Domain Name Rights Coalition

ICANN Takes First Step to Becoming a Global Content Regulator:


There has been wide coverage of ICANN's decision this week to adopt a new process for creating new global Top Level Domains (gTLDs). Publishing a clear, transparent and objective process is thought likely to result in a considerable expansion of gTLDs—although nobody really knows whether this means "quite a lot" or "many thousands”.
The decision endorses a 2007 report from GNSO Council, an ICANN structure that makes recommendations to the ICANN Board on gTLD policy.
Less attention has been given to one of the new tests ICANN will use when considering whether to approve a new gTLD, contained in GNSO's sixth recommendation:
Strings [meaning, new top level domain names] must not be contrary to generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law.
The report goes on to amplify on what it means by "generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order":
Examples of such principles of law include, but are not limited to, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, intellectual property treaties administered by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS).
Quite why intellectual property is included as an issue of "morality and public order" alongside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn't explained, and probably owes more to the lobbying power of the American music and film industry associations than anything else. That aside, not everybody is comfortable with ICANN making decisions on "morality and public order".
ICANN Board member Wendy Seltzer speaking for the At-Large Community (ALAC), that represents ordinary end users, commented:
[ALAC] expressed concern that putting these criteria into the gTLD approval process, even as opportunities for objection, injects ICANN into the business of making morality and public order decisions, or injects that into ICANN's processes in a way that, as ALAC put it, debases the ICANN process. And at-large does not want to see ICANN put into the business of adjudicating or even delegating the adjudication of morality or public order or community support. And so we hope that in implementation, these criteria can be kept sufficiently narrow so that they are both administrable and understandable and so that they do not involve ICANN, the organization, in making, or allowing to be made, determinations about any claim to generally accepted morality principles.
ICANN Board member Professor Susan Crawford agreed, going on to say:
[N]either national governments acting as sovereigns nor intergovernmental organizations acting as representatives of governments should participate in management of Internet names and addresses.
[...]
This wasn't done out of enthusiasm for the free market alone. The idea was also to avoid having sovereigns use the Domain Name System for their own content, control, desires. To avoid having the Domain Name System used as a choke point for content. Recommendation 6, which is the morality and public order recommendation, represents quite a sea change in this approach, because the recommendation is that strings must not be contrary to generally acceptable legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law. That's the language of the recommendation.
Now, if this is broadly implemented, this recommendation would allow for any government to effectively veto a string that made it uncomfortable. Having a government veto strings is not allowing the private sector to lead. It's allowing sovereigns to censor.
In the formal discussions, these issues are mainly debated in the abstract, but two key examples are bandied about in private: .jihad (which even the anti-censorship USA seems keen to prohibit) and .nazi (which is an example dear to the hearts of some European governments with strict anti-Nazi laws).
Civil libertarians supporting Susan Crawford's line argue that if governments are able to pressure ICANN into prohibiting .jihad (which has perfectly non-violent meanings in Islam as well as the terrorist connotations it has recently acquired in the West), then can a prohibition on .falun-gong be far behind?
Traditionalists among the Internet technical community might be less impressed with the cry to protect freedom of expression in top level domains, arguing that domain names—let alone top level domain names—are intended as identifiers in an addressing scheme, not as a medium of expression at all. However, even on this analysis there is cause for concern about the "morality string criterion"
Is it possible for a short phrase such as would be valid as a top level domain name to constitute an incitement to violence, or other generally accepted breach of public order, in and of itself? Does it not depend on how the domain is used? Does the objection to .nazi lie not so much in its identification of content that might relate to Nazi ideology and in history, but that it might be used by people sympathetic to the ideology?
Whether or not it is possible for a domain to inherently infringe principles of morality and public order, doesn't such a rule invite ICANN to investigate how such a domain might be used in any case? Surely it is inconceivable that ICANN would not consider the likely use of a domain. Is such an invitation a good idea? Do we really think ICANN is well equipped to perform this role?
If we accept that ICANN should consider the likely use of a top level domain, and weigh that against principles of morality and public order—not to mention intellectual property law—before deciding whether such a domain should exist, why should it stop there? Why shouldn't ICANN require the registries of gTLDs (including .com) to do the same at the second level? ICANN can impose terms on such registries by contract; the only thing that restrains it is a view that this is not ICANN's proper role or purpose. If we accept the principle that ICANN can adjudicate globally "generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order", why not require gTLD registries to enforce these principles at the second level? And why stop with new domains: wouldn't actual proof of "infringing" use be even more damning than speculation about how a new domain might be used in the future?
The string criteria debate may attract less attention than the creation of new TLDs, and may not immediately affect as many people as the introduction of Internationalised Domain Names. Nonetheless, history may yet come to view this as the watershed moment when the world first acquired a global Internet content regulator.
This article was cross-posted from the LINX Public Affairs blog

Posted by mikki at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Launch of .PARIS:


Yesterday, hundreds of sweaty ICANN attendees put on their best clothes and braved the crush of the rush hour metro on a very hot day to crush together for the ICANN gala at the overwrought Hotel de Ville (city hall) in Paris.
Most of them missed an interesting announcement.
I arrived an hour late, but even so food and drink were not yet served (not even water), and everyone was in desperate need of provisioning. The dull roar of heat-induced complaining drowned out the dignitaries making speeches at the far end of the hall.
Anyone who has been to an ICANN meeting knows that it's free to attend, and all the events are free as well.  If you're smart, you can get free food and booze most evenings, as well as nibbles during the coffee breaks (which makes up for the hotel bar prices: 12 Euros for two small bottles of Perrier, for example).  ICANN is right to always profusely thank the hosts for footing the bill, and the Paris meeting, sponsored by AFNIC (the French registration authority) and the Mairie de Paris (city of Paris), among others, did a very good job for the most part.
So it seems the height of ingratitude to jabber while various luminaries, barely audible, heaped fulsome praise on one another. But jabber they did, and most probably missed the announcement that the mayor's office was supporting the launch of .PARIS, headed by Sebastian Bachollet of ISOC France, which will have technical assistance from AFNIC. (AFNIC's position on TLDs under its sway is baffling, but more on that in a later article.)
The inhabitants of Paris consider themselves a breed apart from the other denizens of France, and in this Parisians exactly resemble New Yorkers, Berliners, Londoners, and other citizens of their country's most prominent city.  And, to my mind, that's the key to success for a geographically-based TLD—a feeling for the place (or language, or cultural identity) that makes people want to proudly display their affinity, and which will result in domain names that are actually used on the web, and not just filled up with annoying parking pages.
Congratulations .PARIS.
We will see many more…

Posted by mikki at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What is the JPA?:


With the NTIA's mid-term review of ICANN's performance under the JPA underway, and ICANN writing to the United States to say "the JPA is no longer necessary and can be concluded," you might well ask yourself, "What is the JPA?" I did, and I'm as steeped in this as anyone.

My sense is that not everyone uses the term "JPA" to refer to the same thing. If we're talking about "concluding the JPA" (what ICANN wants) or "evaluating ICANN's performance under the JPA" (what the NTIA is now doing), it's very important to know if we're talking about the same things when we use the term "JPA.". You'll want to think about this too before you submit comments before next week's February 15th deadline.

Here's what I know. In September, 2006, about the same time that ICANN and the NTIA entered what should have been called "Amendment 7" to their November 25, 1998 Memorandum of Understanding, they stopped using the term "MOU" and began referring to their agreement, as modified over the years, as a "Joint Project Agreement." If you look at the text of their September 29, 2006 agreement, you can see that references to the "MOU" have been replaced with references to the "JPA."

This September 29, 2006 Agreement, however, is not a complete document. By its plain terms, it is an amendment to something else. That something else is the November 25, 1998 MOU.

Some people loosely refer to the "JPA" as the set of tasks listed in the September 29, 2006 amendment. Even ICANN's current Chair, Peter Dengate Thrush, uses the term "JPA" loosely in his letter to the NTIA. He talks about "The JPA – like the memorandums of understanding before it," as though the JPA somehow replaced the MOUs. In one sense, doing away with the list of tasks in the September 29, 2006 amendment is sound. ICANN is at a stage of its development where it ought to set its own agenda, for right or wrong, and it no longer needs the constant reporting to the USG that it has done over the last few years.

