Internet traffic will quadruple in five years and the number of mobile Internet connections will exceed the world's population by 2017, according to Cisco research.

An ITU group has approved a successor to the H.264 video encoding standard, opening the door to future video transmission using only half the bandwidth that's now required.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN body that has played a standards-setting role for global telecommunication networks over the decades, Wednesday night suffered a website attack that severely disrupted a conference to discuss its Internet influence.

The UN's telecommunications standards organization has approved a standard for deep packet inspection (DPI) that raises serious concerns about privacy, the Center for Democracy and Technology said.

The Internet as we know it might never have happened if the Comite Consultatif International Telephonique et Telegraphique (CCITT) had not turned down the offer of TCP/IP from Vint Cerf and other Internet pioneers about 35 years ago.

Going into last month the future of the Internet, to borrow a phrase from the great film noir movie "A Touch of Evil," looked like it may have been all used up. The feeling of the traditional telephone folk and controlling governments was that the Internet had done just about enough of this changing the future stuff -- thanks very much -- now it was time for a bit of control. But the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai did not turn out quite the way that those who would control the Internet wanted. Nor, did the WCIT turn out quite the way that those of us who wanted a more hands-off future would have liked.