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Background The arrangements regarding the composition and organisation of the provision and operation of authoritative root servers are one of the more long-lasting aspects of the public Internet. In the late 1980’s, Jon Postel, as the IANA, worked with a small set of interested organisations to provide this service. It…
Networks are typically built to provide certain services at an expected scale. The rationale for this focussed objective is entirely reasonable: to overachieve would be inefficient and costly. So, we build service infrastructure to a level of sufficient capability to meet expectations and no more. In ideal conditions this leads…
The story of computing and communications over the past eighty years has been a story of quite astounding improvements in the capability, cost and efficiency of computers and communications. If the same efficiency improvements had been made in the automobile industry cars would cost a couple of dollars, would cost…
When the Internet outgrew its academic and research roots and gained some prominence and momentum in the broader telecommunications environment its proponents found themselves to be in opposition to many of the established practices of the international telecommunications arrangements and even in opposition to the principles that lie behind these…
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!)…
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…
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…
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 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.…
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…