So if "conclude the JPA" means allow ICANN to set its own agenda and free ICANN from its reporting requirement to the USG, I can support that.

In its proper form though, the "JPA" refers to the complete current contract between ICANN and the United States. It starts with the November 25, 1998 agreement and is modified seven times, most recently by the September 29, 2006 "JPA." Copies of all versions are here, on the NTIA website.

Just for my own education, I created a complete version of the Agreement, starting from the first MOU and incorporating all of the revisions over the years. The result is here, in a PDF document:

Posted by mikki at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Statement for the Record of Karl Auerbach:


Statement for the Record of

Karl Auerbach

Former (and only) North American Director Elected to the Board of Directors of ICANN
Yuen Fellow of Law and Technology (Caltech and Loyola Law School)
Norbert Wiener Award (2002)
Co-Founder Boston Working Group (BWG)
Chief Technical Officer, InterWorking Labs, Inc.
Director, Domain Name Rights Coalition
Attorney at Law (California) and member of
the Intellectual Property Section of the California State Bar.

on

The Continued Transition of the Technical Coordination and Management of the Internet's Domain Name and Addressing System: Midterm Review of the Joint Project Agreement
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
[Docket No. 071023616-7617-01]

February 6, 2008

Comments

In 2006 when NTIA last inquired about ICANN, I submitted a set of comments.  These may be seen on-line at: http://www.cavebear.com/archive/public/ntia-july-7-2006-statement.html

It is now 2008.  Those comments made in 2006 remai

Posted by mikki at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Registrars and Customer Service - Three Comments - Part 2:

This is a continuation of my previous note, "Registrars and Customer Service - Three Comments - Part 1".

One of the two letters was from Tim Ruiz of GoDaddy.  The gist of this letter was that the number of registrar complaints received by ICANN really was not significant enough to suggest that there is any problem with how registrars behave.

The number of complaints cited was 10,000 during 2006.

Sounds like a lot.

Sounds like a lot more when we realize that it is a rule-of-thumb of marketing and sales that for every customer complaint there are nine more who are angry but silent.

And it sounds like a lot more when we realize that a large number of domain name consumers are professional monetizers who are probably in bed with, or at least in the bedroom with, the registrars they work with - complaints from this quarter are probably rare.

That means that we are talking about at least 100,000 upset domain users out of a pool that mounts to those who actually use domain names as long-term stable identifiers - a pool that probably amounts to perhaps 10 million at best - so we are talking about a complaint rate of at least 1% per long-term domain name client per year.  That's a pretty significant problem rate, especially when measured as the expectency of a long-term domain owner over the lifetime of his/her ownership.

And the number of complaints seems even bigger when we realize that there are a lot of issues that people have simply learned to accept without complaint.  For example, was there a complaint when GoDaddy became a tool in a dispute and yanked someone's domain name, with 52 seconds notice?

And there are a lot of people who have simply given up - either because they don't know to whom they should complain, or have complained in the past and found the system to be a bowl of futile hope, or simply don't realize that they have been scrod.

So, from the same numbers I draw the opposite conclusion - I perceive that we have a serious issue between that part of the public who use domain names for what they were originally intended to be - long term stable identifiers on the internet - and the registrar/registry system that sells (or rents) those names.

Posted by mikki at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Registrars and Customer Service - Three Comments - Part 3:

This is a continuation of my previous note, "Registrars and Customer Service - Three Comments - Part 1".

One of the two letters was from David Maher of PIR, the registry handling .org.

I have great respect for David Maher - he's one of the "white hats".  But in this instance I believe he is going down the wrong path.

Perhaps the most important sentence of his letter was this:

While I recognize that the registrar function is best served by a competitive business model, the Internet has become too important to all its users to allow pure competition to set the standards for customer service.

When it comes to domain names under ICANN we have never ever had a "competitive business model".

What we have had is a highly regulated marketplace in which there is little real choice between domain name products - ICANN has dictated many of the terms of sale, ICANN has dictated the major price components (reserving a hefty chunk for registries such as PIR and for ICANN), and ICANN has severely constrained the number of vendors in the marketplace.

In other words, we are already living in the world in which there is not pure competition, indeed no real competition at all, except on a thin price margin above the core cost components that ICANN reserves for registries and for ICANN.

Why is this so?  Why are we consumers of domain names to be treated as children and not allowed the full possible smorgasbord of domain name products that vendors might create?

Let me be even more specific - By implication my proposal for a domain name product, my .ewe TLD, is a danger to the internet because it does not follow ICANN's rules.

But I deny that new, and different, ideas such as .ewe represent a danger to the stability of the internet.  Yes, such ideas pose a danger to the business stability of the current ICANN-approved incumbents, but we have never as a modern society accepted that there should be such protected marketplaces absent a clear, compelling, and clearly articulated reason for such protection.

So what I would like to hear is this:  What are the reasons that require NTIA and its secular arm, ICANN, to require that the domain name marketplace be wrapped with restrictions and limitations that effectively turn the domain name marketplace into a medieval guild?

I'm not willing to accept vague platitudes - I want to hear specific and concrete reasons.  And my measure of stability is based on the technical ability of the internet and the upper tier of the domain name system to turn DNS query packets into DNS reply packets with dispatch, accuracy, and without prejudice for or against any query source or query target.

I am sure that someone will raise the bogeyman of business failure of a registry or registrar causing hapless domain name owners to become orphans with names that no longer work.  To me that's a business issue, or a consumer protection issue.  The resolution of such issues is a governmental legislative matter, not something for a body whose role is technical coordination.  And there are easy, non intrusive answers to this - my own suggestion is that those registries and registrars that want to demonstrate a commitment to protecting their customers actually engage in data escrow programs and yearly audit themselves and post a statement attesting that they engage in adequate data preservation practices that a successor in interest could pick up the pieces and restore operations.  Consumers can learn to look elsewhere if a registry or registrar does not do these things.  This kind of self-protection on the part of consumers would be greatly enhanced if ICANN were to remove its existing rule against long-term registration contracts.

Posted by mikki at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Six Years Of ICANN Delay And Unjustified Retention of $2,000,000:

It was six years ago this month, in year 2000, when ICANN accepted
nearly $2,400,000 to review 47 applications for new TLDs.

ICANN approved seven of those 47 applications in an infamous, clearly biased beauty contest that was so overtly unfair that one very well qualified applicant with an innovative idea was rejected because one ICANN board member could not pronounce the sequence of characters as a word!

Among the seven winners were several who are now asking ICANN for a change to their contracts.  ICANN's Board meets next week to consider these changes.

I would hope that ICANN postpones these decisions.  For how long?  Until ICANN deals with the remaining applicants who have been waiting for 6 very long years and watching their $50,000 (each) application fees rot away.

Those other 40 were not rejected, in fact they have been often reassured that their applications remain pending.  And when I looked at ICANN's finances I did not see that this $2,000,000 was in a contingent fund or was being treated as anything other than permanent, non-refundable income.

If those 40 applications - and the $2,000,000 in application fees - are not still alive than ICANN has lied and taken their money under false pretenses.  And ICANN would not do that.

Fairness and justice requires that ICANN not amend the contracts of any the seven lucky winners until ICANN squarely and fairly deals with 40 applicants who have been waiting all of these years - or ICANN admits that it lead them on, took their money, and returns that money, with substantial interest (remember year 2000 was still within the .com boom) and an apology.

By-the-way, this kind of delay is ICANN standard operating procedure - I filed a request with ICANN for independent review in that same year - ICANN has never honored its obligation to deal with it.  And ICANN has been stringing Ed Hasbrouck along for years.

The ICANN process reminds me of something and someone - John Ehrlichman, an adviser to Richard Nixon, whose method of dealing with people who raised troublesome issues was to ignore them and leave them "twisting, slowly, slowly in the wind".

Posted by mikki at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Six Years Of ICANN Delay And Unjustified Retention of $2,000,000:

It was six years ago this month, in year 2000, when ICANN accepted
nearly $2,400,000 to review 47 applications for new TLDs.

ICANN approved seven of those 47 applications in an infamous, clearly biased beauty contest that was so overtly unfair that one very well qualified applicant with an innovative idea was rejected because one ICANN board member could not pronounce the sequence of characters as a word!

