. IEPG The IEPG is an informal gathering that meets on the Sunday prior to…


Hiding Behind Masques

It has been almost a decade since Edward Snowden exposed a program of mass surveillance by the US NSA, using the Internet for large scale data harvesting. The Internet had been profligate in the way in which various protocol scattered user data around with a somewhat cavalier disregard for privacy.…


Submarine Cable Resilience

I have on my desk a rather small tube. It’s a little under 2cm in diameter, 6 cm long, and looks like it’s made from a dull white polycarbonate material. At the end I can see a copper inner tube, and inside that another polycarbonate layer, and then a smaller…


An Economic Perspective on Digital Centrality

The IETF met in November 2022 in London. Among the many sessions that were held in that meeting was a session of the Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group, (DINRG). The research group’s ambitions are lofty: DINRG will investigate open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity…


OARC 40

OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations in that meeting. Cache Poisoning Protection Deployment Experience In a world where every DNS name is DNSSEC-signed and every DNS client validates all received…


To DNSSEC or Not?

The early days of the Internet were marked by a constant churn of technology. For example, routing protocols came and went in rapid succession, transmission technologies were in a state of constant flux, the devices we used to interact with the emerging digital environment were changing, and the applications we…