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CircleID Latest posts on CircleID 2021-07-26T19:06:00-08:00,2002:master-feed Subscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with My AOLSubscribe with BloglinesSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with GoogleSubscribe with Pageflakes It's Time to Rethink Outage Reports tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-26T19:06:00-08:00 Geoff Huston
Much has been said about the criticality of the small coterie of large-scale content distribution platforms and their critical role in today's Internet. These days when one of the small set of core content platforms experiences a service outage, then it's mainstream news, as we saw in June of this year with outages reported in both Fastly and Akamai. In the case of Akamai, the June outage impacted three of Australia's largest banks, their national postal service, the country's reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia, the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and some US airlines. The roll call of impacted services appeared to reach some 500 services from this Akamai incident. With Fastly's outage earlier in the month, we saw a set of popular services disappear for an hour or more. The list of impacted services included Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, the New York Times, and the BBC, to name just a few. And now, at the end of July, Akamai has managed to do it again on a grander scale.

 I've already talked about the increasing criticality of Cloud and Content service providers and the vulnerabilities associated with the strong levels of provider aggregation in this space. With so many enterprises all over the Internet forced to choose between just a handful of viable content distribution platforms for their content and services, nobody should be surprised when a single platform's outage has a massive service impact. But that's not what's prompted me to write this note.

 Akamai's report of the incident was unusual. I'll reproduce here in full:

 [07:35 UTC on July 24, 2021] Update:

 Root Cause:

This configuration directive was sent as part of preparation for independent load balancing control of a forthcoming product. Updates to the configuration directive for this load balancing component have routinely been made on approximately a weekly basis. (Further changes to this configuration channel have been blocked until additional safety measures have been implemented, as noted in Corrective and Preventive Actions.)

 The load balancing configuration directive included a formatting error. As a safety measure, the load balancing component disregarded the improper configuration and fell back to a minimal configuration. In this minimal state, based on a VIP-only configuration, it did not support load balancing for Enhanced TLS slots greater than 6145.

 The missing load balancing data meant that the Akamai authoritative DNS system for the zone would not receive any directive for how to respond to DNS queries for many Enhanced TLS slots. The authoritative DNS system will respond with a SERVFAIL when there is no directive, as during localized failures resolvers will retry an alternate authority.

 The zoning process used for deploying configuration changes to the network includes an alert check for potential issues caused by the configuration changes. The zoning process did result in alerts during the deployment. However, due to how the particular safety check was configured, the alerts for this load balancing component did not prevent the configuration from continuing to propagate, and did not result in escalation to engineering SMEs. The input safety check on the load balancing component also did not automatically roll back the change upon detecting the error.

 Contributing Factors:

The internal alerting which was specific to the load balancing component did not result in blocking the configuration from propagating to the network, and did not result in an escalation to the SMEs for the component.

 The alert and associated procedure indicating widespread SERVFAILs potentially due to issues with mapping systems did not lead to an appropriately urgent and timely response.

 The internal alerting which fired and was escalated to SMEs was for a separate component which uses the load balancing data. This internal alerting initially fired for the Edge DNS system rather than the mapping system, which delayed troubleshooting potential issues with the mapping system and the load balancing component which had the configuration change. Subsequent internal alerts more clearly indicated an issue with the mapping system.

 The impact to the Enhanced TLS service affected Akamai staff access to internal tools and websites, which delayed escalation of alerts, troubleshooting, and especially initiation of the incident process.

 Short Term
 Completed:

Akamai completed rolling back the configuration change at 16:44 UTC on July 22, 2021.

 Blocked any further changes to the involved configuration channel.

 Other related channels are being reviewed and may be subject to a similar block as reviews take place. Channels will be unblocked after additional safety measures are assessed and implemented where needed.

 In Progress:

Validate and strengthen the safety checks for the configuration deployment zoning process

 Increase the sensitivity and priority of alerting for high rates of SERVFAILs.

 Long Term
 In Progress:

Reviewing and improving input safety checks for mapping components.

 Auditing critical systems to identify gaps in monitoring and alerting, then closing unacceptable gaps.

 Why do I find this report unusual?

 It's informative in detailing their understanding of the root cause of the problem, the response they performed to rectify the immediate situation, the measures being undertaken to prevent a recurrence of this issue, and the longer-term measures to improve the monitoring and alerting processes used within their platform.

 I guess we've become used to reading evasive and vague outage reports that talk about "operational anomalies" causing "service incidents" that are "being rectified by our stalwart team of engineers as we speak." When we see a report detailing the issues and the remedial measures, it sticks out as a welcome deviation from the mean. It's as if any admission of the details of a fault in the service exposes the provider to some form of ill-defined liability or reputation damage. To minimize this exposure, the reports of faults, root causes, and mediation actions are phrased in vague and meaningless generalities.

 Other industries have got over this defensive stance, albeit in some cases with a little outside assistance. The airline industry is a good case in point where the intent of such investigations is not to attribute blame and determine liability but to determine the causes of the incident and understand how such circumstances can be avoided in the future because of the obvious overarching safety concerns. Other industries, including the automobile industry, the nuclear power industry and the chemical industry, have all been taught the sometimes painful lesson that the path to a safer service and safer products necessarily involves an open, dispassionate, and honest investigation into incidents with the service. Incidents are an opportunity to learn why a system fails, and an honest and comprehensive post-event analysis can offer invaluable pointers as to what measures can be taken to avoid similar failure modes in the future. It allows all service providers to operate a safer service.

 Yet despite these practices that have been adopted in other industries, the information technology industry often regards itself as "special." For decades software vendors have been able to sell faulty and insecure products without even a hint of liability. The effort to improve the robustness of the product was often seen as an avoidable cost to the software vendor. This attitude is still pervasive in this industry and manifests itself in outages on the Internet with depressing regularity. "Move fast and break things" became a pervasive mantra of the Internet, and not only did Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg adopt this as the operating principle for Facebook's internal engineering effort, but he went further to observe that "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." Perhaps we should simply be grateful that Facebook does not build airplanes, nuclear power plants, or automobiles. But this mantra of rapid and, at times, somewhat careless innovation isn't unique to Facebook. It has been applicable equally to many others, including Amazon, Apple, and Google. They have all been moving extremely quickly, and doubtless, they all have been breaking a few things along the way!

 This industry's case for special immunity from such dispassionate and thorough investigations into failures and incidents may well have been based on the assumption that failures of these systems were not immediately and directly related to public safety. Yet this is simply not true. A failure in the ability of a DNS platform to resolve names may sound like a relatively obscure and inconsequential failure, but if other systems rely on the DNS in quite fundamental ways, we head into a cascading failure scenario. The more we use digital systems as the command-and-control mechanism for our public environments, such as our power supply systems, oil pipelines, transportation networks, and water supply systems, to name just a few, then the more we implicitly rely on the safe and robust operation of basic digital infrastructure services. It's not just the waves of various cyberattacks that expose such vulnerabilities in our digital world, but the issues of failures in these highly complex systems where supposedly minor changes to the system or its environment can lead to catastrophic failure either through unintended consequences or more troublesome aspects of emergent behaviors of highly complex systems.

 It would be a positive step forward for this industry if Akamai's outage report were not unusual in any way. It would be good if all service providers spent the time and effort post rectification of an operational problem to produce such outage reports as a matter of standard operating procedure. It's not about apportioning blame or admitting liability. It's all about positioning these services as the essential foundation of the digital environment and stressing the benefit of adopting a shared culture of open disclosure and constant improvement to advance the robustness of these services. It is about appreciating that these days these services are very much within the sphere of public safety, and their operation should be managed in the same way.

Written by Geoff Huston, Author & Chief Scientist at APNIC

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More under: Cyberattack, Cybersecurity, Policy & Regulation

 DOTZON Study: Digital City Brands 2021 tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-26T14:14:00-08:00 Katrin Ohlmer

Ranking Digital City Brands / 2021 DOTZON GmbH

 DOTZON presents the fifth edition of the Digital City Brands study. After introducing the study in early 2017, DOTZON expanded further and enhanced the data to display how cities successfully use their Digital City Brands. The Digital City Brand is the digital dimension of the City Brand and mirrors the "Digitalness" of a city.

 However, the Digital City Brand is much more than a mere extension of the City Brand. It plays an essential role in strengthening the emotional bond between a city and its stakeholders. The Digital City Brand provides a reliable local anchor that is opposed to a city's constant changes and progressive digitalization. Even though the latter makes citizens independent of space and time, it causes a desire for belonging and localization at the same time. As a digital meeting place, the Digital City Brand has the power to satisfy these yearnings.

 European capitals like Berlin, Paris and London were among the first to have their own Digital City Brand. Tokyo, New York, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, and other international metropolises soon joined this development. Today, most Digital City Brands have been well adopted by citizens, businesses, and the city administration. City marketers appreciate them as a valuable tool for city marketing purposes and campaigns (e. g. and as a unique destination proposition in the global competition of places. For digitalization and smart city initiatives, Digital City Brands have become a meaningful tool as well.

 The study Digital City Brands is based on analyzing the 36 cities worldwide with their own digital identity on the Internet — the so-called city top-level domains (cityTLDs). Sources for the underlying data are eight key performance indicators: The number of registered domain names, the annual sales volume, the number of active domain names, the number of pages per domain listed at Google, the number of domains listed in the Alexa and Majestic rankings, the number of domain names per 1,000 inhabitants, the gross domestic product per domain name, and a comparison between the cityTLD and the national top-level domain (ccTLD). The figures used are all from public databases and local parameters specific to a city. They specify the strengths and assets of the cities.

 Digital City Brands 2021 allows a head-to-head comparison of all cities with their own digital identities. The study shows that .berlin remains unchallenged at the top, followed by .tokyo in second place and .nyc in third place. This year's newcomers in the TOP 10 are .miami and .brussels. However, last year's number six, .moscow, and last year's number nine, .wien, did not make it into the TOP 10 this year.

Digital City Brands Ranking 2021

 The most successful Digital City Brand in 2021 is .berlin, which at the same time is defending the top spot for the fifth time in a row. .berlin was the first cityTLD ever to be launched to the public. It ranks good to very good in almost all KPIs. Nearly 50,000 registered domain names combined with a turnover close to USD 1.9 million and a good number of high traffic domain names according to Amazon's and Majestic's ensure the top position.

 .tokyo has been able to reconquer the second position. With a number of 169,814, .tokyo is the cityTLD with the most registered domain names. It counts 22 domains in the Alexa ranking and 53 domains in the Majestic ranking and has thus been able to occupy second place in this category. The popularity of .tokyo is also reflected in the category "cityTLD versus ccTLD": Here, .tokyo performs almost as well as the ccTLD .jp.

 Since its launch in 2014, .nyc has become the digital home for many New Yorkers. The American cityTLD was able to improve from fourth to third place compared to the previous year, which, among other things, is due to its top position in Alexa and Majestic: 23 and 91 domains in the top 1 million rankings speak for themselves. Additionally, .nyc is a lot more popular than the national domain extension .us, which is also evident from a total number of 63,080 registered domain names.

 .amsterdam has managed to reach the TOP 10 for the fourth time. In most of the eight parameters, the cityTLDs have good averages: In Amsterdam, there are about 27 .amsterdam domains per 1,000 inhabitants, which complies with the second place in this category. The fifth place is reached by .amsterdam in the category "turnover of the cityTLD" and the fourth place in the category "gross domestic product per domain name".

 A cityTLD that improved again is .koeln. Instead of tenth place last year, .koeln is ranked fifth place this year. A number of 23 domains per 1,000 inhabitants and a convincing registration number of 25,930 domains have contributed to the good result. However, the top position is reached by .koeln in another category: The "gross domestic product per domain name" contributes greatly to the success of .koeln this year.

 .miami is the cityTLD that made the biggest jump, as it was able to move up from 16th to sixth place. This strong development is due to the top position in the category "domain names per 1,000 inhabitants": Almost 35 domains are registered in Miami per 1,000 inhabitants. .miami also has the highest rank when comparing it with the national ccTLD: There are seven times more .miami domains registered than .us domains. With these two top results, .miami was able to leave other cityTLDs far behind.

