SMU, working with my group in IDA, is organizing a public lecture by Dave Farber titled “The Technical and Societal Implications of Networking” on 22nd June.

Involved with networking for over 45 years, Professor Farber has provided extensive guidance and advice on areas of high performance computing, communications and IT. In the year 2000, he served as Chief Technologist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission ( FCC ). He was the recipient of the 1995 ACM Sigcomm Award for life long contributions to the computer communications field. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious John Scott Award for Inventions that have contributed to Humanity (previous recipients include Madam Curie, Thomas Edison and The Wright Brothers).

Do not miss the opportunity of the life time to meet the Grandfather of Internet! Registration is now open but do it fast because we only have limited places.

A few days ago, IDA announced the next phase after Connected Singapore plan called iN 2015 (Intelligent Nation 2015)¹, a IT masterplan for the next 10 years for Singapore for work, life and leisure. Unlike previous masterplan where it is done internally, this time IDA is engaging the community to provide input to this masterplan.

So where do you want Singapore to be in 2015?

Decisions are made by those who show up so do participate!

¹ Also see IDA Press Release

Since Houlin Zhao (Director of ITU-TSB) proposed the country-based approach towards IPv6 allocation, there have been several forums with debates on the topic. As expected, many of the the “Internet people” rejected the idea outright mostly on prejudge bias. Few are able to put forward very concrete answer to ‘but what’s wrong with the idea to have multiple issuing authority technically speaking?‘

So I am glad when Paul Wilson and Geoff Hutson put together the paper Competitive Addressing:

In the case of the Internet, addressing lies at the very heart of the network. Without a framework of stable, unique and ubiquitous addresses there is no single cohesive network. Without a continuing stable supply of addresses further growth of the network simply cannot be sustained. Without absolute confidence in the continuing stability in this supply chain the communications industry will inevitably be forced to look elsewhere for a suitable technology platform for the needs of networked data communications.

Geoff always like good paper but sometimes a bit difficult to read (his paper has a prerequiste of been both English and IT major which is pretty rare :-). Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to spend a little effort to read it through.

I was one of the few more vocal opponent on the concept of country-based allocation of IP addresses because I believe it only increase country politizing and IP resources wastages. I believe in allocating resources to the places where it is needed the most, not by political boundary.

But lately, I’m questioning if that position is conflicting with my firm belief on free-market and competition. Afterall, Zhou’s proposal does not eliminate the current RIRs IP allocation plan and more competition, more innovation is good for the industry…

Okay, this maybe an old news, only found it in my email when I was clearing them out. (Sorry Bob!) – ITU has just released its new statistics on global broadband penetration as of 1 January 2005.

Not sure the rest of the statistic but the line for Singapore looks a bit funny – perhaps because we track per household and not per 100 inhabitants as they did but the ratio of DSL and cable is certainly not 50-50 – it is more 80-20 (DSL-Cable) the last time I looked. Maybe I should check it again.

Incidently, they managed to get their news-blog going again on dashblog after their old radio server collapsed. So remember to resubscribe to their feed again.

Today, Doug Barton of IANA announced that AfriNIC got their first AS (36864-37887) and IPv4 allocation (41/8). That’s mean they are finally operational. Congratulation! It has been a long journey!

I also learnt an old friend Jay Chang was appointed as Deputy CFO of Tom.com (via xinhuanet and also on forbes). Couldn’t get in touch with him since his CFSB account dont work anymore – but Jay, if you are reading this. Congratulation to you too ;-)

Last week, we had an interview with Aaran Tan (of Digital Life) in IDA. He is looking for something to write on Semantic Web so we took an opportunity to show him the Digital Content Exchange prototype. The article was published today. Overall, great article for a layman to understand Semantic Web (he removed all the technical jargon like taxonomy, thesaurus, OWL/ontology etc :-).

I only have any one quibble – the article make Semantic Web sound like just another-grand-search-engine. The really core idea is with tagging and onotology, software can be written to do locate resources much better. It isn’t just about search – it is about how to find the information and search is just one way to do so.

Thanks Aaron! Aaron is really a cool guy – he is also trying to find OSS stories to write about. :-)
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After releasing .travel and .jobs (hey, steve.jobs up for bidding!), ICANN said they will look at .xxx and .asia next. (via Chiao)

VINT CERF: …OF THOSE, WE HAVE HAD FAIRLY EXTENSIVE DISCUSSION ABOUT .ASIA AND .XXX. WE CONTINUE TO EVALUATE THOSE. THE OTHERS WILL BE ATTENDED TO AS WE CAN GET TO THEM. BUT I WANT TO SAY FOR THE RECORD THAT WE WILL ATTEMPT WITHIN THE NEXT 30 DAYS TO COME TO A CONCLUSION ONE WAY OR THE OTHER ABOUT .ASIA AND .XXX SO THESE WILL BE ON A BOARD CALL SOMETIME WITHIN THAT PERIOD.

