The Star Monitor: Statistics, news and analysis in internet governance

The Star Monitor: Statistics, news and analysis in internet governance
Photo by Víctor Martín / Unsplash

This week's newsletter catches you up on the last three months in internet standards.

The Star Monitor is a cooperative effort between Global Partners Digital and the Internet Exchange, a weekly newsletter on internet governance. The aim of the I-star Quarterly is to help civil society organisations track discussions at internet standards bodies on a quarterly basis. Participation and leadership statistics of major plenary meetings are included, with links to each full report, when available. Hits in mainstream news are included and context provided, as well as links to original sources. Lastly deeper analysis on key developments at each of the core fora are included as well. We always welcome feedback from readers to make this quarterly publication as useful as possible: Please write to mallory@exchangepoint.tech

Participation and leadership statistics

For a handy guide to internet standards and infrastructure acronyms, use ARTICLE 19’s Internet Standards Almanac. Here is a table that tracks the I-star meetings that occurred in this past quarter:


Meeting participants

Leadership

All active engagement

IETF 120
20-26 July 2024
Vancouver
Host: Huawei

48.1% US,

8.7% Canada,

5.7% UK

5.4% Germany

4 Huawei/Futurewei

3 Nokia

3 Cisco

2 Google

1514 participants
833 in-person

APNIC 58
30 Aug-6 Sept 2024 Wellington
Host: InternetNZ

40.4% New Zealand,

9.0% US,

8.0% Indonesia,

7.2% Australia,

5.8% India

CCNIC,
Akamai

423 participants
349 in-person

W3C TPAC
23-27 Sept 2024
Anaheim
Host: AWS


Google,
Apple,
Mozilla


Other notable governance-level happenings during this period can be found at the Packet Clearing House internet governance calendar of events.

News monitor

The following pulls together a curated list of the top news clips about any of the I-stars during this period that made the industry or mainstream news, with a focus on sharing reports and reporting rather than press-release style items.

Analysis

Broken down by forum, below is a deeper dive into the top items that touch on public interest issues. We include a non-exhaustive list of what’s being discussed and what’s considered controversial, whether the proposal is new or part of a broader effort. We make sure that each brief analysis ends with some action and where to go to learn more from a primary source like a version controlled document or a discussion mailing list.

At the highest level, UNGA adopted the Global Digital Compact, which refers to fragmentation in Art 29. (c) to “Promote international cooperation among all stakeholders to prevent, identify and address risks of fragmentation of the internet in a timely manner.”https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/key-takeaways-from-the-un-global-digital-compact-process-04-10-2024-en 

And broadly, it’s worth noting that the editors at Nature published, “How to stop a looming ‘splinternet’” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03110-0 

ITU

In preparation for this year’s WTSA, regional telecommunication organisations meet to discuss priorities for the standards sector. ATU Secretary-General calls for Africa’s unified voice in telecommunications standards https://www.kictanet.or.ke/atu-secretary-general-calls-for-africas-unified-voice-in-telecommunications-standards/ 

New work:

IETF

800m people in China use IPv6 and they’re pushing even harder https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/10/china_ipv6_update. IPv6 Summit aimed to drive Nigeria’s digital transformation as led by the ICT Minister https://sciencenigeria.com/ipv6-summit-aims-to-drive-nigerias-digital-transformation-minister/ 

Published RFCs of note:

  • RFC9580 OpenPGP. P. Wouters, D. Huigens, J. Winter, Y. Niibe. July 2024.
  • RFC9657 Time-Variant Routing (TVR) Use Cases. E. Birrane III, N. Kuhn, Y. Qu, R. Taylor, L. Zhang. October 2024. 
  • RFC9620 Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and Architecture Considerations G. Grover, N. ten Oever. September 2024.
  • RFC9591 The Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold (FROST) Protocol for Two-Round Schnorr Signatures D. Connolly, C. Komlo, I. Goldberg, C. A. Wood. June 2024.

New work:

ICANN and the RIRs

Whois comes under fire once again, this time because of its security flaws. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/rogue-whois-server-gives-researcher-superpowers-no-one-should-ever-have/ Google agrees Whois should be sunsetted. https://www.techradar.com/pro/website-hosting/google-suggests-sunsetting-whois 

After 25 years, Paul Wilson steps down as Director General for APNIC. At APNIC 58 a farewell event was held. Now Jia Rong Low (formerly ICANN, formerly Singbridge International in Singapore) will lead as Director General. https://www.apnic.net/about-apnic/team/jia-rong-low.

W3C

More browser-based solutions enter the cookie wars at the W3C. https://www.forbes.com/sites/esatdedezade/2024/09/04/those-annoying-cookie-pop-ups-could-soon-vanish-should-tech-companies-be-worried/

3GPP

The 3GPP meets four times per year, most recently in Melbourne. However procedings are never made public. One new initiative worth noting is:

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