 After rank eight in the previous year, .hamburg was able to move up by one place and land on rank seven this year. With more than 20,000 registered domain names, .hamburg shows a stable development in the corresponding category. The good ranking is also due to a turnover of about USD $750,000 as well as the sixth place in the category "gross domestic product per domain name."

 .london finds itself back in eighth place after an excursion to fifth place last year. The cityTLD performs well in many categories: For example, 47,122 domain names had been registered under .london by June 2021, which corresponds to the fourth-best result in this category. In addition, .london was able to generate the third-highest turnover with approx. USD $1.4 million, and to enter the third-most domains in the Alexa and Majestic rankings.

 The French cityTLD .paris is represented in the TOP 10 for the second time, ranking 9th this year. It has reached sixth place in Alexa and Majestic rankings with six and 26 domains, and another sixth place in the category "annual sales volume" with about USD $650,000. In the category "number of registered domain names," .paris reaches 18,602, accounting for the eighth place here.

 Another big surprise this year is .brussels. The cityTLD of the Belgian capital improved by two places and thus established itself in the TOP 10 ranking for the first time. Contributing to the ranking is the third place in the category "number of pages per domain listed at Google", as well as the ninth place in the category "Alexa and Majestic ranking", with one .brussels domain listed on Alexa and 28 .brussels domains listed on Majestic. Further solid results in the categories "number of registered domain names," "annual sales volume," and "number of domain names per 1,000 inhabitants" contribute to the ranking.

 The Ranking Digital City Brands 2021 shows the TOP 10 Digital City Brands. The comparison between years reflects the development of each city in the ranking.

Outlook

 The areas of digitization, e-government and smart city will continue to be among the driving forces for the development of cities. COVID-19 has helped to make deficits in digital infrastructure even clearer. As a result, these issues are moving higher up the agenda for city governments and city marketing. The infrastructure of a cityTLD plays an important role here: It enables cities to communicate with their stakeholders and serves as a digital tool for location marketing and branding.

 Last year, cities already started to deepen their knowledge and experience in the field of digital branding and initiated several innovative projects like, or We expect other cities to follow suit so that we will be able to present new placements among the Digital City Brands in the coming years. One cityTLD that will undoubtedly bring movement to the ranking is .zuerich: It will be launched in November 2021.

 Interested parties can order the detailed study (in German) via

Written by Katrin Ohlmer, CEO DOTZON

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More under: Domain Names, New TLDs, Web

 Beavers Kill Fiber Route tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-24T08:12:00-08:00 Doug Dawson

Beavers chewing through fiber cable cause hundreds lose internet in a canadian remote community. (CircleID)

 An article from CBC earlier this year reported that beavers had chewed through an underground fiber and had knocked 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia off broadband for 36 hours. The beavers had chewed through a 4.5-inch conduit that was buried three feet underground. This was an unusual fiber cut because it was due to beavers, but animals damaging fiber is a common occurrence.

 Squirrels are the number one source of animal damage to fiber. It's believed that rodents love to chew on fiber as a way to sharpen their teeth, which grow continuously throughout their life. For example, squirrel teeth grow as much as eight inches per year, and the animals are forced to gnaw to keep teeth under control and sharp. For some reason, squirrels seem to prefer fiber cables over other kinds of wires hanging on poles.

 I remember reading a few years ago that Level 3 reported that 17% of their aerial fiber outages were caused by squirrels. A Google search turns up numerous network outages caused by squirrels. I have a client with a new fiber network, and the only outage over the last year came from a squirrel chewing through the middle-mile fiber route that carried broadband to and from the community.

 ISPs use a wide variety of techniques to prevent squirrel damage, but anybody who has ever put out a bird feeder knows how persistent squirrels can be. One deterrent is to use hardened cables that are a challenge for squirrels to chew through. However, there have been cases reported where squirrels still partially chew through such cables and cause enough damage to allow in water and cause future damage.

 A more common solution is to use sort of physical barriers to keep squirrels away from the cable. There are barrier devices that can be mounted on the pole to block squirrels from moving higher — but these can also impede technicians. Another barrier is mounted where the fiber connects to a pole to keep the squirrels away from the fiber. There are more exotic solutions like deploying ultrasonic blasters to drive squirrels away from fiber. In other countries, ISPs sometimes deploy poison or obnoxious chemicals to keep squirrels away from the fiber, but such techniques are frowned upon or illegal in the US.

 What was most interesting about the beaver fiber cut was that the cut was far underground — supposedly out of any danger. In parts of the country, there are similar threats to buried fiber from pocket gophers. There are thirteen species of pocket gophers in the US that range from 5 to 13 inches in length. The two regions of the country with pocket gophers are the Midwest plains and the Southwest. Gophers live on plants and either eat roots or pull plants down through the soil.

 Pocket gophers can cause considerable damage to buried fiber. These rodents will chew through almost anything, and there have been reported outages from gophers chewing through gas, water, and buried electric lines. Gophers typically live between 6 and 12 inches below the surface and are a particular threat to buried drops.

 There are several ways to protect against gophers. The best protection is to bury fiber deep enough to be out of gopher range, but that can add a lot of cost to buried drops. I have a few clients that bore drops to keep them away from gophers. Another protection is to enclose the fiber in a sheath that is over 3 inches in diameter. Anything that large and tubular is generally too big for a gopher to bite. Another solution is to surround the buried fiber with 6–8 inches of gravel of at least 1-inch size — anything smaller gets pushed to the side by the gophers. Unfortunately, all of these solutions add a lot of cost to fiber drops.

 An unexpected risk for aerial fiber is from birds. Large birds with sharp talons can create small cuts in the sheath and introduce water. Flocks of birds sitting on fiber can cause stretch and cause sag. That may sound like a small risk, but when I lived in Florida, it was common to see hundreds of birds sitting shoulder to shoulder on the wires between two poles. While most people would find that many birds to be an interesting sight, being a broadband guy, my first reaction was always to see which wire they were sitting on.

Written by Doug Dawson, President at CCG Consulting

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Telecom

 Satellites and Cellular Backhaul tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-21T10:06:00-08:00 Doug Dawson
Elon Musk recently announced that he was going to be providing cellular backhaul from the Starlink constellation of satellites. This makes a lot of sense from a financial perspective in that it avoids the costly wired fiber networks needed to reach rural cell sites.

 This is clearly a shot across the bow for companies that currently bring fiber connectivity to rural cell sites. There are numerous rural middle-mile networks that mostly survive by providing backhaul to cell sites. While there has been downward pressure from the cellular carriers on transport rates — it's likely that Starlink or other satellite providers could drop the bottom out of the market pricing for transport.

 Since we hear so much about how the US is losing the 5G war, people may not realize how far the cellular networks around the world are behind those in the US and other developed countries. According to statistics from GSMA, in 2020, there were 7.9 billion cellular users in the work, 48% who were still using 2G or 3G cellular technology. The percentage of users on older technologies is expected to drop to about 23% by 2025, with a big transition to 4G.

 But even then, cellular data speeds are likely to remain slow in many countries due to the lack of fiber backhaul and to the fact that in many countries, the vast majority of people get almost all of their broadband from cellphones.

 It's been predicted for many years that satellites would play a big role in supporting cell sites. The worldwide consulting firm NSR predicted last year that there would be 800,000 cell sites worldwide connected via satellite by 2029. Over that same time period, NSR predicts the US market for satellite backhaul at $39 billion.

 But it's still a bit of a surprise to hear Starlink talking about providing cellular backhaul. A rural cell site is a large data user and requires far more bandwidth than the average residential or business customer. It would be a big challenge to Starlink or any satellite network to carry both cellular backhaul and residential broadband — because the cellular backhaul would suck away a lot of the capacity of the network out of any one satellite. One would think that cell sites would get priority routing, which means other broadband users would suffer.

 It's been less than five years since the new generation of satellite companies said they would be launching big constellations in the overhead sky. My first thought when I first heard of the new satellite technology is that they would be far better off financially by supporting a handful of cellular companies rather than million of residential customers. What I never expected is that somebody would try to handle both on the same network.

 And perhaps that's not Starlink's plan. The company has been talking about launching 30,000 satellites over time (currently at 1,500). It would be possible to have different satellites for different customers with a constellation that large. But Elon Musk's disclosure made it sound like discussions about cellular backhaul are already in the works.

 I think we're many years away from fully understanding how satellite companies will operate. It's possible that cellular companies and big corporate users will make it worthwhile for the satellite companies to give them priority over residential broadband customers. It's not hard envisioning satellites providing connectivity to large fleets like FedEx, UPS, or the US Postal Service. Satellite broadband could become the connectivity of choice for large trucking companies. It's going to be hard for a constellation owner to say no to those kinds of opportunities — but saying yes to big commercial opportunities will means diluting the broadband available for residential customers.

Written by Doug Dawson, President at CCG Consulting

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Mobile Internet, Telecom, Wireless

 President Díaz-Canel, Cuban Internet Is More Than Facebook on Cell Phones – Don't Be Afraid of It tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-20T18:13:00-08:00 Larry Press

Ramiro Valdés Menéndez

 "The Internet could and should be controlled and used to serve peace and development." — Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, Cuban Minister of Informatics and Communications, 1997

 As a result of Internet service interruption during the recent anti-government protests in Cuba, Florida Senator Rubio and Governor DeSantis and President Biden have called for measures to strengthen and guarantee Cuban Internet connectivity, but that won't happen until the Cuban government recognizes that doing so is in its long-run interest.

 I have seen several suggestions that we smuggle end-user satellite terminals from services like SpaceX Starlink into Cuba but attempts to smuggle in end-user terminals by Alan Gross and others disguised as surfing equipment have failed spectacularly. Furthermore, they would have been inconsequential drops-in-the bucket had they succeeded.

 However, if the Cuban government would permit it, SpaceX service in Cuba would benefit the Cuban people and, in doing so, strengthen the position of the Cuban government.

 There have also been several proposals to provide undersea cable connectivity to Cuba. The most recent one was killed in the US, but I'm confident that President Biden would support it (or another one) if the Cuban government would permit it.

 I served on the advisory subcommittees to the Cuban Internet Task Force, and made a number of recommendations for facilitating Cuban Internet connectivity. Again, none of these proposals would work without the support of the Cuban government.

 The Cuban government was frightened by the role mobile phones running communication and social media applications played in the protests, but mobile apps are one small part of the whole Internet. Widespread fixed broadband connectivity via satellite and improved cable capacity would have positive effects on the economy, education, healthcare, entertainment, etc., thereby enhancing the government's standing with the people.

 When the Internet first came to Cuba, there was a high-level debate on its risks and rewards. Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, then Minister of Informatics and Communications, is often quoted as calling the Internet "the wild stallion of the new technologies" and a potential tool for "global extermination." Still, he went on to say it "could and should be controlled and used to serve peace and development." Fidel Castro also recognized the potential upside of the Internet and supported the establishment of Youth Computer Clubs throughout the nation. (They were networked using pre-Internet technology). The same debate took place in China around that time, and they decided on a robust, but controlled Internet. It would be great if the US could convince the Cubans that the Chinese and Valdés were right. If we cannot, the Chinese, with their own satellite and cable projects, may.

Written by Larry Press, Professor of Information Systems at California State University

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More under: Access Providers, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Telecom

 Another Portent of the Decline and Fall of the Telco tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-20T17:17:00-08:00 Geoff Huston
The Swedish carrier group Telia has recently announced the sale of its international wholesale business to Polhelm Infra, an infrastructure investment manager jointly owned by a number of Swedish pension funds. Why would a telco operator sell off what was a core part of its operation to a pension fund?