Among the seven winners were several who are now asking ICANN for a change to their contracts.  ICANN's Board meets next week to consider these changes.

I would hope that ICANN postpones these decisions.  For how long?  Until ICANN deals with the remaining applicants who have been waiting for 6 very long years and watching their $50,000 (each) application fees rot away.

Those other 40 were not rejected, in fact they have been often reassured that their applications remain pending.  And when I looked at ICANN's finances I did not see that this $2,000,000 was in a contingent fund or was being treated as anything other than permanent, non-refundable income.

If those 40 applications - and the $2,000,000 in application fees - are not still alive than ICANN has lied and taken their money under false pretenses.  And ICANN would not do that.

Fairness and justice requires that ICANN not amend the contracts of any the seven lucky winners until ICANN squarely and fairly deals with 40 applicants who have been waiting all of these years - or ICANN admits that it lead them on, took their money, and returns that money, with substantial interest (remember year 2000 was still within the .com boom) and an apology.

By-the-way, this kind of delay is ICANN standard operating procedure - I filed a request with ICANN for independent review in that same year - ICANN has never honored its obligation to deal with it.  And ICANN has been stringing Ed Hasbrouck along for years.

The ICANN process reminds me of something and someone - John Ehrlichman, an adviser to Richard Nixon, whose method of dealing with people who raised troublesome issues was to ignore them and leave them "twisting, slowly, slowly in the wind".

Posted by mikki at 06:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beyond Whois - Data Mining IANA Protocol Numbers:

We all know about how the "whois" database is being mined by spammers and other scum.

This morning I woke up to find a scam email in my inbox, nothing odd about that.  What was odd, however, was that it was very clear that this email was created by mining the IANA protocol number assignments.

Posted by mikki at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What Universe Are They Living In?:

I see the news filled with articles, many from Europe, proclaiming that that the United States government is finally releasing ICANN.

Nonesense.  The US Government is doing no such thing.

In the 1950's the damning phrase (and book title) was "The Man who Lost China".

People in the United States government are terrified of being labeled as the man (or woman) who lost the internet - it would end their careers faster than a lewd instant message to a Congressional page.

And the folks in the present US administration view the US hegemony as a national security issue.  Not only do they believe that retention of control over ICANN is necessary to protect US security, but they fear the attacks that would come from their political opposition if they should do anything that could be perceived or characterized as weak on security.

In addition, the new agreement between ICANN and the US Government is really only a cosmetic change.  Yes, ICANN can skip a few reports - which were mainly self congratulatory lists of how many numbers IANA has assigned and which were one of the few windows into the interior life of ICANN.  Don't forget that the main part of ICANN's work is not performed under this new agreement but under a separate purchase order for "the IANA function" - and that agreement has not significantly changed.

But the real kicker is the way that NTIA simply overturned one of the few policies in ICANN that was developed through a wide process, the policy regarding "whois" data.  In so doing, NTIA signaled quite clearly that it is the Alpha male in the NTIA-ICANN relationship.  And to add insult to injury, in so doing, NTIA has, without as much as a by-your-leave negated the privacy laws of Europe, Canada, and much of the civilized world.

ICANN benefits from this infinitely deferred emancipation.  The moment that the US Government is clearly no longer interfused with ICANN will be moment that ICANN will begin to feel the heat as denied entrepreneurs and ICANN-taxed consumers begin to ask whether ICANN is, under the laws of their countries, an illegal combination in restraint of trade.

Posted by mikki at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another View of the New ICANN-DoC Agreement:


The new MoU, called a Joint Project Agreement (JPA) is a cosmetic response to the comments received by NTIA during its Notice of Inquiry in July 2006. The object seems to be to strengthen the public's perception that ICANN is relatively independent. But the relationship between the USG and ICANN is fundamentally unchanged. In one important respect, the JPA has actually increased direct US intervention. more...

Posted by mikki at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So if you were smart enough and had enough vision to get your domain name at the beginning the advent of the Internet turned commerce boom, you may lose your name anyway if the registrars suddenly decide to charge you more because your name is cooler than someone else's. And who does that benefit? Not small businesses or individuals...

ICANN Confirms: Tiered Pricing Not Forbidden in New .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG Contracts:


I finally got the "official" word from Vint Cerf of ICANN, "on the record", who confirmed that my interpretation is correct, that differential/tiered pricing on a domain-by-domain basis would not be forbidden under the .biz/info/org proposed contracts. This means that the registries could charge $100,000/yr for sex.biz, $25,000/yr for movies.org, etc. if they wanted to -- it would not be forbidden the way the proposed contracts are currently written. This would represent a powerful pricing weapon for registries, and a fundamental shift in possible domain name pricing, that could lead them to emulate .tv-style price schedules. It doesn't mean they will necessarily do it, but it's not forbidden. When a contract doesn't forbid something bad, it implicitly allows it... more...

Posted by mikki at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oy Vey!:

I heard a really good one!  ICANN is asking for "comments" about how they could improve their web site!

Have you ever heard anything so nutz?  I mean, ICANN, has created yet another "forum" so that we can "discuss" ideas - this time about their web site!  Wouldn't 'cha think that sometimes they might actually use their web site to tell us something - like promptly telling us what happened during those telephone meetings of the board?  Do they really need a "forum" for that?!

We don't need no stinkin' forums!

ICANN has a very bad habit of believing that it has to create playpens for people to discuss ideas.  Well thank you ICANN, but we are perfectly capable of creating our own forums - we've had 'em for years.

ICANN's website should be a means for ICANN to publish information, like audio recordings of board phone meetings or timely postings of minutes.

The last thing we need is yet another ICANN managed gathering place.  Didn't ICANN learn from the failed ALAC that people don't like to be herded like sheep and forced to perform on ICANN's stage?  (Yes, I know its a mixed metaphor.)

(By-the-way, ICANN doesn't seem to have noticed that the community of internet users has ignored ICANN's over-managed ALAC in droves.)

So ICANN - please give up trying to make your website into a Disneyland of forums and interactive aids.  Instead please recognize that the purpose of your website is to herald timely information about what ICANN is doing.  We will be discussing it - but not on your website.

Posted by mikki at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Milestones May be Necessary for ICANN:


The US Government may need to develop new milestones and benchmarks to determine when it would be appropriate to relinquish its special role in overseeing the Internet's global addressing system, CDT said in comments to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the Domain Name System (DNS) under a contract with NTIA that is set to expire in September. NTIA requested comments from the public on a range of issues, including whether ICANN has made enough progress to operate free of direct governmental involvement. CDT suggested that NTIA may need to study what safeguards would be needed to ensure that ICANN would be able to remain independent in the current global environment.

Posted by mikki at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My Submission to the House Small Business Committee's Hearing On ICANN:

Here's a pointer to my statement (pdf, 7 pages) to the House Small Business Committee for tomorrow's hearing on ICANN.

It amazes how people who ought to know better fall for Verisign's siren song about its vaunted infrastructure.  In reality what Verisign has assembled is a suite of relatively easily replicable DNS servers backed by a transaction system that is tiny in comparison to that of many banks.  The cost to replace Verisign's registry system and its suite of name servers for .com is really only a tiny percentage of the revenue stream that ICANN has gifted unto Verisign via it's $7 per name per year registry fee.

Posted by mikki at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN Board Votes Against .XXX Sponsored Top Level Domain Agreement:


Today, ICANN's Board of Directors voted against a proposed agreement for a .XXX. Sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD). The application was proposed by the ICM Registry. more...

Posted by mikki at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

It's good that ICANN's GNSO has adopted a definition of the purpose of Whois
that construes the purpose of the database as being merely for the limited
purpose of making technical adjustments to the net.  This may redound onto
NTIA (part of the US Dep't of Commerce) with regard to NTIA's obligations under
the Privacy Act of 1974 (5 USC 552a) with regard to NTIA's privacy-busting
regulations over the .us ccTLD.  You see, now that NTIA dictates
policy for .us it's going to be rather hard for NTIA to continue to
pretend that the Whois information of .us is not a system of records
under the Act.  And the act does require the agency (NTIA) to conform the
use of the information to the purposes for which the information is needed to
fulfill an agency mission.

