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In August 1858, Queen Victoria sent the first transatlantic telegram to U.S. President James Buchanan. The cable system had taken a total of four years to build, and used 7 copper wires, wrapped in a sheath of gutta percha, then covered with a tarred hemp wrap and then sheathed in…
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…
There is a common view out there that the QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000) is just another refinement to the original TCP transport protocol [1] [2]. I find it hard to agree with this sentiment, and for me QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available…
OARC held its fall meeting in Belgrade on October 22 and 23. Here are my impressions of some of the presentations from that meeting. UI, UX, and the Registry/Registrar Landscape One of the major reforms introduced by ICANN in the world of DNS name management was the separation of registry…
The topic of the robustness of IPv6 Extension Headers has experienced a resurgence of interest in recent months. I’d like to update our earlier report on this topic with some more recent measurement data. These extensions to the basic IPv6 packet header have their antecedents in the IPv4 option fields.…
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…
A couple of months ago, in July 2022, I wrote about our work in measuring the level of use of QUIC in the Internet (https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2022-07/quic.html). Getting this measurement “right” has been an interesting exercise, and it’s been a learning experience that I’d like to relate here. We’ll start from the…
