The Star Monitor: Statistics, news and analysis in internet governance
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:
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.
- Bangladesh saw a prolonged internet shutdown amid protests. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladeshs-internet-shutdown-isolates-citizens-disrupts-business-2024-07-26
- Messaging app Telegram– often considered at least end-to-end encrypted– found its CEO detained in France. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/23/tech/telegram-ceo-durov-arrest-user-data-changes/index.html
- The EU proposal to backdoor encryption returned under the Hungarian presidency. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-eu-still-wants-to-scan-your-private-chats-heres-what-you-can-do-about-it/ar-AA1qwJDK
- Signal turned 10 https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal; Got blocked in Russia and Venezuela. https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/9/24217008/signal-blocked-venezuela-russia
- GSMA standard RCS slated to play a role in Google and Apple messaging security. https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/16/24194362/rcs-iphone-ios-18-preview
- Malaysia's plan to block overseas DNS dies after a day. https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/10/malaysias_dns_blocking_plan_paused
- OpenDNS choose to leave France over blocking order. https://torrentfreak.com/opendns-suspends-service-in-france-due-to-canal-piracy-blocking-order-240629
- Cloudflare DNS 1.1.1.1 was out in 300 networks, 70 countries because of BGP hijack. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cloudflare-blames-recent-outage-on-bgp-hijacking-incident
- Blast-RADIUS attack broke 30-year-old protocol used in networks everywhere. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/new-blast-radius-attack-breaks-30-year-old-protocol-used-in-networks-everywhere/
- Global Microsoft meltdown tied to bad Crowdstrike update. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/global-microsoft-meltdown-tied-to-bad-crowstrike-update
- Brazil blocked X and VPNs. https://restofworld.org/2024/brazil-x-ban/
- The White House met with Big Tech to help evade online censors in Russia, Iran. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-calls-big-tech-help-evade-online-censors-russia-iran-2024-09-05
- The WH also issued a roadmap for BGP security. https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2024/09/white-house-plan-looks-secure-foundational-piece-global-internet/399239/
- US State Department trained its diplomats in cybersecurity and privacy. https://www.wired.com/story/us-state-department-diplomacy-school
- China proposed digital ID, backlash ensued. https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Analysis-Xi-Jinping-s-draft-internet-ID-law-sparks-1984-fears
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:
- ITU will be part of a new standards collaboration on AI watermarking, multimedia authenticity and deepfake detection using the C2PA protocol https://www.worldstandardscooperation.org/standards-collaboration-on-ai-watermarking-multimedia-authenticity-and-deepfake-detection
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:
- Birds of Feather session at IETF 120 considers new work on digital emblems as defined by the International Committe of the Red Cross https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/bofreq-haberman-digital-emblems/
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:
- The 6G Standards Tracker https://www.3gpp.org/news-events/partner-news/6gsns-tracker