Way, way, way back in another era I was offered a position as an attorney in
the office of the counsel to NTIA.  During that time NTIA was a strong
proponent of computer and network privacy.  It is amazing how completely
NTIA has flipped over the intervening years from an advocate of privacy
protection into an agency that now works with considerable zeal to destroy
privacy on the internet.

Changing the subject - I just drove back from Phoenix to Santa Cruz and we
took the detour to see the wildflowers (especially California poppies) between
Lancaster and Gorman (California highway 138, Lancaster Road).  It's a late
wildflower season but it looks like its going to be a spectacular one. 
Right now the patches range from a few acres to several hundred acres.  But
I expect that between now and the end of April that the flowers will overshadow
the scenes from Wizard of Oz.  If you are in the vicinity of LA you
should consider taking a look.  I'm probably going to detour back through
the area on my way to Las Vegas for Interop at the end of April.

Interop - yes, once again (as I've done nearly every year since 1987) I'll be
working behind the scenes.  This year I'll be at the iLabs running network
impairment systems (my Maxwell product) to evaluate and demonstrate the susceptibility
of VOIP systems to various kinds of network conditions ranging from simple
packet loss and jitter to actively hostile conditions.  Even with good
network conditions I don't think VOIP call quality would have been acceptable
unless cell phones had so badly reduced our expectations regarding voice quality
and transmission delay.  And with predatory providers operating under the
euphemism of "network neutrality" and with increasing levels of
internet congestion at exchange points (driven by net services such as
entertainment grade video), we may have VOIP users longing for the "toll
grade" quality of Ma Bell's network of 1990.

That is, I hope to be in Las Vegas.  A note to myself: Next time I
decide to paint a bathroom to surprise my wife I'll get somebody else to pick up
and reseat the toilet.  The amount of pain that can come from a scrunched
back, and the time it takes to heal, are amazing.  It's really put a crimp
on my activities, particularly things like air travel.  I'm forced to walk
like Quasimodo in slow motion.  Even relatively simple tasks - like
standing in the kitchen while preparing a dinner for a dozen people (something I
really enjoy doing) have become excursions through a world of pain that I never
knew existed.

(Since other people are doing it: Music played on the box as I write this:
The Duhks, Four Blue Walls; Suzanne Vega, Harbor Song.)

Posted by mikki at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN: Fighting over Table Scraps:

I've finally recovered from another ICANN meeting, frustrated as ever. 700 or so people flew halfway around the world to hear canned presentations, dueling-monologue public form sessions, and resolutions that left major issues unresolved, and to gripe in the hallways about how little was being done.

Every time I talked to someone who had been away from the ICANN scene for some time and returned, I heard the same assessment: "It looks just the same as it did N years ago," for varying values of N. Yet many of us return nonetheless, I because I'm still trying to make ICANN responsive to the public interest.

I've been trying to explain why ICANN inspires such vigorous debate and loathing. ICANN is not about big issues. A domain name policy, even a perfect one, isn't going to cure cancer, or even bring connectivity to rural Africa. It's no surprise many in the GAC (Government Advisory Committee) complain about the difficulty raising understanding of ICANN issues with constituents who don't yet have reliable Internet access.

But the big issues are not on the table. Even the big issues of Internet connectivity -- bridging digital divides, routing around private or government-imposed obstacles, network neutrality -- are not part of ICANN's mandate or sphere of control. Thankfully. ICANN oversees allocation of IP address blocks, accredits domain name registrars, and decides what new top-level domains will enter the root zone.

Furthermore, most of the functions ICANN oversees "just work." Even if it doesn't seem "fair" that MIT has more IP addresses than many countries, by and large, those who need addresses get them. Domain names resolve uniquely. Independently designed protocols interoperate.

We're fighting over table scraps from a table that wasn't very well stocked to begin with. The fight for those crusts and bones gets even more vicious when the loaves and steaks aren't part of the debate, because we can't trade off more important issues in the bargaining.

The problem is that when it doesn't "just work," ICANN's "bottom-up" process is neither bottom-up nor effective to resolve the problems. Without big issues at stake, much of the general public can't be bothered to learn all of ICANN's acronyms and procedures to participate. Those who do are derided as kooks or edge cases. We're told that the telephone company doesn't want to hear from its customers (paraphrasing a comment by Board member Veni Markovski).

ICANN's problem is that the table scraps of issues are still important. Certainly to those who have built businesses in ICANN-regulated industries, most notably domain name registrars and registries. But also to the general public. Lots of issues fall between out-in-the-street-protest important and negligible: the cost of domain names, the availability of domain names and new pools of domain names (TLDs), the ability of trademark claimants to take domain names from prior registrants.

ICANN's core values refer to the "Internet Community." That community is not just those with commercial interests, but especially those using the Net to communicate: the new blogger who wants a domain name to hang her weblog; the parent who wants an email address he controls; the critic who wants to criticize a business without having her home address and telephone number made public.

ICANN needs a better way to hear and respond to the public Internet community, but so far, there's little indication it's listening. Without the at-large public, this "private-public partnership" looks a lot like a conspiracy in restraint of trade.

Posted by mikki at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN's Recent Report on "Alternate Roots":

ICANN's "Security and Stability Committee" (SSAC) just issued a report
on "alternate roots"

The best word I can think of to describe it is "dud".

Remember ICANN's ICP-3:
A Unique, Authoritative Root for the DNS from back in year 2001?

Remember how ICP-3 was filled with hysterical language about how competing
DNS roots would cause the internet sky to fall and and DNS caches be polluted?

The new report from the SSAC quietly distances itself from those
claims.  This is the positive aspect of this new SSAC report.

The report, however, continues the unjustified and undefined claim that only
ICANN can publish a DNS that is "authoritative".  And the report
continues ICANN's historical method of using subjective social and business
concerns as justifications for technical restrictions.  For example, this
report makes the claim that only ICANN authorized top level domains can operate
with concern for customer needs and that only ICANN can act in conformity with
some never-defined notion of "public interest" (an odd claim given
ICANN's ejection of the public from virtually all aspects of ICANN's
decision-making machinery.)

In other words, ICANN's Security and Stability Committee, a committee of
technical worthies, has authored a report that addresses neither security nor
stability, and those matters that it does address are supported by
non-technical, conclusory assertions for which the members of the committee possess
no particular expertise or experience.

But the most important aspect of the new SSAC report is this:

The SSAC report does not raise any technical reason why as a technical matter
there can not safely coexist on the net several different DNS naming spaces -
which may or may not be consistent with one another - each dangling from a
different DNS root.

The report does say that two people each using a different root might
get different answers to the same DNS question.  But that is a meaningless
observation - it is something we've all known for years: that different DNS
hierarchies may, but need not necessarily, yield different answers.

The discussion about competing roots has evolved so that we now ask whether
different DNS hierarchies are consistent or inconsistent with one another.

Inconsistency, like a tango, takes two.  When two or more roots differ,
it is useless to engage in endless, and ultimately dogmatic and religious,
debates about which is "authoritative".  It is far more useful to
ask whether each root serves the needs of the community that has voluntarily
chosen to use it.

One of the underlying assertions underlying ICANN's behavior towards
competing roots is the implicit belief on the part of ICANN is that ICANN has a
duty to suppress DNS heresy and create a single catholic
name space that everyone on the internet is required to use.  In other
words, ICANN does not want communities to have a choice; it's either the ICANN
way or naught.

It is impossible to reconcile ICANN's Procrustean
stance vis-à-vis competing roots with the idea that every user of the internet
should have not only the ability but also the right to shape the way in which he
or she uses the internet.  This idea of control at the edge is the
underlying conception of the end-to-end principle and of my own First
Law of the Internet.

Why should ICANN be allowed the power to deny to users of the internet the
ability and right to shape the landscape of names that they, and their children,
use on the internet?

The biggest hammer this document had to throw was that the authors couldn't
conceive why anybody would want to operate a system of root servers.

In other words the report says that because the authors do not have an
imagination then nobody else does - which is both absurd and false.

Not long ago I published a note entitled What Could You Do With Your Own Root Server. 
That note considered the ways in which a root server operator could take
advantage of its position for profit or power.  It is quite clear that a
single root server operator could obtain a significant revenue stream.  It
is even more clear that an entire system of roots, if it can garner adequate
use, could also obtain significant revenue.