 The Internet was originally conceived as a telephone network for computers. (I should mention that this was not a concept that was unique to the Internet at the time. Most computer networks were designed using a similar transactional model.) By that, I mean that, like the human users of a telephone network, computers could be both senders and receivers, conversations occurred between any two parties, and conversations had a distinct start and an equally clear end. The network was largely a passive fabric of connectivity, and a client of the network could only initiate conversations with other clients and could not converse directly with the network itself. This model was suited to the early mainframe model of the computer environment, where computers were shared by many users and used for many purposes at once.

 However, the computer environment has changed radically over the past forty years, and with it, the service requirements from a network have changed as well. Particularly so with relation to the Internet. The major shift has been the specialization of the roles of client and server. Services are hosted within dedicated platforms that are constructed specifically for a server role. These days we use data centers, constructed as large-scale concentration points of storage and processing capability, as the platform for service delivery, while clients have disappeared into our pockets or quietly embedded themselves into a myriad of things where they're all but invisible. The immediate corollary for the network's architecture was a transformation of the network into the same client/server distinction. Clients initiate network transactions with servers, and a subsequent bidirectional data stream ensues.

 However, the client/server network had a somewhat unanticipated outcome. If servers never initiated a transaction with a client, clients did not need to have a permanently available unique rendezvous address for others to initiate a network transaction. When a client was not talking with a server, it did not need an IP endpoint address. There is an associated observation that a client could use many different client-side endpoint addresses to talk simultaneously to many different servers. The client's address only needed to be relatively unique to those used by other conversations, and a client had no requirement to present the same source address in all of its transactions with servers.

 From the client's point of view, an IP address is merely a conversation token to be borrowed and used for a conversation with a server and then passed back into a shared pool. This form of sharing a pool of endpoint addresses between clients was implemented by Network Address Translators (NATs), and it is a foundational technology of today's Internet. Indeed, it is the reason why the exhaustion of the supply of unique IPv4 addresses has had no visible impact on the Internet and the reason why IPv6 is still seen as an option rather than an urgent necessity.

 But even this client/server architecture has been a temporary model for the Internet. We have amassed abundant processing and storage capacity in the digital world. What is in short supply is time. The Earth has an unavoidable physical size, and there is an equally unavoidable delay in propagating a signal between two points. The further apart these two points, the longer the propagation delay for a signal between those points. However, we can use abundant processing and storage capacity to steer a path around this limitation. If we clone these service delivery points across the world and devise a way to direct each client to the closest instance of the service, then we can speed things up. Over the past decade or so, that is exactly what we've been doing. These days Content Distribution Networks are the core of the Internet's operational model, and the aim is to position services in close physical proximity to every significant cluster of clients. Rather than having a network that brings diverse clients to a unique service delivery point, the network is now facilitating the selection of the best instance of a particular service delivery point from many potential alternatives.

 These changes in the design of the Internet can be seen in many metrics. The speed and quality of service delivery have been improved by orders of magnitude for many users. The network is used more efficiently, and the costs associated with network transit have dropped dramatically.

 Faster. Cheaper. Better. What's the problem?

 Well, for most of us, it's probably all good. There is, however, one case where it's not quite so rosy, and that's the Internet transit service providers. Whether your assets are under the ocean or trenched across long overland distances, it's somewhat challenging to change your asset base and reposition yourself to define a new engagement model with content-centric service network architectures. In some cases, we see these transit providers just holding on and riding through this change process and accept the inevitable consequences. Others are trying to pivot their business and get out while they can.

 For that reason, I was drawn to this Telia announcement to divest itself of its wholesale international Internet transit business. One possible explanation here is that Telia is cutting and running before the residual value of its transit business and transmission assets plummet to the point where they are basically worthless. Of course, the reasons why a company divests itself of part of its activities is not always obvious. Still, assuming that companies act in terms of perceived self-interest and enhancing shareholder value, it would appear that several Internet transit providers are seeing the transit market entering a phase of decline that could possibly be terminal and are looking for other investments that offer a better return.

 It's not just the transit business but the larger picture of cross-investment in foreign markets that could well be in decline. The period of the  techno-colonialization  of the digital world, to put it somewhat cynically, where telcos whose home markets were saturated looked outward to less developed markets where they believed there was an opportunity for further growth and financial rewards, could well be drawing to a close. It's not just Telia selling off their international enterprises and investments, but they're joined by Norway's Telenor and Sweden's Tele2 are following a similar path of withdrawing from foreign markets. A summary of the changes over the past five years for these Nordic telcos is shown in Figure 1.

 This shift is not isolated to the Nordic telcos, of course. The wave of international investment in the telco sector started with the breakup of AT&T in the late 1980s and was followed by the progressive deregulation of many national telco sectors. The initial focus was the establishment of competitive phone services in national markets but was quickly followed by various Internet services, including wholesale and enterprise support services. Part of the rationale of this expansion into international markets was to service a domestic demand for international services in both the ISP and enterprise networks. However, the emergence of cloud-based services to the enterprise and retail sectors has undermined the ongoing value of this form of distributed service integration. A good recent example here is Microsoft's Windows 365 service which takes the model of the now well-established cloud platform for applications and adds the platform itself into the cloud, making the desktop itself a cloud-based service.

Figure 1: Divestiture of International activities by Nordic Telcos. Source: Telegeography

 This change is one from content and service delivery as an overlay on a shared common network platform to content and services environments being tightly bound to dedicated network infrastructure.

 If we take some of the detail from capacity reports that Telegeography has made to industry forums, this trend is clearly visible. They've reported that in 2006 some 80% of international capacity was shared common IP transit capacity, while by 2018, this proportion was down to 40% of total international capacity. At the same time, content providers' dedicated capacity inventory accounts for 54% of all international capacity by the end of 2018. This shift is most evident in the trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific and intra-Asia markets. Further decline in the transit market and an associated shift to cloud and content distribution services is expected in the coming years.

 It is also interesting to observe the decline in the role of North America as the major hub for interregional traffic. Some 97% of inter-regional capacity had a North American endpoint in 2004, and this has declined to some 80% of capacity using North America in 2018. In its place, Europe has grown as a hub, with inter-regional capacity that uses Europe servicing capacity to Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The overall picture of the western hemisphere being the hub for much of the international capacity inventory is unlikely to change dramatically in the near-term to mid-term future. While seafloor-based capacity in the Atlantic and the Pacific might involve longer paths than some Indian Ocean/Mediterranean routes, these extended paths represent a far lower political risk.

 Perhaps the most significant aspect of this content and cloud capacity, which impacts the historical telco model, is a no sharing regime. Cloud and content providers have expressed a strong preference for direct purchase of entire cable systems or a dedicated fiber pair as a minimum level of capacity provisioning. This reduces unwelcome third-party dependencies and creates higher levels of assurance in meeting service and capacity evolution. While dedicated capacity measures were negligible in 2013, the intervening period has seen these cloud and content providers making subsequent investments in international cable systems that have resulted in wholly content-owned capacity representing 80% of the entire trans-Atlantic capacity, 50% of the trans-Pacific capacity, and 25% of the Latin American capacity by the end of 2018. Perhaps the critical issue here is that these cloud and content providers appear to eschew more intimate capacity-sharing solutions, including wavelength-based segmentation. In trying to assess how far this dedicated capacity market segment will grow, the capacity predictions are somewhat clouded here. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is that this is no longer based on the old model of the Internet transit's just in time demand-pull model of content delivery to clients, but one that uses a CDN's cache pre-provisioning model of just in case push distribution of content. The larger the content volume being managed in this matter, and the greater the number of client access points (CDN data centers), the higher the demand for internal capacity to meet these content flooding demands.

 But while these demands can be extrapolated to very high numbers, it should be stressed that the CDN industry is currently highly resourced, and while private capacity can be seen as an expensive luxury, it's a luxury that the content industry can currently afford. This edges out the more traditional capacity sharing broker, which is the telco wholesale carrier business model.

 There was a time, and it was not so long ago, that the telcos dominated the communications sector. In many national environments, they were the largest employer, the largest revenue earner, even the largest credit provider. Their position as a domestic monopoly created a secure revenue base that was immune from competitive pressures, and the privileged position was all but unassailable. Deregulation opened up this sector to initial waves of like-for-like competition, but this has been quickly followed by a new wave of substitution competition where the rise of Internet-based services has shifted the nexus of value generation from carriage to content and service. The result was initially the commoditization of the shared public carriage role, but the process of time and the successive improvements of the digital capacity of physical transmission systems has meant that dedicated transmission systems are now accessible to the large cloud and content providers and shared carriage systems have become a niche activity rather than the mainstream of the carriage sector.

 With this trend, we see the continual erosion of the residual value of shared common carriage systems. For the wholesale telco carriage provider, this story of inexorable decline is not exactly good news. No wonder some of them are bailing out!

 I simply cannot let the title of this article pass without at least a passing mention to that epic work by the English historian Edward Gibbon. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a six-volume epic, published between 1776 and 1789, still in print today. To quote from this work: "The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long."

Written by Geoff Huston, Author & Chief Scientist at APNIC

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 The Growing Rate of Standalone Broadband Adoption tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-20T13:51:00-08:00 Doug Dawson

 Parks Associates recently announced its Home Services Dashboard release, a for-pay service that tracks consumer adoption of telecom services like Internet, pay-TV, and cellphones. As part of the announcement, the company released a blog that shows that at the end of the first quarter of 2021 that 41% of US homes are buying standalone broadband — meaning broadband that's not bundled with cable TV or a home telephone.

 This is further evidence of cord-cutting since in 2018, only 33% of homes had standalone broadband. This shows that 8% of all US homes have ditched all services from their ISP other than broadband in eight years. One doesn't have to trend this too many years into the future until over half of all homes will be buying only broadband.

 ISPs are working hard to keep some kind of bundle because they understand the power of the bundle to control churn. It's much easier for a customer who is only buying broadband to switch to another ISP. As the bundle with cable TV is losing appeal, the biggest cable companies, Comcast and Charter, have been busy bundling customers with cellular service. Comcast has also been successful in bundling millions of homes with smart home packages. For a short time, Comcast even tested the idea of bundling with solar power.

 My consulting firm does broadband surveys, and we've seen a wide range of success of bundling in different markets across the country. Just in the last two years, we've seen communities where the level of bundling is as low as 45% or as high as 80%. We've noticed that cities with older populations seem to have the highest percentage of homes still buying a bundle. Bundling is also still fairly common in rural America, although the rural bundle is most typically a DSL connection and a telephone landline. A few telcos like CenturyLink still bundle with satellite TV.

 The one statistic from Parks Associates that I have to challenge is the average price for unbundled broadband at $64. I have to wonder what is included in that figure. Consider Comcast as an example. The Comcast price for its most popular broadband product, Performance, is $76. There is currently a web special where a new customer can buy the product for as little as $34.99. But that price is only good for 12-months and reverts to the higher price. But more importantly, Comcast charges $14 for the modem. That means the price of standalone broadband without a promotional price is $90. Even the introductory product is at $49 when including the modem. The same is true for Charter and other major cable companies — the standalone price without special discount with every big cable company is more than $64 — sometimes a lot more.

 Over the last year, I've done rate studies in over a dozen communities, and I've never seen the average price for standalone broadband below the $75 range. I can accept the Parks Associates price if it doesn't include the extra modem fee. Parks Associates are obviously looking at a larger database of numbers than I am, but I've seen the $70+ average price in urban, suburban, and rural markets.

 I agree with Parks Associates that broadband prices have steadily been climbing, and they observed that standalone broadband prices have increased in price by 64% since 2011. I have no way to judge the percentage increase, but I agree there have been substantial rate increases.

 What might surprise a lot of people is how many households still cling to their bundles. After accounting for homes that don't buy broadband, there are still slightly more homes that buy broadband through a bundle than households that buy standalone broadband. However, at the rate that homes are cutting the cord, it seems likely that there will be more homes without a bundle within a year or so. In 2020, the traditional cable industry lost almost 6 million customers or nearly 7.4% of the base of cable customers — and most of those customers broke a bundle when they ditched cable.

