Policy & Regulation

ICANN Accountability Without gTLD Remedies Is Just Documentation

Past gTLD disputes show applicants can win ICANN accountability rulings without obtaining the contested string, raising a critical question for 2026 applicants about whether expanded review mechanisms can deliver meaningful remedies.

When a Link Becomes a Border: The Quiet Geopolitics of Internet Access

A LinkedIn short-link anomaly in Iran reveals how sanctions, corporate compliance and geolocation controls can translate geopolitical boundaries into infrastructure-level restrictions, creating an Internet that remains globally connected while becoming functionally unequal.

Thirty-Five Years Later, Moscow Comes Looking for the Soviet Union’s Domain

Russia is imposing state identity verification on .su, the Soviet Union's surviving domain, as researchers uncover criminal infrastructure across the namespace and ICANN pursues a retirement process that could eventually remove it from the global root.

Digital Embassies: Could Africa Rethink Digital Sovereignty?

Estonia's data embassy model offers African governments a different approach to digital sovereignty, combining cross-border infrastructure, legal safeguards and geographic redundancy to keep critical state systems secure, recoverable and operational during major disruptions.

The Missing Privacy Debate Around IPv6

IPv6 solves the Internet's address shortage and simplifies networking, but its technical elegance may carry a hidden cost: shifting privacy protections from architectural constraints toward policies controlled by Internet providers, corporations and governments.

AI Is Rewriting the Internet. But in Whose Language?

AI is becoming a gateway to the internet, but thousands of languages remain excluded. Closing the gap requires multilingual infrastructure, representative training data and policies that make linguistic inclusion a foundation of the AI era.

Beyond Protocol and Policy: Why Project Jake is Reshaping the Architecture of Internet Trust

Project Jake aims to bridge the divide between internet protocols and policy, offering registries, law enforcement and rights holders a decentralised framework for accessing domain-registration data securely while navigating privacy laws and institutional gridlock.

Open-Weight AI: Open to Whom?

The push for open-weight AI promises broader access and competition, but true openness requires more than releasing model weights. Compute, infrastructure, training data, security, and control ultimately determine who can meaningfully benefit from open AI.

DNS Abuse and Criminal Infrastructure: Beyond Definitions and Blocklists

Research suggests criminals may control a striking share of newly registered gTLD domains, raising questions about whether ICANN's definitions, contractual safeguards and enforcement mechanisms are keeping pace with the industrial scale of technology-facilitated harm.

AFRINIC’s Constitution Is Africa’s Next Internet Stress Test

AFRINIC's proposed Constitution offers Africa's troubled internet registry a chance to turn years of litigation, disputed elections and institutional paralysis into durable governance, provided reforms constrain external capture, internal concentration and administrative overreach alike.