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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
