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CASE FILE
Case File governance intelligence tracks institutions, policy processes, standards activity, registry operations, accountability disputes, and implementation signals that affect internet infrastructure. BTW.
Institutional BreakdownLegal and Policy ConflictElection and Control Risk
Institution legitimacy and continuity risk mapping.
Primary-source based timeline and risk analysis.
Used for continuity and policy exposure planning.
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Latest from CASE FILE
762 articles
CASE FILE
The Contract Clause That Stopped the .ORG Sale
ICANN did not stop the proposed Ethos Capital acquisition through a registrant vote, a court injunction or a change to the domain-name system. It used a prior-consent clause in Public Interest Registry’s registry agreements—an ex ante gate that public opposition could influence…
CASE FILE
The .ECO Community That Became a Registry Right
Big Room’s 14-point Community Priority Evaluation did not establish ownership of environmentalism or place .ECO in the DNS root. It gave one community-based application priority inside a four-way contention set. Narrow review left that score intact; a later registry agreement and…
CASE FILE
A .AFRICA Process Victory Without the String
DotConnectAfrica’s 2015 Independent Review Process victory established that ICANN’s Board had handled its .AFRICA application inconsistently with ICANN’s Articles and Bylaws. The Board then preserved the undelegated string and returned the application to evaluation. Neither the…
CASE FILE
When Estonia Split an Identity Card in Two
Estonia’s 2017 eID crisis was not simply a chip failure or an emergency patch. It exposed a boundary: a component could retain formal evaluation credentials while new cryptographic evidence made keys produced through one library unsafe for continued operational reliance. Estonia…
CASE FILE
How Consensus Advice Held .AMAZON for Five Years
In the .AMAZON dispute, governments did not own the root-zone switch and an independent review panel did not acquire it. The decisive power moved through presumptions, reasons, application status, contract terms and finally delegation—showing how consensus can stop a namespace…
CASE FILE
Why Google Could Not Keep .SEARCH Closed
Google’s registry subsidiary applied to reserve a generic namespace for its own corporate group at a time when ICANN’s published rulebook did not expressly forbid that model. The application exposed a policy omission, and the decisive response came not from public comment…
CASE FILE
How a 14-Point Score Eliminated Six .HOTEL Applicants
A single Community Priority Evaluation report did not award a registry or place `.HOTEL` in the DNS root. It did something narrower and, for six competitors, immediately decisive: it supplied the score that activated ICANN’s pre-adopted rule for ending their applications’ route…
CASE FILE
A $135 Million Auction, a Funding Agreement and .WEB’s Ten-Year Wait
A US$135 million auction removed six rival .WEB applications from contention, but it did not determine who controlled the winning position, whether the funding arrangement complied with the 2012 rulebook, what independent review could actually remedy, or which company would…
CASE FILE
When .us Withdrew the Proxy Option
A proxy service could publish its own contact details while keeping a customer’s identity in a confidential file. In .us, that arrangement collided with a federal registry contract interpreted to require the registry to hold and publicly display the actual holder’s data. The…
CASE FILE
A Hijacked Domain Put the Proxy Holder in the Control Chain
The Solid Host dispute exposed a narrow but durable governance problem: a privacy intermediary can deny that it is the registrar while still appearing as the registrant, holding the customer’s identity, evaluating a theft complaint and occupying a practical route to restoration.…
CASE FILE
The .se Incident: When Registry Zone Publication Defeated DNS Redundancy
A malformed country-code top-level-domain zone showed why resilient DNS servers cannot compensate for a shared publication failure, and why recovery must restore semantic and cryptographic validity together.
CASE FILE
XZ Utils made release tarballs a software-supply-chain accountability test
The XZ Utils backdoor did not become a mass compromise, but it exposed a control failure with global reach: trusted source code, a signed release, and the package actually built by Linux distributors were not the same security entity. The case asks who must prove that maintainer…
CASE FILE
Grenfell Tower made combustible cladding a building-safety accountability test
The Grenfell Tower fire is an accountability case because a small domestic fire became a building-wide catastrophe through an external-wall system assembled by many organisations, approved through a fragmented regulatory structure and installed around homes whose residents had…
Afrinic SAGA
AFRINIC's Legal Spend per Active Member
AFRINIC's legal bill becomes more intelligible when divided by the organisations sustaining the registry, but the calculation also exposes a missing denominator, unequal fee incidence and the absence of a member-level account of what the expenditure achieved.
Afrinic SAGA
From AFRINIC Failure to NRS Advocacy for Continuity
The way out of registry failure is not a rival database launched overnight, but a verified transfer of service in which operators can move while uniqueness, disputes and running-network state remain intact.
Afrinic SAGA
The Clean-Restart Fallacy in AFRINIC Reform
A newly elected board can reopen a boardroom, but it cannot by itself repair the records, incentives, delegated powers and remedies that allowed a registry crisis to reach the running Internet.
Afrinic SAGA
A Court Calendar Is Not a Registry Recovery Plan
Hearings, return dates, injunctions, and judicial deadlines governed AFRINIC's legal crisis, but recovery required a separate operating map for authority, services, people, money, records, member rights, and failure.
Afrinic SAGA
AFRINIC's Customers Were the Continuity Backstop
African networks kept routing, serving users, maintaining infrastructure, and absorbing registry uncertainty while AFRINIC's ordinary governance failed, making customers the unrecognised last line of continuity.
Afrinic SAGA
Why Transparency Could Not Reconstitute AFRINIC's Board
AFRINIC's long board vacuum showed that publication can expose institutional failure, but only valid authority, enforceable deadlines, reviewable remedies, and a completed member vote can end it.
Afrinic SAGA
The Member Register During AFRINIC's Institutional Vacuum
When AFRINIC had no ordinary board to supervise an election, control of membership status, fee standing, corporate authority and designated-voter data became control of the route back to legitimate government.
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AFRINIC Saga
Multi-year governance and legal crisis with implications for RIR accountability worldwide.
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