Consider, for example, a root system that takes a few cues from Google:
Consider a root system that uses data mining to generate a revenue stream and
that attracts query sources (users) by giving those users a taste of the
action.  Suppose you were to receive a check from such a root system that
paid you $0.0001 for every DNS name that you (legitimately) resolve using this
root system rather than the ICANN/NTIA root.

Consider the opportunities for preferential or optimized name services.

Consider the opportunities for highly filtered views of the DNS
landscape.  Not everyone considers universal connectivity to be a
boon.  For instance Motorola recently found that it could create a
lucrative line of mobile
phones for orthodox Jews in Israel in which the ability to call or be called
by certain phone numbers can be restricted by the elders of the sects.

ICANN's SSAC seems to have no more foresight than the business professor who
gave the founder of FedEx a low grade because the professor thought the Federal
Express business model was silly.

Good thing the FedEx founder had the opportunity to test his idea.

However, in the land of ICANN no idea is permitted unless approved by the
ICANN powers.

Yet there are those who still refuse to see that ICANN's methods are nothing less
than highly intrusive and destructive regulation plunged into the body of the
internet up to the hilt.

Posted by mikki at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

IANA Contract Extended by Six Months:


The U.S. Government has extended the current phase of ICANN's IANA contract for six more months. Importantly, this is not a renewal of the contract, simply an extension of the existing contract. The extension ends on September 30, 2006, the same date that ICANN's MOU with the United States expires.

Posted by mikki at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Royal Reading of the Reports:


The ICANN "Public" Forum begins, as usual, with the Royal Reading of the Reports and the announcement, as usual, that today's public forum must end early and tomorrow's public forum will begin late.

As you scroll through the list below, note the place of high importance that the Board has placed "open microphone."Here is this afternoon's agenda: President's

Report; Supporting

Organization & Advisory Committee Reports; ccNSO

Report; GNSO

Council Report; ALAC

(At-Large Advisory Committee) Report; Public

Comment on President's Report & Supporting Organization &

Advisory Committee Report; Nominating

Committee Report; Ombudsman

Report; Public

Comments on Nominating Committee & Ombudsman Reports; Break; Morocco

2006 Meeting Hosts; Brazil

2006 Meeting Hosts; Presentation

on President's Strategy Committee; Public

Comments on President's Strategy Committee & Open Microphone. 

Posted by mikki at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First Thoughts On ICANN's Wellington, NZ, Meeting:

ICANN has begun a meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.

Nice place New Zealand.  But remote.  Has anyone noticed how many
years it has been since ICANN has had a meeting in the place where it has its
legal home, California?  Perhaps ICANN is afraid.  And perhaps ICANN
should be afraid, very afraid - I've spoken to people in the California
government and they are aware of ICANN and its ill and exclusionary behavior
towards citizens.

As a prelude to the meeting both Ross Rader and Susan Crawford wrote
interesting notes on their blogs.  I'll take a moment and respond those
those.

Ross
suggested that ICANN's GNSO is not conflicted because it represents all
stakeholders.  I don't agree.  ICANN's GNSO, and ICANN generally,
exclude the largest group of internet stakeholders - the community of internet
users.  The interest of that group, measured in terms of the cumulative
financial impact and in the number of people affected, the "stake" of
this community far outweighs that of the members of the GNSO by several orders
of magnitude.

But it is a well accepted principle of nearly every legal system on the
planet that collections of incumbent business interests ought not to have the
life-and-death power over the attempts of others to enter the marketplace. 
The idea that incumbents can limit the entry of new players went out with the
Guild system.  Yet is that not what ICANN has become, a Guild, a place in
which incumbent businesses (and a few other selected industrial bystanders, such
as the intellectual property industry) have been given the power to be
gatekeepers who permit or deny new entrepreneurs, new ideas, and new products?

And is that not also "regulation" in its worst and most
heavy-handed sense?

Ross suggests that ICANN is not a regulator.  But if we examine the
aspects of domain name life upon which ICANN imposes mandatory conditions we see
that ICANN has established a deeply intrusive and deeply controlling system of
regulation.  Among the things that ICANN imposes are minimal registry
prices, astronomically high hurdles for new registry proposals to overcome,
terms and conditions in registry and registrar contracts and users who acquire
domain names, a dispute policy amounting to supra-national law of
trademark-over-domain-name, a WHOIS policy that requires registrars and
registries to publish their customer lists and that also is the largest and
worst privacy abuse on the internet.

If that's not regulation then I don't know what regulation is.

Susan
suggested that from the feedback she has received that there is pent-up
demand for perhaps a dozen or less new Top-Level-Domains.  I, and others,
tend to feel that that number understates the actual demand by at least several
thousand-fold.

An easy test would be for ICANN to put up on its website, in a place that
people can actually find on its website, a request for statements of interest in
obtaining a TLD.  That web page should make it clear that ICANN is asking
for those who would be interested under the following conditions:

• Minimal application fee ($25 US) and no yearly tithes to ICANN


• The only review will be to ask whether the applicant will abide by
  published internet technical standards.


• No requirement to adhere to existing ICANN contractual structures, publish
  customer lists (WHOIS), mandate a UDRP, or use a registry-registrar business
  model.

Yup, that's it - those three conditions.  The first condition should
cover ICANN's costs of checking the second condition and of mechanically adding
the TLD to the root zone file.  (ICANN could charge a reasonable yearly maintenance
fee - perhaps $100 - for updates to the name server records.)  The second
condition is really the only one necessary to protect the technical stability of
the internet - see the new ICANN/Verisign contract for one definition of what
"stability" means.  And the third condition is there to indicate
that the abusive behaviors of ICANN in the past should be discounted when making
these statements of interest.

Under those conditions I'd
put up my hand for my .ewe registry.

Now, back to the ICANN meeting itself.

Paul Twomey opened a hornet's nest of accumulated
anger when he suggested that his discussion be off the record.

Paul: ICANN's began its life in secrecy with secret agreements made by
ICANN's founder, Joe Sims.  The fact of those agreements is well known -
Sims once told me of their existence during a phone call when he told me that
changes in the yet-to-be-formed ICANN were impossible because such changes would
contravene those agreements.  Then very soon after ICANN formed certain
ICANN board members and officers adopted a stance right out of Orwell's Animal
Farm - that in order to be "open" ICANN's board had to meet in
secret.

Then ICANN went on through the years in that mode, secrecy piled on top of
secrecy, closed meetings on top of closed meetings.

And then I was elected to ICANN's Board of Directors.  ICANN felt that
it should operate in secret even against its own Board of Directors!  I
tried to exercise my "absolute right" under the Law to take a look at
ICANN's financials.  ICANN had the audacity to try to deny me that
right. 
I had to sue.  I won, ICANN lost.  You would think after the disastrous
advice that ICANN's law firm gave it on that occassion, that ICANN might
reconsider its choice of law firms.  When I left the board I recommended
(see Section 4.12 of Appendix B of http://www.cavebear.com/rw/senate-july-31-2003.htm)
that ICANN make a deep review and potentially significantly reform its
relationship with Jones-Day.)

Yet, apparently ICANN still does not easily open its books or its affairs to
directors.  And most of the directors have been wimps, not asking question
much less requiring answers, not demanding that staff do what staff ought to
do.  ICANN directors generally treat their jobs on the ICANN Board of
Directors as some sort of distant honorific in which the directors merely make
polite nudging noises rather than actually using their plenary power and
obligatory authority to actually direct
the affairs of ICANN by making informed and independent decisions.

In addition, apparently, ICANN
has not published any financial statements on its web pages for several years
- I wonder whether ICANN has made its mandatory filings of its IRS form 990, a
document that tax-exempt entities such as ICANN are required to make visible to
the public else be subject to a daily accumulating fine.

Stepping over to another topic - apparently TLD registries are trying to make
a land-grab by claiming that they have the exclusive rights to the
internationalized versions of their strings.  What an absurd idea. 
How greedy can these TLD registries get?  Haven't they ever read the Grimms'
tale of  The Fisherman
and His Wife?