Written by Doug Dawson, President at CCG Consulting

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 Computing Clouds in Orbit – A Possible Roadmap tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-20T10:21:00-08:00 Tom Evslin

An artist's impression of the Exolaunch's Fingerspitzengefühl satellites deployment into orbit. Illustration: EXOLAUNCH

 Last week, I predicted that much of the Internet and most cloud datacenters would launch into space in the next ten years. Today the only part of the Internet in space is a very small amount of "bent-pipe" access: signals which go from a user to a satellite and bounce back down to a ground station which feeds them into the terrestrial internet where all processing is done and all queries answered by internet-connected servers, many of them in cloud data centers. Responses follow a reverse path through a ground station, back to a satellite, and then to the user. Below is a possible roadmap to the orbital internet; reality will certainly vary.

1. Starlink and Iridium prove the practicality of internet access service based on Low Earth Orbit Satellites (LEOS) — done

 See: The Internet and The Cloud Are Going into Space

2. Bent-pipe access via LEOS creates a huge market in orbit

 On the supply side, Starlink will go from 1500 to at least 44,000 satellites. OneWeb, a European competitor, has launched 54 satellites and will go commercial this fall. Kuiper from Amazon will come online in the next couple of years. Starlink will get laser-based satellite-to-satellite working and be able to provide service in most of the world where it has no ground stations.

 On the demand side, all users of obsolete slow-responding geocentric satellites are converting to LEOS as fast as they can. Even though fiber currently provides faster access than satellites, fiber is slow to deploy and perhaps never will get to the end of the road. Fiber can't provide mobile access, which is required both by people and the Internet of Things (IoT), which will soon include all cars. Iridium already provides mobile access, and so will Starlink soon. 5G is the main competitor for this market. For emergencies, no terrestrial solution is adequate for communication. Poles and towers are subject to the same catastrophes as the people who depend on them locally.

 Starlink says it has contracts for backhaul from remote cell towers not on the fiber network to the internet backbone. This is the first but won't be the last example of cellular acting as a concentrator and distributor of traffic which passes through LEOS.

 Technology will increase the capability of LEOS service, and competition will drive down the price.

3. Caching for and in orbit

 Caching in internet terms means storing replicas of frequently accessed information near the consumer of that information to sped response times and lower overall communication costs. Every time you click on a URL, a query goes to a domain name server (DNS) somewhere to look up the physical address on the internet of the website your query is headed for. For example, converts to At least part of the DNS directory will quickly be cached in all ground stations. Large ISPs often host their own domain name servers to increase responsiveness; Starlink will not be an exception. I'll be astonished if Starlink doesn't start caching DNS directories in access satellites shortly. Users will experience great responsiveness, and Starlink will save an exchange with a ground station for each truncated query.

 Companies like Akamai and Cloudflare operate content delivery networks (CDNs). On behalf of content owners, the CDNs cache copies of fairly static content (movies, for example, but also many other types of web pages) at locations around the internet. This is a form of hosting that saves content owners from owning huge data centers with huge pipes themselves and assures that the content is quickly accessible from all over the world that each content owner cares about. Whether Starlink will operate its own CDN or partner remains to be seen; what is certain is that terabytes of content will move into space to be "near" users of satellite access. At this point, we will see the first dedicated cache satellites. Access satellites will query them by laser.

4. Smart routing in orbit

 Once satellites can talk to each other, they become routers and can manage the quality of service and optimize routing dynamically to some extent, just as terrestrial routers do. If a query can be answered in space by a cache satellite, the query will go there and get a very fast response with no bouncing around in the terrestrial internet. If a query does need to go to earth, it might be routed with a satellite hop or two to a ground station collocated with a data center that can process some or all the requests.

5. LEOS gain a speed advantage

 With smart routing, caching, and content delivery hubs in space and at ground stations, a query sent through LEOS will often get a faster response than the same query sent through the terrestrial internet. All packets traverse a net of routers to get to their ultimate destination. Each router adds delay to the packet's journey for processing and queuing time. Each satellite can get traffic to any other satellite with a maximum of four hops, usually less. If the packet is then served from a space-based cache or a data center with a download station collocated, which will be most data centers in a few years, there are fewer hops and more alternatives for dealing with congestion. The speed of light is also 50% faster in space than in fiber, but that is not as significant to response time as reducing the number of hops.

6. Peering in orbit

 Once competitive networks are firmly established in space, satellites from Starlink, Kuiper, OneWeb and other operators will start to exchange packets with each other via laser; this kind of traffic exchange, which is called peering is already standard practice among terrestrial ISPs, even fierce competitors. They don't do it to be nice; they peer because of Metcalfe's Law: the value of a network is directly proportional to the square of the number of endpoints. The ISPs gain more by combining their networks than they do by keeping them separate. The same goes in space.

7. Terrestrial aggregation

 People like high-frequency traders and very serious gamers, for whom every millisecond counts, will start to use LEOS for access even when they live in areas with fiber. Fiber operators will start to add routes directly to space from their networks.

 Mobile applications (think automated cars) which need rapid response will be connected mainly by cellular networks unless space technology has evolved quickly enough for them to connect to LEOS (which is possible). Even cell towers located on fiber backbone will start talking directly to LEOS to better serve their traffic.

8. Data centers in space — the cloud in orbit

 Within five years (I usually underestimate time), major data centers will be in space for simple economic reasons. Data center location depends on where the traffic is and the local price of energy to run the data center, and its attendant air conditioning. Within five years, a high percentage of queries will be passing through space; solar power is free once you've repaid the capital cost of solar panels and launch; a/c isn't needed in space. The physical bulk of a data center without a/c and built for zero gravity will be relatively easy to lift into orbit.

 Security concerns alone are enough to make governments and corporations want to replicate key command, control, and data out of the reach of terrestrial physical attacks. Amazon is the biggest operator of data centers on earth; they will move quickly to orbit; cloud providers who don't offer an orbital location will be at a significant disadvantage.

9. Computers built for orbit

 Currently, computers are built to run on earth. Their speed is limited by how fast electricity can travel through their circuits; the energy lost in transit becomes unwanted heat. A chip designed for use in space can be run at temperatures near absolute zero. At these temperatures, many materials become superconducting; they provide almost no electrical resistance. The computers in an orbital data center will be faster than their terrestrial predecessors.

 If there is still cyber-currency mining, it will be done in orbit where none of the energy used is polluting, and calculations can be done faster than anywhere else.

 Especially with stricter and stricter environmental controls, it will be hard to justify building another data center on earth!

10. New backbone, when needed, is built in orbit, not under the ocean

 With space-based caching, orbiting computer centers, and traffic relayed through space from mobile sources and aggregators as well as individuals, there won't be growing demand for terrestrial backbone. Just as the highway network disrupted the railroads because of greater routing and dispatching flexibility, orbital routing and processing will shrink the long-haul fiber demand. Even where communication is between two terrestrial locations, the shortest and cheapest route will usually be through space. Sure, a New York to London flight is a good way to get traffic between these two cities; but, if you're going from Minneapolis to Birmingham, do you really want to connect twice in the hubs? Neither do your packets. Space is the realm of the most direct connections.

 <sh5And in conclusion....

 This roadmap is just to demonstrate that there is a credible way for the internet and cloud computing to become mainly orbital. It surely won't happen in exactly this way and may not happen at all. Since each step above lowers the cost of computing and communications, each of these steps — at least the ones which actually occur — will present enormous opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurs.

Written by Tom Evslin, Nerd, Author, Inventor

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 The Sate of the Internet During the Anti-Government Protests in Cuba tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-19T12:55:00-08:00 Larry Press
On Sunday, July 11, thousands of Cubans, took to the streets in anti-government protests triggered by COVID, the faltering economy, and an overwhelmed healthcare system. In three days, 110 protests took place across the island. The following is a snapshot of an interactive, crowd-sourced map showing the locations of 118 large and small demonstrations (94 reported on the 11th, 14 on the 12th, seven on the 13th and three on the 17th).

 For the interactive version, many with images and videos, click here. As the images and photos show, the government responded with arrests and violence in some cases.

 The government also began blocking the Internet on the evening of the 11th, as shown in the following graph, posted by Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik.

 It was totally blocked for a short time, then partially blocked. Madory speculated that they might have been trying to figure out how to block certain portions of the country.

 Several messaging apps were blocked during the protest period. As you see below, the encrypted messaging app, Signal, was blocked at 10:41 PM on July 11 and was still down on the 17th. (UTC is four hours ahead of Cuban time). Messaging apps WhatsApp and Telegram were also blocked, but not Facebook Messenger.

 Cloudflare was also monitoring the situation in Cuba and, as shown below, there was a marked shift from mobile to desktop traffic. I read reports that mobile access had been cut off, and there are periods where 100% of traffic was from desktop users, but some mobile traffic moved during the protests.

 Another interesting shift was in the percent of traffic written by humans to that from bots. Some of this shift may be a result of the blocking of human traffic or from increases in search engine activity. Since they report percents rather than absolute levels, it is hard to know.

 Despite blocking and suspension of Internet service in Cuba, there was a roughly threefold increase in Cuban traffic during the protest time — Cuba was in the news, and Cubans were doing their best to communicate.

 When blocked, many Cubans accessed the global Internet using the Psiphon VPN service. As shown below, the number of VPN users grew steadily during the protest period and reached a peak of 1.389 million daily unique users on July 15. I bet many new people learned about VPNs and learned to use Psiphon during the days of protest.

 The Cuban protests and Internet shutdown attracted widespread attention, and we have seen sympathy demonstrations throughout the world — particularly in Florida. Politicians from Florida's Governor Desantis and Senator Rubio to President Biden have spoken out in support of the Cuban people and called for some sort of technical intervention to strengthen and guarantee Cuban Internet access. Still, I don't see how that can happen without the agreement of the Cuban government.

 The Internet-supported protests in Egypt led to the downfall of a dictitorial government, but the euphoria was short lived since the protesters were polarized.  Large crowds took part in pro-government rallies across Cuba on the 17th. Let's hope for political reform and compromise in Cuba.

Written by Larry Press, Professor of Information Systems at California State University

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 DENIC (.DE) Now Has Over 17 Million Domain Names Registered tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-19T06:15:00-08:00 Thomas Kuiper
DENIC (the registry of .DE and the top-level domain name extension of Germany) has just recently announced that it has cracked the mark of 17 million domain names registered.

 As one of the most successful ccTLD's (country-code top-level domain names), the press release of DENIC is providing some additional interesting statistics. Such as that there are now 30k new registrations on average every month and that DENIC has over 300 members (mostly domain name registrars) to register domain names on behalf of their customers.

 The way DENIC operates is also quite unique in the domain name world. Since its founding in 1996 DENIC has organized itself as a not-for-profit cooperative. Similar to a farmers' co-op, members are the ones who benefit the most from the success of the operations and have equal voting rights.

 The registry has added Registry Lock in 2020. An important security feature for sensitive domain names and brand owners in case of a registrar security breach.

 When the EU data protection directive (GDPR) was introduced DENIC registry no longer required the local presence in Germany for the registration of .DE domains.

 With anyone in the world being able to register their dot-DE (1.5 million of them are registered outside of Germany) we can only hope that other country top-level domain names will consider and follow the example of DENIC to become more open to the world and allow anyone to register their countries top-level domain extensions.

 There are now plenty of registries out there, such as Afilias (which manages several ccTLD's) that could assist any country top-level domain name extension in achieving this goal. Also, a lot of experience is gained thanks to the new generic top-level domain names, which overall now stand at 25 million names registered and which, at the time of this writing, now have 1171 extensions online according to the popular statistics website .

Written by Thomas Kuiper, General manager, Gandi Asia Co. Ltd (

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 A Post-Pandemic Look at Owning (Virtual) Space for Business vs Renting on Social Media tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-17T07:51:03-08:00 Neha Naik
Over 20 years ago, in 1997, the very first social media platform,, was launched. Most of us have probably not heard of it, and that's not surprising since the platform survived for only four years. Since then, there has been a surge in the number of social media platforms that have been launched: Friendster, MySpace, Foursquare, Classmates, Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest, WeChat, Vine, WhatsApp, Blogger, WordPress, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, ClubHouse, the list goes on.

