Infrastructure Archive

Far more than they appeared to at first glance, two news stories in recent days have framed America’s position in the world at the outset of Joe Biden’s presidency in unusually stark and powerful ways. The first trumpeted a $400 billion investment agreement between Beijing and Tehran, with China vastly increasing its trade with Iran. It comes at a moment when the United States is hoping to force the Iranian government back to the negotiating table to reinstate and even broaden the international agreement aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The Trump administration withdrew from that deal, reimposing […]

It’s been called a “coup” attempt at the British registry for .uk domain names, and it has broad implications for internet governance. You may not have heard of Nominet, the company in question. You may not have heard of ICANN, either—the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. But these two nonprofits are quite significant in the inward-looking world of internet governance. Nominet, a not-for-profit company, is owned by approximately 2,500 members—individuals and organizations, from GoDaddy to mom-and-pop shops, that are involved in domain registration and associated services, such as hosting, web design and email provision. Some of those members, […]

“Keep the politics out of the network”—that was the mantra of the tech community back in the day. There was wisdom in that sentiment, and it worked fairly well for the first 20 years of the internet’s build-out. But today, controversies over next generation 5G networks and how many of them will be built by China’s telecom giant, Huawei, have demonstrated how far geopolitics have infected digital infrastructure. The latest tensions are now over undersea cables. The argument over digital networks goes like this. It’s to be expected that politics, culture, language and all sorts of complex, contested issues will […]