Tell me this: What does "com" mean?  It is not a word in
English.  It has been used as shorthand for "communications" (as
in 3COM) or "commercial".  What is the internationalized version
of a non-word or acronym?

By-the-way, I own the domain name "cie.com" which, if viewed
in French could be construed to mean the same as "com.com".

Posted by mikki at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CIRA Suspends Participation in ICANN:


The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has issued a public letter to ICANN calling on the organization to follow accountable, transparent, and fair processes. Until the concerns are addressed, CIRA says it is suspending its voluntary contributions to ICANN... more...

Posted by mikki at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad ICANN:


Every once in a while, ICANN pushes so far past the limits of acceptable decision-making processes that the only suitable response becomes satire. Here are three recent examples:

• Texturbation -- which looks like a new weblog -- has two recent posts on the .COM deal:

  "VeriSign's .com Win Guarantees Internet Stability"

  and "VeriSign to Outsource .com Registry to Go Daddy";
  
  

• Karl Auerbach has simplified the creation of an ICANN Strategic Plan by automating the generation of important-sounding but nonsensical ICANN-speak; and,
  
  
• Richard Sexton takes on Vint Cerf and the ICANN Board Chair's views on new gTLDs.
  

Posted by mikki at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN's Strategic Plan:

ICANN has issued its "draft"
Strategic Plan.

It is most interesting for what it does not say.

First of all, nowhere does it suggest that ICANN is striving to be
accountable to the community of internet users or to serve their needs. 
Instead it is full of words about how ICANN is going to serve its
"stakeholders", which by definition excludes internet users.

Did you notice that the ALAC or at-large isn't even mentioned?  I guess
that even ICANN has realized that the ALAC is a failure - institutional
cheer-leading Astroturf is hard to grow.

Nor does ICANN even begin to mention that it aspires to ensure that the upper
tiers of the internet's domain name system will operate 24x7x365, quickly and
accurately responding to query packets with response packets and doing so
without prejudice against any query source or mining of the data stream for
non-operational purposes.

I wonder whether a lot of the text for this plan came from Dilbert's
Mission Statement Generator?  (If you look quickly you may see an experimental
tool to generate ICANN Strategic Objectives.)

It's also nice to know that not only is ICANN planning on continuing its
excommunication of internet users, much less granting them the lofty position of
"stakeholder", but that ICANN is apparently canonizing and
transforming some of its current stakeholders into "key-stakeholders".

Posted by mikki at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN's Registrar Community on the ropes: Can the cheese stand alone?:


Bret makes some great points about the Registrar community and its lack of involvement over the years with the more serious, and less profitable, issues that ICANN has been faced with since its inceptions.

You can draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign a perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

– icann.Blog

The same issues that are now biting the Registrar community square in the ass.

First they ghettoized Individual Users, and we did not speak out—
because we did not represent Individual Users;
Then they isolated and ridiculed the activist Board members and critics, and we did not speak out—
because we are not activist Board members or critics;
Then they dissolved the DNSO General Assembly, and we did not speak out—
because we did not participate in the DNSO General Assembly;
Then they antagonized the Country Code Managers, who resisted fairly well, but we still did not speak out—
because we were not Country Code Managers;
Now they are marginalizing the Registrar community —
…and few are left to speak with us.

…with apologies to Martin Niemöller.

Posted by mikki at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's to the Crazy Ones....:


A group of registrars filed a new Request for Reconsideration this

week (PDF here). It addresses ICANN's many failures in openness, transparency,

legitimacy, and sound decision-making. It's well worth reading.

Registrars, it's also probably time you all got out of your work rooms

during the ICANN meetings and met some important people in the

community.

Allow me to make a few

introductions.

Registrars, I'd first like to

introduce you to the editors of ICANNWatch.... Michael

Froomkin, Jonathan Weinberg, Dave Farber, Ted Byfield, and Milton

Mueller. They started writing about the very issues raised in your

Reconsideration Request way back in 1999. Imagine that.

You also

should take a few minutes and get to know Karl Auerbach and Andy Müller-Maguhn.

They used to be on the Board. They were even elected.

Take some time to

talk about ICANN accountability with the many members of the NAIS Project and the At Large Study

Committee: Clement Dzidonu, Alan Levin, Izumi Aizu, Adam

Peake, Myungkoo Kang, Christian Ahlert, Stefaan Verhulst, Jeanette

Hofmann, Jerry Berman, Alan Davidson, Rob Courtney, Scott Harshbarger,

Don Simon, Raúl Echeberria, Carlos Afonso, Carl Bildt, Charles

Costello, Pierre Dandjinou, Esther Dyson, Olivier Iteanu, Ching-Yi Liu,

Oscar Robles, and Pindar Wong. Do you remember this statement in Ghana? Some of us will never forget it. We knew then what it would mean for this ICANN.

Take a virtual walk

through the former

DNSO's General Assembly, where disenfranchised individual

domain name registrants still worry about an unaccountable, opaque

ICANN.

Spend some time in Wellington getting to know

the At Large Advisory

Committee. They're the last vestiges of a once robust At Large Membership.

And last but not least, let me

introduce you to Ed

Hasbrouck. In spite of being bullied by ICANN's counsel and

ignored by ICANN's Board, Mr. Hasbrouck has filed timely and important

requests for reconsideration and independent

review. In them, he makes allegations about ICANN's closed, non-transparent processes that are strikingly similar to the

ones you made. You two have a lot of common

interests.

You need to know all of these

people, Registrars.

See,

here's how this works: we're all connected.

You can

draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision

to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign

a

perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely

disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public

scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

After you meet all these people, Registrars, you'll

find that you like their company a great deal. It's these people -- the

users -- who share your interests in an open, competitive marketplace.

They too believe in a transparent, accountable ICANN. It's time you got to know these people, maybe even helped them organize into voting GNSO constituencies or funded their travel to ICANN's farflung meetings. And when you

meet them in some hotel bar in Wellington or Marrakech or Sao Paulo, buy them a drink and raise a

toast to

the crazy ones.

As you've now discovered, they weren't so crazy after all.

Posted by mikki at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Internet Gambling, The ICANN Way: Using Someone Else's Wallet:

Bret Fausett's blog quoted Stratton Sclavos (CEO of Verisign) as saying that every week Verisign's registry gets
7,000,000 name registrations but that only 0.6% (42,000) of those last more than 5
days.

Wow!

In other words, for every "normal" registration transaction there are 167 five-day speculative registration transactions (plus an additional 167 drop transactions.)  Thus for every normal registration there are 333 speculative transactions (i.e. one normal add transaction and 167 5-day add/drop transaction pairs.)

And, it seems from what I've been able to discover so far, but I'd certainly like clarification, that Verisign receives revenue only for the "normal" registration transactions but has to eat the cost of the 5-day add/drop transaction pairs.

Which, if true, means that the registry fee charged for each normal registration transaction has to cover the cost of 333 speculative registry transactions.  That's a heavy and unjustifiable burden.

I have long assumed that the actual cost of registry operations is down in the 1 cent per year range.  I'm not alone in this belief.

We know that Verisign isn't losing money with the $6 registry fee.  And if we take into account the 1:333 ratio of normal-to-speculative registrations we see that the actual registry transaction fee has to be below $0.02, with the "normal" customer picking up the tab for 333 speculative transactions.

One of the reasons that Joe Sims, ICANN's architect-apparent of the ICANN-Verisign agreement, said in a posting at Circle-ID is that this new .com agreement was needed was to encourage Verisign to invest in infrastructure.

However, according to Sclavos statement, apparently the vast bulk of that infrastructure is there to support speculation rather than "normal" name registrations.

And that's not even counting the infrastructure that Verisign has to maintain to handle the stupid system of polling by registrars who circle like vultures waiting for names to drop.

In other words, those of us who consume domain names in the "normal" way, i.e. we use 'em for long terms, appear to be carrying an enormous burden (measured in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars per year in inflated registry fees) to support the ICANN allowed, if not ICANN created, speculative fever.

And yet, those of us who pay this tab get no vote in ICANN and simply get to pay the bill every year, year-in/year-out.

To the degree that my speculations (pun intended) are accurate, ICANN and its registry system are building up an enormous pool of money that one could claim has been dragged out of domain name buyers because ICANN is a combination in restraint of trade that can't be bypassed because ICANN occupies a monopoly position that is buttressed by a very shadowy governmental presence.