 While many of these platforms still exist, some have died a slow death, and some have experienced an abrupt end.

 Take, for instance, MySpace. From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world. In 2008, MySpace began losing its members to Facebook, and soon it was as good as dead.

An image dated 14th June 2007 in NBC News. The accompanying story talks about Obama using MySpace as part of his presidential campaign.

 Remember the 6-second-video sharing platform, Vine? It was acquired by Twitter in 2012 and in October 2016, Twitter decided to put Vine to rest. The many Vine celebs, who had thousands of fans and followers, had no choice but to make peace with the fact that all their hard work had gone to waste. In more recent times, TikTok faced an abrupt ban in India, a geo where it had amassed 200 million users. TikTok was one of 59 apps that the Government of India decided to ban, and overnight, its users were left without an accessible profile.

The Government of India banned TikTok in June 2020, leaving 200 million TikTok users without an accessible profile.

 While these platforms saw an extreme eventuality, the rest continue to undergo constant changes to monetize and/or improve user engagement. For example, when Snapchat stopped autoplay, marketers saw declining view counts of their content. Facebook aggressively started taking down music covers because they hadn't yet come up with their own versions of Content ID like YouTube or a way to monetize them. And with constant consolidation of platforms, such as that of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; end-users and brands are expected to keep up with the new privacy policies and one-size-(doesn't)-fit-all type of guidelines.

 Such changes are evident across platforms, but what does it mean for brands, including personal brands of influencers? The end-users of these platforms are not in control of their virtual presence; if anything, they are at the mercy of these platforms to a large extent. Changing capabilities of social media platforms impact the visibility of posts and reach and directly impact the livelihoods of those that depend on it.

 The ups and downs of social media platforms beg businesses to own a website. And the pandemic just fueled the need manifold.

 The need to own (and control) a virtual presence has been furthered by the pandemic. For businesses that did not have an online presence, the lockdowns put a big question mark on business continuity for entities worldwide.

 Within a few weeks of the pandemic making its presence known, we could see domain sales going up. It soon became clear that getting online with your own website was no longer a good-to-have. It was now a crucial part of the business mix. In fact, 2020 was one of the strongest years in terms of sales for .Store Domains and .Online domains; both popular domain extensions among online sellers and small businesses. We saw the volume for .Store jump 48% in 2020 vs. 2019.

 For small retailers, the most significant upside of moving online was a whopping 175% year-on-year online sales growth in the first few weeks of April 2020, and more than 425% year-on-year online sales growth in the 47th week of 2020, just before Black Friday.

The missed opportunities without a website

 By completely giving websites a miss, businesses are compelled to constantly fight for attention on social media to stay relevant. Not only that, but they also spend a lot of time, money and energy towards beating the competition, building a loyal customer base, and retaining them, all within the realm of social media platforms.

 It's no secret that the cost of marketing to an existing user is far lesser than trying to attract new customers. Repeat customers, after all, spend 67% more than new customers. The only way to retain them and engage with them one-on-one is via a website that captures more than just their social media handle.

 That's not it though. Owning a website gives businesses access to intense customer behavior data through tracking tools such as Google Analytics. This further feeds into their business growth and strategy decisions.

 Websites also open up the opportunity to get dedicated traffic through search engines; building a larger funnel of leads can far supersede the leads that can be attributed to social media. Those who sell online through a website will leverage SEO to generate far more demand for their business offering in comparison to their competitors who are confined to social media. It's because of this that the global SEO industry is slated to grow from $46. 66 billion in 2020 to $50. 45 billion in 2021.

Keeping up with Google Shopping

 Over the years, Google has been trying to make itself more than a search engine for shoppers. With the pandemic causing a shift in consumer behavior and eCommerce, the search giant seized the momentum and opened up Google Shopping to free product listing. In July 2020, Buy on Google also became commission-free.

 In May 2021, Bill Ready, Google's president of commerce and payments, announced its partnership with Shopify that enables the platform's 1.7 million merchants to show their products across Google Search, Shopping, Image search, and YouTube. In early June 2021, WooCommerce's integration with Google Shopping was also live.

 With the integrations mentioned above, online businesses can now get their products in front of shoppers right when they're looking for them on Google. This wouldn't be possible if one is only selling on Instagram or Facebook Marketplace. So in a way, Google has reiterated the need for a website for online sellers.

 As per a post on Google's blog, users shop on Google a billion times a day. While that's a staggering number, it's only expected to increase with Google's focus on the shopping feature.

Image:

So, where does social media fit into the scheme of things?

 Social media platforms are a boon for businesses when building social validation, maintaining online reputation, and promoting new campaigns and launches. Social media is a great extension of a business's online personality and can do wonders for its overall virtual presence.

 But businesses can't fully and solely rely on these platforms for building a sustainable brand. For that, businesses need to build and own their website that they can control and evolve with their business.

 A version of this article was originally published on YMS ()

Written by Neha Naik, Director, Channel Partnerships at Radix

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 What ICANN Should Do Now to Help Future Applicants of New gTLDs tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-16T07:21:00-08:00 Sean Atkinson-Henry
During ICANN71, the Brand Registry Group (BRG) openly asked potential future applicants what ICANN can do to help prepare them for the next gTLD round (Recording here). The answer was very clear — commit to opening the next round and provide as much information as possible early on.

 However, in recent correspondence to the BRG from ICANN Chair, Maarten Botterman, he emphasized that "significant work lies ahead of us: the 2012 Applicant Guidebook must be updated with more than 100 outputs from the SubPro PDP WG". But how significant are the proposed changes?

 Assessing the 123 outputs from the SubPro PRP WG, we believe eighty of the outputs could be considered minor changes, and only nine considered substantive. Based on this review, the existing applicant guidebook (AGB) remains a solid base to use going forward, together with some adjustments which could be easily applied, together with references of any anticipated amendments as the implementation work progresses. This "Preliminary AGB" could provide the early information demanded by new entrants in a short timeframe, together with translated versions, to maximize outreach and awareness across the globe.

Why is this important?

 Providing this information at an early stage but recognizing there will be some adjustments to be made allows future applicants to assess and prepare their plans in realistic timeframes. These include internal conversations, preparation of business cases, and budget planning, which for many organizations can take considerable time alongside competing priorities and projects.

What can ICANN do?

 ICANN has the opportunity now to be proactive by preparing and issuing a Preliminary AGB in multiple languages. This could be completed and issued while the anticipated Operational Design Phase proceeds. This would also provide a positive signal that the Board is moving ahead with the next round of preparations and responding to the ICANN community's recommendations after five years of intense work.

 ICANN CEO Göran Marby has repeatedly stated his interest in opening the next round to attract the next billion users of the Internet, making it more inclusive. International Domain Names (IDNs) will help to make the Internet more representative and inclusive for our global community. Publicly committing to opening the next round and providing early information will help all potential new applicants, especially those in underserved regions.

 ICANN now needs to deliver. It's been ten years since the last round of applications, and in that time, we've seen new businesses formed and grown to a global scale, such as Uber, which has grown from a small US business to one which now operates across 10,000 cities globally. ICANN must avoid stifling competition and limiting innovation by denying newcomers the opportunity to apply for new gTLDs.

 The BRG has again delivered these messages to the Board in its latest letter, recommending they:

Commit to the next round of new gTLDs

Prepare and issue a preliminary AGB as soon as possible

Provide a realistic timeframe for the next round (as an output of the Operational Design Phase)

 This is a sensible way forward, not only for newcomers but also for ICANN, which was criticized for its lack of outreach and awareness in preparation for the last application round in 2012 and will show that ICANN has responded effectively to lessons learned.

Written by Sean Atkinson-Henry, Secretariat, Brand Registry Group

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More under: DNS, Domain Names, ICANN, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, New TLDs

 The Dumb Pipe Question tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-14T08:57:00-08:00 Doug Dawson

 Every few years, I read something that resurrects the old question of whether ISPs should be dumb pipe providers or something more. Some ISPs have fought against the idea of being dumb pipe providers and want to believe they are far more than that. The latest event that raises this question anew is AT&T's debacle with ditching DirecTV and WarnerMedia. AT&T was clearly not content with being considered as only a dumb pipe provider. The company was lured by the perceived higher earnings of both cable companies and media companies, and AT&T went on a buying spree and purchased both DirecTV and WarnerMedia.

 At the time of the DirecTV purchase, when AT&T paid $67 billion for the satellite company, there were already rumblings in the industry about cord-cutting. There hadn't been any evidence of large numbers of customers dropping traditional cable TV, but the industry was already in a holding pattern of zero net growth, with new customers roughly equaling customers who were ditching traditional TV. Since the DirecTV purchase, cord-cutting materialized with a fury as the traditional cable industry lost over 13 million cable subscribers.

 The lure for an ISP to become a media company has hovered over the industry for over twenty years. Those of us that were in the industry in 2000 still remember being flabbergasted by the merger of AOL and Time Warner. The merger was blessed by Wall Street and by analysts' consensus that the Internet was going to subsume media and that the merger was a defensive move by Time Warner. But it was hard to picture a path where the combined companies could grow to justify the astronomical $350 billion valuations awarded by the stock market at merger. And sure enough, the wheels came quickly off in what was possibly the worst merger of all time.

 AT&T was also lured by the continued growth in the valuation of media companies. The stocks of media companies like Disney climbed in value year after year while AT&T's value stagnated. AT&T was convinced that the merger with Time Warner would put the company's stock on an upward trajectory like other media companies.

 Underlying AT&T's decision in both purchases to branch out was a dissatisfaction of being viewed by Wall Street as a dumb pipe provider. AT&T is the ultimate dumb pipe provider with a huge base of cellular and broadband customers — all who buy basic connectivity from the company.

 AT&T was obviously jealous after watching companies like Apple and Google profit by putting apps on AT&T's phones. AT&T was equally unhappy to see companies like Disney prosper from sending video signals over AT&T copper and fiber. I believe the entire AT&T debacle boils down to a company that did not want to be perceived as only providing dumb pipes. I think it's that simple.

 But something happened in the industry in recent years while AT&T lost over $90 billion from the two acquisitions in just five years. In recent years, the valuation of fiber-based dumb pipe providers is up significantly. In the last year, the industry has seen transactions for fiber-based ISPs getting huge valuations. I honestly can't fathom some of these high valuations any more than I could understand the AOL / Time Warner valuation. But the current high valuation for fiber networks is real since there are investors willing to pay big prices to get fiber companies.

 All of the big ISPs have grasped this fundamental market shift. Most of the big ISPs have announced strategies to build significant amounts of fiber this year and next year. AT&T is building fiber past 3 million more homes this year. Verizon is on a tear and says it will build fiber-to-the-curb past 25 million homes by 2025. We see big fiber expansion plans from Charter, CenturyLink, Altice, Frontier, Windstream, and a long list of others. All of a sudden, everybody wants to be a bigger dumb pipe provider.

 It's going to be interesting to see if this trend continues. For now, investors are betting that fiber companies will beat the cable companies in the broadband market — there is no other way to explain the higher valuations. The cable companies have thrived during a decade of lopsided competition against telephone DSL. Are the cable companies faced with being on the opposite side of the competitive battle and seeing fiber become the consumer choice? As always, this industry continues to provide interesting trends to watch.

Written by Doug Dawson, President at CCG Consulting

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 The Internet and the Cloud Are Going Into Space tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-13T13:35:00-08:00 Tom Evslin
Unlike Bezos and Branson, they're going to stay there.

 Today we have space-based internet access and a terrestrial internet; within ten years, we'll have a space-based internet. Internet traffic will travel more miles in space than on terrestrial fiber. By that time, the great cloud data centers of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and their competitors and successors will mostly be in orbit as well. Five years from now, this transition will be obvious, accepted, and well underway — or this will turn out to be the dumbest prediction I've ever made. Starlink is not the cause of the Internet moving to space; it's an early example of the technologies which are enabling the move.

