Mark Nottingham

Co-chair IETF HTTP & AIPREF working groups, member Internet Architecture Board (again), standards lead at Cloudflare. Former W3C TAG, W3C BoD. Interested in the intersection of legal regulation and technical standards.

Social media is mostly-write for me - if you want to make sure I see something, e-mail.

Web: https://mnot.net/
Town: Melbourne, Australia
Land: Bunurong
Pronouns: He/him/mate

Public Key

npub1djpwzjj94vkt0hy9eesvgcekq3dee8x0vewt6knax7xa4qe4zt5s07ept4

NIP-05 Address

mnot_at_techpolicy.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxeqhpffz6kt9hmjzuucxyvvmqgkuunn8kvh9atf7n0rw6sv6396gpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet5qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv0zpd42

Publishing to

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

nos.lol

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub1djpwzjj94vkt0hy9eesvgcekq3dee8x0vewt6knax7xa4qe4zt5s07ept4

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-06-19 05:43:09 UTC

When to reach for a well-known URI — and the traps that catch most protocol designers.
https://mnot.net/blog/2026/well_known_uris

2026-05-19 09:09:56 UTC

Anyone want to go in on a proposal for a Unicode emoji of a guillotine?
It feels very 2026.

2026-05-16 21:46:07 UTC

"The game of technology is defined and controlled by the United States of America. Local governments can impose rules that moderate the impact, but genuine limitations on technology are impossible.
Or, they used to be."
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/
Via @npub1fdr…lvhs

2026-05-11 02:10:40 UTC

I looked through Common Crawl and found over 300,000 parseable RSS/Atom feeds, confirming that Web feeds are still a major part of the Open Web. But most aren’t high quality, and autodiscovery often points users at stale or abandoned feeds.
https://mnot.net/blog/2026/feed-survey

2026-04-23 12:52:32 UTC

- reply

hmm. Examples?

2026-04-23 11:49:11 UTC

- reply

the thinking there is to use HTTP content negotiation, rather than repeat content in the document in different languages. Generally sites that are sophisticated enough to have translations can do this.

2026-04-23 11:27:40 UTC

Playing around with a new way to discover feeds on a site; feedback most welcome.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-nottingham-feed-menu-00.html

2026-03-09 06:53:07 UTC

More belated introspection from the adtech industry.
https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/the-privacy-zealots-were-right-ad-techs-infrastructure-was-always-a-risk/

2026-02-13 06:49:51 UTC

The voluntary nature of Internet standards means that the biggest power move may be not play the game. Let's take a look.
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/02/13/no

2025-10-26 05:55:44 UTC

Some thoughts about how to schedule online meetings for a global organisation in an equitable way.
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2025/10/26/equitable-meetings

2025-10-26 05:49:27 UTC

"AI hucksters [...] will tell you that there is only one way that this technology can be used: to fire a whole ton of workers and make the survivors do their job at frantic Lucy-in-the-chocolate-factory cadence. While it’s true that this is the only way that their companies could possibly be worth the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into them (so far), there’s no iron law that says that investors in tech bubbles should always turn a profit."
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

2025-10-01 06:07:32 UTC

RFC 9842 is HTTP Compression Dictionary Transport -- this is a big one!
Congrats @npub1804…ka24 and @npub15a4…rewk !
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9842.html

2025-06-28 13:51:21 UTC

@npub1fdr…lvhs perhaps the amount of power that monopolists amass scares even those with masses of power.

2025-05-21 00:55:51 UTC

So, Google just launched a major new AI demo that requires people to relax their browser security settings. Wow.
https://techpolicy.social/system/media_attachments/files/114/543/096/428/519/955/original/399a76e96ec39435.png

2025-03-28 04:27:47 UTC

"We therefore suggest that one of the most pragmatic anti-capitalist things that one can do is to push for any organizations that you might be involved with to participate in the standards development process. Encouraging organizations within a capitalist system to participate in a process that rests on openness, consensus, and lack of dominance erodes the power of that very system. It ensures that information — which, as we know, is power — is a public good."
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-anti-capitalist-case-for-standards/

2025-02-09 09:51:52 UTC

Well this looks useful. https://support.apple.com/en-au/102471

2025-01-23 20:58:24 UTC

- reply

it sounds like your page is generating the POST upon page load, in which case this would not be Microsoft's fault. A POST needs to be initiated by a user action -- and clicking on a GETable link doesn't count.

2025-01-14 03:18:53 UTC

All of the drama around Wordpress is poster child #1 for why Open Source is not adequate to assure good governance -- forking is expensive and hard, and allows a lot of sins to be swept under the carpet.

2024-12-04 20:41:21 UTC

- reply

my initial thought is that no one cares about filesystem benchmarking any more because it’s perceived as a solved problem for most purposes.

2024-11-29 00:38:23 UTC

A new book explores an intriguing idea: that there are core processes in some platforms that naturally tilt the table towards being implemented in a single company.
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/11/29/platforms

2024-10-22 21:57:43 UTC

If you need cheering up, watch this video. Run, nazi, run.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/neo-nazis-pepper-sprayed-after-attempting-to-disrupt-refugee-rally-20241022-p5kkh3.html

2024-09-12 07:00:04 UTC

Katherine Kemp summarises the dismal state of privacy law reform in Australia.
https://theconversation.com/long-overdue-australian-privacy-law-reform-is-here-and-its-still-not-fit-for-the-digital-era-238214

2024-09-05 08:28:37 UTC

Recent statements by authorities in Australia make this worth repeating.
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/04/29/power

2024-09-04 02:33:34 UTC

- reply

Sure. The aspect of this that is interesting to me is that the adtech industry makes a lot of arguments that imply that a larger ad market is always better.

2024-09-03 21:16:25 UTC

People say that AI is killing the Web, but content farms existed and were a problem king before AI took off.
What they both share is a profit motive this is satisfied by automated, large scale advertising.
So it’s more accurate to say that unrestricted advertising is killing the Web.

2024-08-25 06:13:52 UTC

Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores some ideas of how to start.
https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/08/25/feeds

2024-08-11 01:08:33 UTC

Just wondering: has a country ever denied accusations of ethic cleansing and then later been found to be innocent?

2024-08-03 00:51:35 UTC

How do internet standards work? What role do the have in internet governance? I’m writing about these topics and more in a series of posts - feedback much appreciated!
https://www.mnot.net/blog/series/internet-standards/