It is appalling to be reminded, once again, of how badly ICANN has damaged the internet.  Rather than creating a domain name system that is rich in competition and innovation we find, after over half a decade of ICANN blundering, that the domain name system marketplace is devoid of real competition except among registries and even there the only real difference is price.  Rather than low prices that reflect underlying economies of scale we see a system that grossly subsidizes speculators out of the pockets of normal internet users to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars every year.  Under ICANN's hand innovative domain name providers have been arbitrarily denied the right to go into business and those who do get ICANN's blessing are required to follow rules that subordinate user and business choice to the desires of ICANN's "stakeholders" and to pay large fees to support ICANN's ever growing bureaucracy.  And ICANN created FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is used to besmirch those who suggest that ICANN's approach is as empty as the Emperor's fabled wardrobe.

Update: I've been wondering whether a decimal point has been slipped and that the real number is 6% rather then 0.6%.  That is more consistent with a steady-state of roughly 40 to 50 million names in .com.

But even if the number is 6% that still means that to 420,000 paying registrations are supporting the cost of 6,580,000 freeloading speculative transactions.  That's still an egregious subsidy being paid by normal domain name users.

Posted by mikki at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chinese Net Routes Around Political Stonewalling:


According to this BBC story,
the Chinse government got tired of waiting for ICANN to approve top level domains in non-Roman characters
and rolled their own for use in China, using a combination of client-side software, domain name translation by ISPs, and other hacks to make it work.

With 110 million people online, China is already the second largest net-using nation on Earth.

Big push for Chinese net domains,
By Mark Ward,
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

So the legendary recalcitrance of ICANN to move ahead with top level domains
has led to the world's largest country going ahead anyway, in order to promote their domestic economy.

Chinese domain names will no doubt occasionally leak out of China, e.g., on business cards
and in signatures of electronic mail messages, leading to confusion.
But that's a relatively small risk compared to a major nation being impeded in its use of the Internet.
If you see domain names ending in
.zhongguo, .gongsi, or .wangluo in Chinese characters, you're probably seeing such a leak.
(I take the first of these names to be the Chinese name for China; can someone tell me what the other two are?)
Note that .zhongguo.cn, .gongsi.cn, and .wangluo.cn already exist under the .CN top level domain,
so if you see those, you're not seeing a leak.

Commercial companies may want to consider that if they don't deliver what the customers want,
somebody else probably will, and on the Internet the somebody else may be in a different company
in a different legal regime that won't be impressed by patent thickets or trademarks.

-jsq

Posted by mikki at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN Capitulates:

In the face of nearly unanimous opposition from the ICANN "constituencies," the ICANN Board has approved settlement with VeriSign. VeriSign (which had sued ICANN when ICANN forced it to shutter the SiteFinder disservice), learns that lawsuits lead to better contracts (quasi-perpetual hold on .com, complete with datamining and price raises); the domain name registrars and other ICANN participants learn that cooperative behavior is less productive than lawsuits; and the rest of us learn that unless we can foot the bill for lawyers of our own, our voice in the ICANN "policy development process" is meaningless. My tremendous respect for the directors who voted against the settlement.

Posted by mikki at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Day Which Will Live in Infamy: ICANN Board Approves VeriSign Settlement:


ICANN's Board voted to accept the latest settlement proposal by a vote of 9 to 5: "Today, ICANN's Board of Directors approved, by a majority vote, a set of agreements settling a long time dispute between ICANN and VeriSign, the registry operator for the .COM registry. These settlement documents include a new registry agreement relating to the operation of the .COM registry..." more...

Posted by mikki at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No IANA Reports on .CX, .GS, or .TK:


Over the last six months, ICANN has approved the redelegation of .CX (Christmas Islands), .GS (South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands), .TK (Tokelau). The IANA reports on the redelegations, however, are nowhere to be found, which leads one to wonder on what information is ICANN redelegating ccTLDs? The last time I blogged about this, I was told privately by ICANN Staff that the problem with the IANA reports, whatever it was, had been corrected. Hmmmm.

Posted by mikki at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN Is Never Wrong:


If you've been following the practical problems of The Practical Nomad in getting an Independent Review out of ICANN, you'll want to read the latest salvo from ICANN's General Counsel. Brief background: At the recent ICANN Public Forum in Vancouver, ICANN's Board Chair Vint Cerf pledged to a patient yet dogged Edward Hasbrouck that "GENERAL COUNSEL IS PREPARED TO PROVIDE YOU WITH THE DETAILS OF HOW TO GO ABOUT THIS PROCEDURE [AN INDEPENDENT REVIEW]."

At the ICANN Board meeting the following day,

ICANN's Counsel read a letter to Mr. Hasbrouck stating "PLEASE PROVIDE

US WITH YOUR FORMAL IRP REQUEST IN WRITING, AND WE WILL FORWARD YOUR

REQUEST TO THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR DISPUTE RESOLUTION, WHICH ICANN

HAS DESIGNATED TO PROVIDE INDEPENDENT REVIEW SERVICES IN ACCORDANCE

WITH THE BYLAWS." (emphasis added). Mr. Hasbrouck immediately did so,

agreeing (under protest) to ICANN's financial preconditions and

attaching his previous Independent Review request from months earlier.

ICANN's official response is truly mind-boggling.

If you follow ICANN closely, you really ought to read it. It has

enormous impact on the entire ICANN community. As background, remember

that the IRP provided by the ICANN Bylaws provides that "Any person materially affected by a decision

or action by the Board that he or she asserts is inconsistent with the

Articles of Incorporation or Bylaws may submit a request for independent

review of that decision or action."

In its response to Mr. Hasbrouck, ICANN takes the unreasonably narrow

view that only Board "resolutions" are reviewable by Independent

Review. It further claims that ICANN's operating "procedures" are not

reviewable, even when they were necessary precursors to ICANN Board

actions or followed directly from such actions. Finally, and most

troublesome of all, ICANN claims that Staff

actions that are inconsistent with, or even in direct violation of,

ICANN's Bylaws are never reviewable, even when those Staff actions

informed or followed from Board decision-making.

To top off

ICANN's insult to what remains of its own integrity, ICANN declines to

forward Mr. Hasbrouck's request to an Independent Review panel, despite

the public promises it made to him in Vancouver and Mr. Hasbrouck's

agreement to ICANN's preconditions. Instead, ICANN insists that Mr.

Hasbrouck redraft his request and resubmit it in a legalistic format

that is specified nowhere on ICANN's website.

We all need to

stand on the side of Edward Hasbrouck on this issue. Whether he's right

or wrong on his ultimate claim matters less than the precedent ICANN

will set by construing its Independent Review provisions as reviewable

of almost nothing.

Posted by mikki at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First Thoughts on ICANN's "Whois" Report:

I just glanced through ICANN's Whois Report - or more properly it's Preliminary
task force report on the purpose of Whois and of the Whois contacts.

Much seems centered around two different points of view of the purpose of
whois data.

But I notice a very glaring omission in both points of view:  Neither
defines who is the intended beneficiary of this violation of privacy.

Both formulations are ambiguous with regards to the intended beneficiary of
the information.  Is the beneficiary intended to be the owner of the domain
in the sense that publication allows the owner to learn more quickly that
something might be awry?  Or is the intended beneficiary meant to be the
person who feels somehow wronged or harmed by the actions of the domain name
owner?

How can one grant any validity to this report if it can not define the
intended beneficiary of this highly intrusive, privacy-busting, heavy-handed,
one-sided regulation of internet activity?

This document makes many claims that the destruction of privacy would create
some benefits to certain groups.  But privacy is a balancing of equities
and this document merely piles up anecdotal benefits without engaging in a
principled weighing of the competing equities.

Nor does the document address any measures to remediate the intrusion -
measures such as requiring those who wish to view whois to state, in writing on
a permanent record, the grounds and facts that create a need to view the
information, such as requiring that those who view whois to identify themselves
into a permanent record and authenticate that identity, such as publishing
statistics about how many times each viewer has examined whois, etc etc.