The primer (nerds feel free to skip)

 Today, the components of space-based internet access are a user radio and an antenna, usually but not always dish-shaped, satellites, and ground stations with their own radios and dish antennas that provide access to the terrestrial internet backbone. Techies like to call the satellite link a "bent-pipe." Your packets go through your radio to a satellite; they are sent back down to a ground station; they go to whatever their destination is on the Internet; a reply comes back to a ground station, goes back up to a satellite, and finally back down to your radio and you. Note that even the simplest query takes four hops through space, and so the time space hops take is very important to how long it takes for you to get a reply. We call the time between query and reply "latency." The time a space hop takes depends mostly on how far away the satellite is since radio signals travel at a constant 186,000 miles/second in a vacuum.

 The first satellites used for internet access almost 20 years ago were geostationary (GEOS): 24 hours/day, 365.25 days/year. They are at the same spot in the sky as seen from any spot on earth. Having them stationary means it's possible to aim a dish antenna at them; a directional antenna like a dish is an energy-efficient way to communicate point-to-point. One big problem, though: the laws of orbital mechanics say that GEOS must be 22,000 miles high. Four hops of 22,000 miles each require more than 0.5 seconds to complete, even ignoring any delay in the satellite and on the ground. The human ear is sensitive to delays of more than 0.15 seconds. Zoom-like interactivity is essentially impossible although streaming, since it's one way, works fine. Even web browsing is very painful using GEOS because the typical web page takes many interactions to assemble itself.

 Companies like WildBlue offered internet access using GEOS. HughesNet and Viasat still do in the US. Bandwidths have gone up since I wrote about my experience with WildBlue (Why Satellite Internet Access Sucks) but the latency problem with GEOS is incurable, and the bandwidth of the technology they use makes the companies impose data caps which are unrealistically low by today's standards. Users of GEOS are eager to convert to almost anything else (except possibly DSL), but they don't usually have other options available where they live.

 The solution to the latency problem is low earth orbit satellites (LEOS). These orbit only a few hundred miles above the earth, so the travel time of each hop is negligible. However, being low, they orbit the earth in about 90 minutes and appear to zip across the sky. There's no way to aim a dish at them mechanically. With a small non-directional antenna, the amount of data that can be exchanged without expending a huge amount of energy and frying objects in the immediate vicinity is small.

 Nevertheless, Iridium, which has gone through bankruptcy once, has several very useful mobile applications based on a fleet of 66 LEOS in polar orbit which covers every spot on earth. They've improved since I wrote about them (Going Sailing) and were essential to a sail I took from Norway to Scotland and back.  Their LEOS, most of which were launched under contract by SpaceX — parent of Starlink, can communicate with each other, so a packet may take several hops in space before finding a satellite that can see a ground station. The advantage of this approach is that they only need four ground stations, and the service works even in countries that don't allow ground stations to be built.

 Only one of Iridium's services is internet access, strictly speaking. It is available with or without a fairly expensive but usable voice service. The bandwidth is low — think dialup speeds, but when you're in the middle of an ocean and need a weather forecast or other info, it's far better than nothing. Iridium is packaged with products like Garmin's InReach, which leaves breadcrumbs on a website wherever you roam and can also be used for an SOS anywhere the sky is visible. A large number of devices with low but urgent data needs (the Internet of Things) take advantage of Iridium, as do aircraft. The Iridium access devices have small, non-directional antennas which can connect with the LEOS, which zip by. Because the antennas are non-directional and battery-operated radios are low-powered, Iridium is not suitable for high-bandwidth applications.

 And now there's Starlink with some 10,000 users as of February (a very small number), perhaps 500,000 people who've put down deposits and are waiting an indeterminate amount of time for service, still in beta but a proof of concept for delivering affordable high bandwidth to remote places with LEOS. Starlink antennas are dishes, but they track satellites without moving the dish using an electronically shaped beam — an important breakthrough for high bandwidth. SpaceX has pioneered reusable rockets, so they can launch swarms of satellites cheaply — about 1500 are in service now, with 120 or so new ones launched each month.

 Starlink has an agreement to collocate ground stations with Microsoft and Google cloud datacenters — a development not lost on Amazon, which has received licenses to launch its own competitive satellite constellation called Kuiper and has started a space division.

Written by Tom Evslin, Nerd, Author, Inventor

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 A Simulation of the SpaceX, Amazon, Telesat and OneWeb Broadband Satellite Constellations tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-13T13:18:00-08:00 Larry Press
Over two years ago, an MIT research group ran a simulation of the low-Earth orbit broadband constellations of OneWeb, SpaceX, and Telesat, and last January they repeated the simulation updating with revised constellation characteristics and adding Amazon's Project Kuiper.

 They ran the new simulation twice, once using the planned initial deployments of each constellation and a second time using the configuration shown below, which shows final deployments assuming that change requests pending in January would be approved. (SpaceX's have been approved). I will discuss the second simulation here, and you can consult the paper for the results of the initial deployment simulation.

 The following figure shows the total system throughput for each constellation as a function of the number of ground stations and whether or not the satellites have optical inter-satellite links (OISLs), enabling them to route traffic through the in-orbit grid. (The lines show averages, and the shaded regions show interquartile values).

 Note that Telesat is committed to having OISLs in all their satellites, and SpaceX will have them in their polar-orbit version 1.5 satellites that are launching this year and in all version 2 satellites starting next year. OneWeb initially planned to include OISLs but decided not to for now and Amazon has not committed to them but has formed an OISL hardware team.

 The following figure shows the number of satellites in line of sight (LoS) at full deployment and population as a function of latitude. All Amazon satellites are in inclined orbits, so while major population centers are served, polar regions are not, and the altitudes of the OneWeb and Telesat constellations increase the numbers of satellites in LoS.

 If interested, you should read this and the earlier paper (links in the opening paragraph) for details on the methodology, assumptions, and results, but I will conclude with a couple of caveats.

 This simulation ignores the 7,518 very low-Earth orbit satellites that have been approved for SpaceX, and the designs of all of the constellations are in flux. SpaceX will soon be launching version 1.5 satellites, followed by version 2 next year. Similarly, OneWeb will be launching improved satellites by the time the constellation is complete, and Telesat and Amazon are still in the design phase.

 The simulation assumes that demand is proportional to population (based on a 0.1-degree resolution grid), so mobile utilization by ships, planes, and vehicles is not considered. It also assumes each individual consumes an average of 300 Kbps and the total addressable market is 10% of the global population. As they admit, the 10% is optimistic. (Elon Musk expects 3-5%). Since SpaceX will be charging the same price in every nation, their per-capita subscription rates will vary with national income, and the companies' target markets vary. For example, Telesat will not market to consumers.

 While the specifics will change, and this and other simulations will have to be rerun over time, this simulation considers key variables, and general conclusions can be drawn. For example, in this simulation, maximum throughput is from 13-42% higher when 20 Gbps OISLs are assumed. Currently, only SpaceX and Telesat are committed to OISLs. Still, since OISL technology is improving and they also improve latency, save on ground station cost and enable coverage at sea and other isolated locations, I expect all operators to adopt them eventually. (We may also see OISLs between layers, for example, between Telesat's LEO and GEO constellations).

Written by Larry Press, Professor of Information Systems at California State University

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 5G Base Stations $13,000 in China tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-13T11:06:01-08:00 Dave Burstein
Most carriers don't order 200,000 5G base stations, so they will pay more, but that's the actual price for the joint procurement of China Telecom and China Unicom. The 200,000-300,000 cells the two jointly are upgrading are probably more than the entire rest of the world will add. The second Chinese network, jointly built by China Mobile and China Broadcast, is growing even faster.

 Huawei and ZTE will probably split 90% of the order, with Ericsson, Nokia, and perhaps CICT/Datang getting the rest. Ericsson was so worried they'd lose their share — traditionally 10% — that CEO Börje Ekholm actually threatened to move out of Sweden if the country blocked Huawei. (He didn't.)

 The price of state-of-the-art commercial base stations is now so low the new Open RAN companies will find it hard to survive. Altiostar (owned by the Japanese) and Mavenir (de facto controlled by Koch) charge much more because they don't have the volume. Some fantasists in DC think O-RAN will result in a U.S. lead in 5G. But Indian giants (Jio-Radisys & Bharti-Tata) will soon be much larger. Ericsson, Samsung, and especially Nokia are opening up.

 Since the first 5G equipment hit the market in 2019, it's been clear to the industry that 5G would be similar in cost to 4G. Except for the U.S. mid-band, 5G networks are being built without a rise in capex. (The analysts and reporters still saying otherwise should find another line of work.)

Written by Dave Burstein, Editor, DSL Prime

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 How Does the Acceptance of All Domain Names in Open-Source Software Look in 2021? tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-12T08:33:00-08:00 Mark Datysgeld
A recent study carried out by Governance Primer on behalf of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) identified trends in the acceptance of all domain names in software hosted at Github, the largest open-source repository globally. This research builds on top of previous efforts aimed at identifying the underlying issues that result in problems when different applications need to handle Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) and new gTLDs, particularly when it comes to email addresses.

 The goal was to obtain real-world data on the usage of software libraries, which are prewritten pieces of code that act much like building blocks, providing a specific functionality required by the developer so that they do not have to reinvent the wheel every time a feature needs to be implemented. For example, the Pillow library for Python provides image processing functionalities so that an application in which changes can be made to digital images does not need to have coded from scratch the manipulation of pixels, as well as common features such as transparency, blur, sharpening, and so on.

 In the case of domain names, libraries of particular concern are the ones that somehow deal with validation, allowing the input of certain characters and structures, while disallowing others. To give a practical example, our previous research tested the validation of email addresses in the "form" field (often found in contact sections) of the top 1.000 websites in the world according to Alexa's rankings. These results were subsequently updated in 2020 by another team, and this is what the acceptance landscape looked like:

Test case	2017	2019	2020

ascii@ascii.newshort	91%	97%	98%

ascii@ascii.newlong	78%	84%	84%

ascii@idn.ascii	45%	50%	47%

Unicode@ascii.ascii	14%	13%	18%

Unicode@idn.idn	8%	8%	11%

Right-to-left (RTL)	8%	7%	11%

 What these results tell us is that the code being deployed on the Web is fairly competent at dealing with new gTLDs of four characters or less, but already starts to struggle with those with longer ones and see a dramatic drop when IDNs are introduced. The question that followed these findings was: what does the landscape look like when it comes to software? While many validation processes are carried out on the Web, several others happen in non-Web applications.

 To perform this analysis, the most used coding languages in open-source software were targeted, Java and Python, and a crawler was created to aggregate all valid (as per Guthub's guidelines) software, extracting their "dependency" file. This file is basically responsible for telling anybody who wants to do any work with a given application what libraries it relies upon so that those can be included in the final software for it to perform its tasks correctly.

 While some lists of most used libraries do exist, their methodology is not based on the direct sampling of projects, and not enough metadata is provided for correlations to be made between projects and the libraries they use. This means that it would be hard to map out what projects use an insufficient library and engage with them to stimulate changes to their codebase, implementing a more compliant library compliant with Universal Acceptance. Further, metadata about the projects was collected to generate a ranking of the most relevant applications (based on an algorithm that considered data points such as the number of forks), which is a feature not provided by Github.

 Thanks to the "Universal Acceptance Compliance of Some Programming Language Libraries and Frameworks" study, the compliance status of some libraries was already known, and the team proceeded to evaluate the status of others that were deemed to be relevant. In essence, a library that makes use of the newer IDNA2008 standard is "UA-Ready", while one that makes use of the older IDNA2003 standard is "Not UA-Ready." There is also the possibility that it follows neither, which leads to a reasonable assumption that it is "Not UA-Ready."

 It is not the case that by incorporating a UA-Ready library, the application automatically becomes able to accept all domain names, as, unfortunately, other factors are involved, including whether the library is implemented correctly by developers. However, this makes decision-making around resource allocation for engagement and remediation much more rational, as priorities can be better established, such as, for example: "testing and reaching out to projects that place highly in the ranking and are likely to be UA-Ready."

