The recent Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), considered and eventually abandoned by the US Congress after rancorous debate earlier this year, proposed giving judges the power to cut off American access to particular websites. Under the initial version of the bill, judges would have been able order Internet service providers to use only crude tools Read more…

Conversation with Steve Crocker and Vinton Cerf, two of the Internet’s founding fathers. Crocker established protocols necessary for the workings of the Internet, and Cerf, a computer scientist, was instrumental in the development of the first commercial email system. The recorded video is at page http://wwwhatsup.com/c+c/cerf+crocker_smithsonian_11-9-2011.flv A better video may be available after some time.

Fellowships to the OECD Technology Foresight Forum are part of the Internet Society’s Next Generation Leaders (NGL) programme and are available to Internet Society members aged between 20 and 40 years. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Technology Foresight Forum is an annual event organized by the OECD’s Committee for Information, Computer, and Read more…

In an extraordinary meeting on 6 December the United Nation’s Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) decided to create a Working Group on Improvements to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) (http://www.intgovforum.org/) with a membership made up only of governments.   We believe this decision sets back the model of multistakeholder cooperation under which Read more…

Recently, we have witnessed the effective disappearance from the Internet of a website made infamous through international press coverage and political intrigue.The Internet Society is founded upon key principles of free expression and non discrimination that are essential to preserve the openness and utility of the Internet. We believe that this incident dramatically illustrates that Read more…