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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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1,366 articles
CASE FILE
Emergency Custody, Not Ownership: The .WED Failure and ICANN’s EBERO Chain
The .WED case is not chiefly a story about a failed registry. It is a test of how contractual emergency powers, escrowed records, root-zone changes and a temporary operator can preserve a top-level domain without deciding who may hold its permanent registry role next. The record…
CASE FILE
When a Registry Policy Became Browser Code: The .APP Contract, Delegation and HSTS Preload Chain
.APP did not become an HTTPS-enforced namespace through one decision by one institution. Its path ran through a governmental warning, an amended application, evaluation, a twelve-party auction, an ICANN contract, a root-zone change, a registry-to-registrar notice rule and…
CASE FILE
When Territorial Coexistence Met a Single Root: Merck KGaA, .MERCK and the Limits of ICANN Review
For decades, private agreements divided use of the Merck name by territory. ICANN’s root could not. The .MERCK record shows how contractual history could enter objections and accountability proceedings without giving any one forum power to partition a globally unique label, award…
CASE FILE
Why Booking.com’s .HOTELS Contended with .HOTEIS but Not .HOTEL
Two decision processes within ICANN’s new-gTLD programme could compare similar-looking top-level-domain strings and produce opposite-looking outcomes because they were not answering the same procedural question. Booking.com’s route to .HOTELS shows how a visual screen…
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 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
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
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 .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
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 .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
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
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 $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
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.
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