 The results are presented below.

Java

 "RegEx via annotations" seems to be a popular method of performing validation in Java, which is unfavorable to the UASG's interests, as it is not a uniform way of validating strings, and any arbitrary expression can be used to make that check. This means we cannot be sure of what kind of processing is being performed under the hood, but it is likely not helping the application become UA-Ready. The most relevant libraries making use of this method are: validation-api ranking at 55th and its derivative hibernate-validator placing even higher at 21st springfox-bean-validators also ranks quite high at 79th.

Dataset: 1.3 million dependency files; occurrence in entire dataset: 70,182; approx. 6%.

Library	Occurrence (projects)	Status

hibernate-validator	62963	Not UA-Ready. RegEx via annotations; Hibernate implementation ofvalidation-api.

validation-api	25190	Not UA-Ready. RegEx via annotations.

springfox-bean-validators	12501	Not UA-Ready. RegEx via annotations; SpringFox implementation ofvalidation-api.

commons-validator	4906	Not UA-Ready. Relies on a static list of TLDs from 2017.

icu4j	886	UA-Ready. IDNA2008.

libidn	29	Not UA-Ready. IDNA2003, deprecated and ported to the Java language as "”.

Python

 Out of the entire Python dataset, the idna module ranks 6th overall in terms of usage, which is a favorable result to the UASG's interests. It can also be a key argument in engaging with the Python language developers to port that module to the language's core, replacing the default IDNA2003 implementation. This would be a significant gain to a coding language that is in increasing demand.

Dataset: 450 million dependency files; occurrence in entire dataset: 70,813; approx. 37%.

Library	Occurrence in projects	Status

idna	70789	UA-Ready. IDNA2008.

validators	1660	Not UA-Ready. Email validation based on Django validator; URL validation based on RegEx.

email_validator	1178	UA-Ready. IDNA2008.

pyicu	243	UA-Ready. IDNA2008.

idna_ssl	10	UA-Ready. IDNA2008.

 The complete study can be found at this link.

 Many thanks to project contributors Sávyo Vinícius de Morais, Edson Celio Ferreira Araujo, Jonas Mendes Fiorini.

Written by Mark Datysgeld, GNSO Councilor at ICANN

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 Where are the Gigabit Applications? tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-09T09:16:00-08:00 Doug Dawson

 I remember that soon after the City of Chattanooga launched its citywide fiber network, the company held a competition seeking web applications that would benefit from gigabit speeds. I don't recall if anything useful came out of that effort, but I know that there are still today almost no big bandwidth applications on the web online aimed at the average household.

 There are always a few people in every community that immediately benefit from gigabit broadband. In many of the cities I've worked with, some of the first customers who signed up for residential gigabit service are radiologists and other doctors who appreciate the ability to review medical imagery without having to pop into the hospital in the middle of the night. I know of a few cases where doctors now buy multi-gigabit connections as fast as 10-gigabits because a gigabit isn't fast enough.

 There are always a few others in larger markets that also need the full gigabit capability. This would include scientists and engineers who work with huge data sets. I know people who work from home with movie animation who regularly fill a gigabit connection. But these connections are all work-related and represent people who work with large data at the office and who want the convenience of doing so at home. It's been eight years since Google Fiber got the whole country talking about gigabit broadband speeds — and yet there still are not any killer gigabit applications.

 I think we're finally on the verge of seeing this change. The demand for faster broadband products leaped upward during the pandemic. According to OpenVault, at the end of the first quarter of 2021, the percentage of homes subscribing to gigabit data products jumped to 9.8% of all homes. This grew from 1.9% of homes in 2018 and 2.8% at the end of 2019. This is a profound market change because having 10% of all households subscribing to gigabit broadband means there is finally a potential market for gigabit applications. A company that develops a high-bandwidth application can now be assured that there are enough possible customers to make it worthwhile.

 Another factor that makes us ripe for gigabit applications is the continued growth of gaming. It's hard for folks of my generation to put gaming into perspective. The gaming industry now dwarfs other entertainment segments like movies or television. In 2020, the gaming industry had revenues of almost $140 billion. That includes $73.8 billion for mobile gaming, $33.1 billion for PC gaming, $19.7 billion for game console gaming, $6.7 billion for extended reality, and even $9.3 billion for paid subscriptions to watch others play games.

 The gaming industry made a big change just before the pandemic when the biggest game companies moved games to the cloud. The old phenomenon of kids lining up to buy the latest game release at midnight is a thing of the past as games are now introduced online and played in data centers. I think the early big bandwidth applications will be related to gaming — and this is not unusual because entertainment has driven the use of bandwidth in the past — a large percentage of home broadband usage is still to watch video.

 The third factor that I think will drive faster broadband applications is generation Z coming of age. This is the generation that grew up with a smartphone in their hands and good home broadband. This is a generation that adapted immediately to homeschooling — while they badly missed their friends and live activities, this is a generation that was already living a large percentage of their lives virtually. Generation Z kids are now in college and will soon be out in the world as a major block of consumers. They will likely be the first target audience for faster broadband applications and are also likely to be the generation that will create many of the new applications.

 It's likely that the big bandwidth applications will involve extended reality, which is an umbrella term that covers virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and other similar technologies. With gigabit-capable homes as customers, we'll start seeing games that bring telepresence and virtual worlds into the home using big bandwidth. The United States is ripe for big-bandwidth applications since 10% of homes are buying gigabit broadband products. We have a huge potential market for innovative gaming since over half of the people in the country now play games at least once a month, with tens of millions who play games regularly. All that is needed now is for a few entrepreneurs to see the potential for developing big-bandwidth games. And as it happens with all new technologies, this will grow from a start in gaming to extend to the rest of us.

Written by Doug Dawson, President at CCG Consulting

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 Euro 2020 Part Two: eCommerce Marketplace Activity tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-08T11:00:00-08:00 David Barnett
Co-authored by David Barnett, subject matter expert, Brand Monitoring and Pascal Rodax, manager, Business Development

 Following our previous article on the Euro 2020 football tournament that looked retrospectively at domain name registrations relating to the competition, this article considers activity on eCommerce marketplaces.

 For this study, our Discovery Engine technology was used to conduct a regular series of scans across key international online marketplaces. We monitored for listings (offers of sale) relating to Euro 2020 clothing and merchandise. The scans focused on the top-listed results1 (i.e., those most visible to potential buyers) that were returned from a series of competition-, product- and team-related search queries. We categorized results by marketplace and the team name mentioned in the listing. In the four weeks between May 25 and June 21, 2021, we identified and analyzed more than 35,000 listings. We first looked at listings identified during the two weeks immediately preceding the competition, where the data had not been affected by any match results. Unsurprisingly, one key finding was that the greatest numbers of listings were identified for the higher-ranked teams in the competition2 (Figure 1) — potentially those with a larger fan base, and therefore a greater demand for associated merchandise. However, other factors, such as the target markets of the marketplaces themselves, may also have an impact on the number of listings for each team. It's also interesting to note that comparatively, the number of listings do not drop off as steeply as might be expected for the lower-ranked teams. This is because the scans incorporated explicit searches for all team names, thereby returning disproportionately more results for the lower-ranked teams than would be expected purely based on the total raw numbers of listings on the marketplaces.

Figure 1: Numbers of highly ranked eCommerce listings for each Euro 2020 team, over a two-week period prior to the competition, compared with their FIFA world rankings

 Table 1 shows the total value of the top-listed items identified across the whole analysis period. The calculation accounts for the total number of items offered in each individual listing and the unit price per item — fields that could be automatically scraped from the sites because the format of the listing pages is known in advance.

 The calculation also makes use of a data cap, applied in cases where a seller is offering an unrealistically high quantity of items (see Figure 2), to avoid the calculated values being artificially high4. This can make a large difference to the overall numbers, particularly on marketplaces where high quantities per listing are typically seen (e.g., Alibaba, DHgate, and Shopee in this study), and may result in estimates that are more realistic in terms of the value of items actually held in inventory.

 This type of analysis forms the basis of a return-on-investment (ROI) calculation that can be carried out as part of a monitoring and enforcement program. In reality, only a certain proportion of the items offered on each site will actually be infringing (i.e., counterfeit), and this value varies between sites. Therefore, any enforcement program needs to incorporate an analysis component to determine which listings are for potentially legitimate items and which are infringing and can be removed. In practice, ROI calculations can be carried out at regular points during the brand protection service to determine the actual value of goods removed. Using suitable assumptions, you can extend this to estimate the proportion of this revenue that may be reclaimable (by virtue of consumers purchasing legitimate items through official channels once the infringing items become unavailable).

Table 1: Total value of items (converted to USD5) identified across the top listings on each marketplace during the four-week analysis period. Marketplace names marked with an asterisk denote that multiple different country versions of the site in question were included in the calculation.

Marketplace	Total value of items (USD) (raw data)	Total value of items (US) (quantity capped at 1,000)

Alibaba	7,724,290	187,880

Amazon*	73,058	73,058

Bukalapak	86,075	86,075

DHgate	1,788,317,000	1,914,560

eBay*	7,911,037	6,385,396

Lazada*	654,367	654,367

MercadoLibre*	180	180

Redbubble	73,024	73,024

Shopee*	267,568,070	16,561,059

TOTAL	2,072,407,099	25,935,598

Figure 2: Example of a marketplace listing for football jerseys, offering a very high quantity of items, with 5,998,851 in stock.

 Clustered visualizations of data relating to the identified results help identify top entities for further investigation or as priority takedown targets, or identify links between infringers. Figure 3 shows a cluster of sellers offering items relating to the French national team, showing entities that are active across multiple country versions of the Lazada site, as a way of maximizing their exposure to potential buyers.

Figure 3: Example of a clustered visualization of sellers offering items referencing the French national team (individual seller names obfuscated for privacy reasons).

 Within the overall set of individual listings identified in this study, there are a number of interesting trends and observations. Many offers of sale incorporate a variety of keywords — frequently the names of popular players from the teams (see e.g., Figure 2) — as a means of attracting search traffic. Often the items are customizable upon request from the buyer (Figure 4), a trend that we also see more generally for football clubs outside the Euro 2020 competition.

Figure 4: Examples of marketplace listings for customizable items: football jerseys (top) and face masks with options for various event- and team-related logos (bottom).

 In many cases, the sellers use product images featuring just the back of the item or a generic product view, presumably to avoid showing any event or sponsor logos (Figure 5). Sellers probably do this to make the listings harder to identify by brand protection service providers making use of logo recognition or to reduce the degree of trademark infringement in the listings, making them more difficult to enforce upon.

Figure 5: Example of a marketplace listing featuring no official logos or brands in the product images.

Recommendations for brand owners

 Our top five tips for brand owners to combat counterfeits6 forms the framework of good practices that should be incorporated into any comprehensive brand protection program. In the context of this study, these recommendations may be applicable to the owners of the trademarks relating to the competition, organizers or teams, to any official sponsors, and to the manufacturers of legitimate products.

1. Ensure your IP portfolio is in good shape

 Having all relevant brand terms suitably protected — that is, having appropriate trademarks registered in all relevant product classes and jurisdictions — is an essential pre-requisite for an effective enforcement program and greatly increases the takedown options available.

2. Employ an automated monitoring solution

 Use technology to automatically monitor a range of marketplaces and other relevant online channels, to pull out rich datasets for each result (seller name, price, quantity, etc.), and aggregate information to identify top targets. The system should also use a customizable rules language, allowing the searches to be configured for brand variants, misspellings and other relevant keywords, and in multiple international character sets.

3. Perform test purchases

 A key part of the enforcement process is analyzing individual listings to identify which are infringing and therefore actionable. While a number of factors such as features in product images, price point, quantity, item location, etc. can provide indications that an item may be counterfeit, it's never possible to prove this definitively based solely on information in the listing itself. Carrying out a test purchase, and thereby obtaining a sample of the item actually shipped, is the only way to determine its legitimacy.