Chiao called .ASIA “more or less like a joint venture among APxx organizations”. I say bullshit! Don’t let appearance fool you.

The main person driving .ASIA is Cheng Che-Hoo (Hong Kong). Che-Hoo has a lot of respect and friends in the Asia Internet communty being former CEO of HKNIC, former executive in Level3 Asia, board of APNIC etc. But what most people don’t see is the whole excerise is underwritten by Afilias, including the ICANN bidding fee and most of the expenses incured. In other words, Afilias is trying to repeat their success with .ORG with .ASIA. (which btw, I highly doubt would be a commercial success being a sTLD).

But didn’t .ASIA have a lot of APxx supporting it? Well, yes. As I said, Che-Hoo is well respected here and many initial NICs who joined .ASIA are really giving Che-Hoo their support and not so much .ASIA per say. I know at least one NIC who got into some trouble after they signed the letter of support without their board approval; That’s how far people will go for Che-Hoo.

But subsequently, the tactic to get support is, hmm, how should I put this? Maybe let me describe how it works: .ASIA deal with the NICs is that if you support .ASIA, when registrations comes from your region, we will split the revenue of that registration with you. One way to look at it is ‘hey, profit sharing with the NIC! Good guy!’. But another way to look at this is “If I don’t support them now, I don’t get anything if someone from my region registered with .ASIA”.

So in other words, a perfect manuipulation in Game Theory – the NICs is put in a position where they cannot afford not to support it.

I admire Che-Hoo dedication and I marvel the tactic they used. But no, I strongly disagree .ASIA is a “joint venture” or “partnership” of Asia Pacific organization. Especially one that NICs join because they don’t have a choice and mastermind by someone outside the region.

.ASIA? Yes, lets do it really from Asia. And its do it properly and not play games.

ps: Let me state outright : This is not about anti-Afilias. My position on .ASIA has not changed since beginning of last year.

There is an article on CNet with a misleading title The U.N. thinks about tomorrow’s cyberspace

The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications. But the ITU enjoys virtually no influence over the Internet. That remains the province of specialized organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN; the Internet Engineering Task Force; the World Wide Web Consortium; and regional address registries.

It is important not to equate UN with ITU (an agency under UN). UN is thinking of Internet Governance but it is charted WGIG. It is also important not to equate ICANN as Internet Governance. ICANN is part of the picture but not the whole. These differences maybe subtle but are world apart in the debate on Internet Governance.

Corrections aside, I am extremely happy to hear Zhou say “I do not consider ICANN an enemy…We tried to support ICANN as far as we could but on the other hand you see that ICANN’s mandate seems to be a little bit unclear…“. Now lets see if ICANN community would also play nice.

btw, my position on ICANN and ITU is that both of them are here to stay so please learn to live with each another (as noted in my previous entry).

Incidently, ICANN also just published Telcordia Report on .NET registry. The winner is Verisign.

[ This entry is also on CircleID. ]

One thing that amazed me about the ICANN community is the creativeness in finding new business models. I am not even talking about new technology like Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), the number of business models created from the vanilla DNS (actually just .com) are just mind boggling.

ICANN was formed in 1999 and introduced the concept of registries and registrars model to the DNS business. With that, we witness the rise of register.com, an IPO darling in the dotcom days, in the early 2000s and subsequently overtaken by the ultra-cheap high-volume reseller model of GoDaddy. We also see new registries like .info and .biz and several others that didn’t do so well.

There are also after-market (aka ebay) for domain names like afternic and registry outsourcing, DNS hosting, Dynamic DNS etc.

That’s about what most outsiders know of DNS business models, mostly revolved around the registry-registrar-reseller model. But there are really more and I shall discuss two not-so-well-known but interesting models below.
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While I am in US this week, IDA¹ concluded our 5th Infocomm Technology Roadmap (ITR5)².

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) today unveiled its fifth and most significant Infocomm Technology Roadmap (ITR5) to date. This inaugural 10 year Technology Roadmap discusses the next era technologies such as sensor technology, biocomputing, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies and provides insights into how these major revolutions and evolutions in infocomm will help to grow the infocomm sector and build a well-connected society.

Traditionally, ITR is event we organized to share our findings of how infocomm technology is going to developed over the next 5 years. But ITR5 is very different this time round -We’re looking at 5 to 15 years into the future and looking at how nanotech, biotech and infocomm is going to come together to shape the future for Singapore. Hopefully, this will help Singapore companies adapt and leverage on this broad trend and to bring such services for Singaporeans. (Any wonder why we took the number 1 spot? :-)

We also have many distinguish speakers including John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox, Paul Reynold, CEO of British Telecom, Dr. Tan Geok Leng, CTO of IDA. Before I left last week, I think we already have 600+ sign up. (I was told ~800 turn up in the end :-)

So while I really enjoy VON, I also kind of sad I couldn’t attend this event back home.

¹ More specifically, Technology Group of IDA, the division I am working at.

² See also ITR5 homepage. Slides and the report itself can also be downloaded from here.