Opinion: Digital Sovereignty and Internet Standards

There have been a number of occasions when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has made a principled decision upholding users’ expectations of privacy in their use of IETF-standardised technologies. (Either that, or they were applying their own somewhat liberal collective bias and to the technologies they were working on!)…


Call the Routing Police!

There was a somewhat unfortunate outage for a major communications service provider in Australia, Optus, in mid-November. It appears that one of their peer BGP networks mistakenly advertised a very large route collection to the Optus BGP network which caused the routers to malfunction in some manner. The problem was…


Internet Governance in 2023

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me in mid-October 2023. I presented in a couple of panels at the 18th Internet Governance Forum meeting, held in Kyoto, Japan, and I also listened in to a couple of sessions in their packed agenda. The following week I followed the…


On Centrality and Fragmentation

I attended a workshop on the topic of Internet Fragmentation in July. The workshop was attended by a small collection of Australian public policy folk, some industry representatives, folk from various cyber-related bodies and those who have a background in Internet Governance matters. It was a short meeting, so the…


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…


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…


Is Secured Routing a Market Failure?

Author: Geoff Huston       The Internet represents a threshold moment for the communications realm in many ways. It altered the immediate end client of the network service from humans to computers. It changed the communications model from synchronized end-to-end service to asynchronous, and from virtual circuits to packet…


DNS in the IGF

I don’t normally make the effort to attend the Internet Governance Forum gatherings these days. It seems to me that this forum continues to struggle for relevance. In my view it has never been able to realize an effective engagement with the set of actors who make up the supply…