4. Educate your customer base

 Customer education is an essential way to bring the quality and safety implications of non-legitimate goods to the attention of potential buyers. Brand owners should also employ initiatives to promote their official suppliers and sales channels, so customers are aware of the sources of legitimate goods. Brand owners may also want to consider rolling out the use of product verification tools (e.g., QR codes and unique serial codes in individual listings) that can be checked by prospective buyers against official databases.

5. Choose the right partner

 Collaborating with a brand protection service provider that offers a holistic suite of products and services is vital. It enables brand owners to monitor across all relevant online channels, allows for efficiency in monitoring and enforcement processes, and can provide analyst support across all of these areas to keep the brand owner informed of service and industry developments.

The exact depth of the searches varies between marketplaces; typically the scans analyse the top 10 pages of search results

Correlation coefficient = (-)0.68

 (data correct as of 27 May 2021)

Exchange rates taken from  (data correct as of June 21, 2021)

This article originally published on Digital Brand Insider.

Written by David Barnett, Brand Monitoring Subject-Matter Expert at CSC

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 Email Recommendation System-Abstract: Deployment Considerations (Part III) tag:https:,2021:/ 2021-07-06T07:10:00-08:00 Fred Tabsharani
Perhaps, one of the most thrilling moments of any machine learning project for a data science team is learning that they get to deploy the model in a production environment. However, this can be a daunting task or a simplified one, if all the tools are readily available.

 Machine-learning (ML) models "require" deployment to a production environment to deliver optimal business value, and the reality is that most models never make it to production because the deployment phase requires a longer than necessary implementation schedule. Even successfully deployed models require subject matter and domain expertise that create intense bottlenecks in engineering and operational processes.

 If you look at ML models as software, then deploying and maintaining any software requires maintenance and versioning. The one inconsistency that ML Models introduce is a broader set of complex challenges. Let us review them.

 Demands of ML deployment have given rise to the field of MLOps. A nascent industry that is gaining in popularity. Like how DevOps added structure to software engineering, a proper MLOps implementation orchestrates the development process and deploys ML models. Done right, these ML Models are validated and created autonomously. This post will attempt to introduce MLOps and outline deployment considerations/requirements that will help ensure ML applications make it to production and run smoothly — that is what it takes for a model to provide business value. Concepts don't provide business value, neither do stand-alone models.

 We will leave aside estimating the business value achieved by deploying such a model, though we discuss architectures that simplify decisions regarding continuous and autonomous deployments.

 Acknowledging the transfer gap between the success of the initial model and the requirements before, during and after deployment is step one. The success of your email recommendation system is not based solely on just the model itself but rather on the horizontal orchestration of the deployment. To conduct these tasks optimally, we should work backward within the Machine Learning lifecycle.

Data Resiliency

 The major components of the deployment phase include model monitoring or logging, maintenance, compute resources, concept drift, data drift or data degradation, and data resiliency. Data resiliency is relatively a new term coined to describe the age and relevancy of the features or schema and the age of data related to historical datasets to make predictions more accurate. The question to ask the team is how resilient this data is? Likewise, answers can vary depending on the type of model, industry, third-party data introduced, and many other factors.

 A data relevancy or data resiliency score is a new "feature or variable" that can be introduced in the testing environment to make your predictions hold up during the production phase. We might ask questions like, how quickly does the data become obsolete? Why do I have 16K images of automobiles that were produced ten years ago in this dataset? How far back in time should our model run? When was the data resiliency score introduced in the dataset? The score could be based on how correlated the dependent variables are to the target variable and, again, the age of the data. So, what makes deployment hard, especially in an email recommendation system environment? Below are several factors to consider.

First Step: Register your Model

 MLOPs teams are the glue between built and the success of your deployment. MLOPs works analogously with the data science teams, DevOps and software engineers to get the model production-ready. Having a model registry puts structure around the handoff between data scientists and engineering teams. It is a foundational component of any successful deployment process.

 If your model is transferred to production and produces erroneous output, registries make it easy to determine which model version is causing the issue and roll back to a previous version of the model if necessary. Model registries also enable the auditing of model predictions.

 When MLOps examines new and relevant pain points during the deployment phase, a solid reference to the schema is paramount, along with a historical reference of experiments to produce the original model. If you are committed to a single cloud provider, these registries are standard and make it simple to register, such as AWS SageMaker and Microsoft Azure. There are also several easy-to-implement open-source tools for registration. Probably most popular is MLFlow, which enables customization across many environments and technology stacks.

Featured Stores

 Feature Stores are becoming a necessity when building models at scale like our email recommendation engine. Our partner Splice Machine understands the importance of registering your model and the significance of what Feature Stores can bring to any implementation. Schemas of your model will change continuously, and Feature Stores can make it easier to track what data is being used for the email recommendation predictions and help data scientists and ML engineers reuse features for multiple models.--If you have "Marlowe" turned on, you might be running several types of models orchestrated by one AI assistant simultaneously. The feature store provides a repository for data scientists to track features they have extracted or developed for the initial models and iterate by building new models on the fly. In other words, if a data scientist retrieves data for a model (or engineers a new feature based on some existing features)-(such as the implementation of a data resiliency score) or monitoring the "input" velocity of the end-user, they can commit that to the feature store. Once a feature has been awarded entrance into the existing feature store, it can be reused to train new models — not just by the data scientist who created it but by anyone within the organization who trains models.

Compute Resources and Auto-Scaling

 Other considerations for streamlined deployment include types of predictions (Real-Time predictions vs Batch Predictions,) Compute Power, Cloud or Edge/Browser, monitoring and latency requirements and security and privacy.

 Since we know we are building an email prediction recommendation system in real-time, we know that a dedicated prediction server is needed to serve up predictions in milliseconds. Campaign Builders will not wait overnight to assess their predictions, so batch processing is not a conducive way to serve up predictions in our particular environment. Further, some models working in parallel with each other might require neural networks associated with deep learning algorithms that require enormous computing power, especially the image optimization widgets inside the email editor. It is crucial at the outset to scope out what computer resources are needed.

 Thankfully, the cloud offers an auto-scaling mechanism to bolster or throttle back GPU usage as necessary, but looking at some documentation from Google, this can be a little bumpy, especially during the assessment phase. The MLOPs architect and software engineers should create a plan to monitor peak usage patterns and curate the potential input-velocity and deployment patterns before full-scale production. A staggered deployment pattern approach such as shadow mode and canary deployments might provide increased accuracy and prove as a worthy strategy since shadow mode deployments are often used in conjunction with human assessment of the models' integrity. In a continuous model building environment, shadow mode might not be favorable.

Latency

 Questions to consider within this component are: What velocity are the inputs coming in at? How fast do I want to serve up my predictions? What times of day is the heaviest usage? This is all part of your observations, monitoring and logging, which will include additional investment. Observability requirements such as logging and monitoring are chief concerns.

 In an email recommendation system, returning or predicting 6-10 different image enhancement choices as predictions in the "styling widget" in 500 milliseconds or less would is optimal. Styling of the images and image augmentation to produce more accurate predictions might need to be available. Determining your latency requirement for your end-users is a significant determination and will provide that "dopamine effect" that the campaign builder now suddenly craves. Moreover, as it relates to throughput, for example, if you are building the recommendation system that needs to handle 1000 queries per second, it would be helpful to test the deployment to ascertain you have enough computing power to hit the QPS requirement.

Logs

 When building your email recommendation system, it may be helpful to log as much of the data as possible for analysis and review and provide supplementary data for retraining your learning algorithm in the future. The logs can act as a new introductory dataset to further measure compute power and better estimate peak traffic patterns but also to continuously build on the accuracy of the current models in production. Yet, also this data is used to identify deployment patterns for real-time model iterations. When certain thresholds are breached in your monitoring, you should receive a notification.

 Security and Privacy play a significant role in determining the type of information being served up by the recommendation system. Depending on the input, the concept of the model might need to be modified slightly to accommodate any security requirements by your team. In an email prediction system like ours, security and Privacy should be straightforward with minor tweaks in "x" = inputs.

Concept Drift and Data Drift

 Generally, concept drift should happen. If not, you can't trust the model. This means the model's predictors/classifiers (target and correlated dependent variables) might require a re-engineering effort to accommodate the deployment patterns, especially after mapping the model on the dataset in production. Concept drift may occur from many vectors.

 Foundationally, the model might have performed well on the test set, but the overall concept might need some modifications when transporting the model to the deployment phase. There may be mapping constraints or even mapping enhancements. There might come a time that CTR rate in an email is no longer the target variable, for example. In our proof of concept, we merely showed 3-5 classifiers. If you have concept drift, this might show as many as 12 or more. Concept drift is healthy, but it should not disqualify your efforts or heavily constrain your timeline to deployment. Tackle concept drift early and often.

 An example of Concept drift is more likely in an email recommendation system as you discover enhancements from the production data set that were not considered with the test dataset. Either way, modifications to the existing model will need to be made on the fly for the predictions to maintain integrity and precision.

 The prospect of adding new or additional hyperparameters, maybe a new target variable, or a combination of both is a validation of a working model. For example, let us say we want to optimize the model for x=input, and then we might consider introducing additional target variables to introduce in order for Y=output to have a higher delta. A perfect compliment, perhaps to a CTR rate in an email optimization target variable, might be HubSpots' overall email score.

 Principally, the 3-5 variable optimization technique discussed in Parts I and II requires further conceptualization.

 In a data pipeline where new data points are ingested in real-time by end-users, both inputs "x" and outputs "y", the likelihood of data drift or data degradation might be less severe.

TensorFlow Extended

 We encourage you to study TensorFlow Extended, (TFX), which makes deploying your model in any environment simpler and aggregates the above components as a one-shop stop. Earmark, especially the ontology of artifacts and metadata. The more metadata your model can store, the better explainability your model will have. Explainability = Trust.

 The essential workflows and underlying systems for machine learning (ML) in production systems come in different shapes and sizes. However, one key distinction is between one-off and continuous pipelines.

 Engineers initiate one-off pipelines to produce ML models "on demand." In contrast, continuous pipelines are "always on" — the ingestion of new data produces new iterations of models in real-time. This is how we see our email recommendation engine developing.

 The expectation is that a "fresh" model should be pushed to serve as frequently and timely as possible to reflect the latest trends in the incoming traffic. For example, you might want to serve up 3D images in your styling editor to enrich your editor's feature portfolio. Our email recommendation engine for image optimization discusses data or image augmentation to see if augmented images produce a better CTR rate.

 Any ML task whose underlying data domain is non-stationary can benefit from continuous training to keep models fresh. Failing to update models in non-stationary settings can lead to performance or data degradation. The frequency with which models need to be updated depends on the speed with which the underlying data evolves. Once again, the theme here is input velocity and how many different models are being used at any given time. The inventory of items representing the corpus (initial model) keeps expanding within a recommender system like ours. The initial model may have had five different types of emails as dependent variables, but as new classifiers evolve, the model needs to be updated. As a final example, the images retrieved initially in our initial model will change as new images need to be ranked and ultimately retrieved to expand the corpus for better predictions. This makes the recommendations stay fresh.

Autonomous Validation

 Within TFX, any system that automatically generates new ML models must have validation safeguards in place before pushing a new model to production.

 Using human operators for these validation checks is prohibitively expensive and can slow down iteration cycles. Moreover, these safeguards need to be applied at several junctures in the pipeline to catch different classes of errors before propagating through the system.

 This implies more than just checking the quality of the updated model compared to the current production model. As an example, suppose that an error in the data leads to a suboptimal model. Then, whereas a model-validation check will prevent that model from being pushed to production, the trainer's checkpointed state might be affected by the corrupted data and thus propagate errors to any subsequent warm-started models.

 TFX addresses these points by employing several validation checks at different stages of the pipeline. These checks ensure that models are trained on high-quality data and are at least as good as or better than the current production model, and are compatible with the deployment environment. We will publish our email recommendation for images later this month.

Written by Fred Tabsharani, Founder and CEO at Loxz Digital Group-ML Modeling

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