And missing from the voices in the document are the victims - the people
whose personal privacy is penetrated and whose families and lives could be, and
have been, harmed and endangered by ICANN's policies.  ICANN long ago
excluded the voice of the public.  But without that voice this document
must be considered vacuous, the product of systemic bias, and as nothing more
than an instance of Benjamin Franklin's two wolves and a lamb voting on what to
have for lunch.

The document makes claims based on some sort of notion of inertia deriving
from "historical uses" of whois.  I am one of those people who
have been part of the internet since the early 1970's.  My name is to be
found in many of the early versions of whois - such as the ARPAnet directories
from that era.  And I can state from my own experience that the original
purpose of such publications was a quasi-private roster of friends in a small
club and not a directory that was intended to be open to public access.  In
other words, the so-called history mentioned in the report is nothing more than
hearsay, gossip, and fantasy that diverges from the reality experienced by those
of us who were actually there.

On a minor note - the formatting of the document, in a word, sucketh. 
The business, registrar, ISP, and intellectual property constituency statements
are all headed by text in grand 20+pt font while the non-commercials are hidden
under a 12 point header that is lost in the numbering system.

As a whole, the document is worthless.  Only the Non-Commercial
constituency approaches the questions based on a principled analysis; the other
groups are simply making self-aggrandizing assertions.

I wonder - how many companies of the business constituency, lawyers of the
intellectual property constituency, and members of the other constituencies
would be willing to put their personal contact information and their company and
law-firm org-charts, and phone and address directories, up for anonymous public
browsing 24x7?  My guess is that the number would closely approximate
zero.  Yet these same people, who most likely stamp every one of their
company directories with non-disclosure labels, are the most willing to condemn
internet users to a hell that they themselves are not willing to endure.

Posted by mikki at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kieren McCarthy on the Import of 2005:


2005:The year the US government undermined the Internet: "On 28 July 2005 at a special [ICANN] board meeting ....consciously and for the first time, ICANN used a US

government-provided reason to turn over Kazakhstan's internet ownership

to a government owned and run association without requiring consent

from the existing owners. The previous owners, KazNIC, had been created

from the country's Internet community...."

Posted by mikki at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Revisiting the idea (the very stupid idea) of sponsored top level domains:

ICANN loves "sponsored" top level domains.  It has given us
TLDs for co-ops, Catalonian speakers, "professionals" (except for the
world's oldest profession), travel businesses, etc.

That world of "sponsored" TLDs is so exciting and vibrant! 
And so useful too!

So in a moment of unrestrained excitement over sponsored TLDs, I have come up
with some ideas for new sponsored TLDs.

I'll begin with ".family".  And by this I don't mean
some neutered and sterile Disneyesque kind of family.  Appropriate
residents under my .family would present content describing how families
are created, including biological details, and methods for keeping control of
family size (which would, of course, include those providing abortion services.)

And then I'd add ".christian" (and other TLDs for other
major religions.)  As sponsor I'd be able to say who is worthy to have a
name under .christian and who is not.  For starters, I'd make sure
that the list of excluded names includes "Robertson",
"Dobson", "Falwell" - they would be vectored over to the .ElmerGantry
TLD.

And then there's ".fruitcake".  This TLD would give
free names to those who claim to have been kidnapped by space aliens, 
practice feline phrenology, or believe that "intelligent
design" should be taught in schools.

What is ICANN's policy about "sponsored" TLDs doing to the
internet?  The best way to answer is to draw a parallel:  What ICANN
is doing to the internet is similar to what would have happened had some 16th
century ICANN forced Gutenburg to use his new printing press to print nothing
but Sharper Image catalogues and Wal Mart flyers.

Posted by mikki at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But wait a minute! Isn't ICANN supposed to be dealing with the technical management of the Internet, which obviously includes security? Am I missing something?

9/11 Commissioners Criticize Lack of Cybersecurity Progress...:


9/11 Commissioners Criticize Lack of Cybersecurity Progress

Posted by mikki at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN: ALAC meets the ICANN Board:

For three years, I've been a member of ICANN's "Interim" At-Large Advisory Committee, ALAC. At this Vancouver meeting, for the first time, the ICANN Board met with us, and Bret captured it on mp3 for podcast.

ALAC criticized ICANN's proposed settlement with Verisign, and then spoke about the problems with the current structure for at-large participation.

See, if you're an individual interested in the management of domain names and Internet infrastructure, you can't participate directly in ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Instead, you have to form an organization to apply to ALAC for recognition as an "at-large structure"; gather with other such structures to form a "regional at-large organization"; and as a RALO, elect members to the advisory committee that can make statements it's not clear anyone listens to. Although individual board members assured us that they do listen to ALAC statements, it's not a terribly attractive prospect for individuals or organizations looking to deploy scarce time and resources.

ICANN, however, has been using the ALAC to say that it offers representation to individual Internet users. If it wants to claim public support, it must offer the public a more meaningful opportunity for participation. ALAC, as currently structured, is not that public voice. As I said to the Board, I would rather see ALAC disbanded than used as this type of window-dressing. Better still would be to restructure so that the Internet-using public had a real role in ICANN process.

Update: Susan Crawford was listening, and as a newly-selected member of ICANN's Board, will be in a position to help untangle the knots.

Posted by mikki at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lawsuits Filed Against ICANN-VeriSign Settlement:


The new organization called Coalition for ICANN Transparency (CFIT) has filed a lawsuit against ICANN and VeriSign in order to stop implementation of the proposed .com registry agreement. According to its description, "CFIT is a not-for-profit Delaware corporation based in Washington, D.C. CFIT’s supporters include individuals, organizations, institutions and companies who are committed to the core principles on which ICANN, the internet governing body is founded."

Posted by mikki at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Top News Article | Reuters.com:


AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch technology company has breathed life into a project to rid the Internet of suffixes such as .com, and instead offer single names which can be countries, company names or fantasy words.

Such a system, which enables countries, individuals and firms to have a Web address which consists of a single name, offers flexibility and is language and character independent.

"The plan is to offer names in any character set," said Erik Seeboldt, managing director of Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot.

UnifiedRoot offers practically unlimited numbers of suffixes, unlike the short list of suffixes currently in use. Its offer is different from other "alternative root" providers such as New.net which offers to register names in front of a small range of new suffixes, such as .club and .law.

"We've already had thousands of registrations in a single day," said Seeboldt after the official opening of his 100-strong company which has installed 13 Internet domain name system (DNS) root servers on four continents.

Dutch airport Schiphol is one of the early customers. Registering a name costs $1,000 plus an annual fee of $240. Companies can then invent additional Web site addresses in front of their top-level domain (TLD) name, such as flights.schiphol or parking.schiphol.

Critics argue alternative root companies such as UnifiedRoot introduce ambiguity because they bring a new set of traffic rules to the Web which are, certainly in the beginning, only recognized by a limited number of computers around the world.

"Those who claim to be able to add new 'suffixes' or 'TLDs' are generally pirates or con-men with something to sell," said Paul Vixie, who sits in several committees of the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) with day-to-day control of the Web, on his CircleID blog.

WELCOME

Others are more welcoming.

"The existence of alternate roots, and the possibility of new ones, provides a useful competitive check on ICANN," said Jon Weinberg, a member of ICANNwatch which keeps a critical eye on ICANN.    Continued ...

Posted by mikki at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BS?:

Recently ICANN's
Chairman was thus quoted:

Q: Critics say the U.S. government basically controls the Internet.

A: That's bulls—t. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to say that to reporters, but that's just a very bad misunderstanding. Ninety-nine percent of the Internet is in private hands. If you've got a computer at home, and a cable box or DSL line, you own a piece of the Internet. Most of the Internet is owned by the private sector, by businesses, by ISPs, by individuals, by governments—well, that's not [the] private sector, but it's not ICANN either and it's not the United States.

Rubbish.

The Internet is like the sea - the vast bulk is not subject to any particular
authority.

However like the seas, the Internet has its Panama and its Suez; the internet
has its Molucca Straits.

ICANN stands astride the naming systems of the internet just as Panama,
Egypt, and Indonesia stand over the oceans' most critical shipping lanes.

ICANN sprung from the loins of United States Department of Commerce. 
The DoC frequently denies its role as parent, but it has most overtly and
forcefully confirmed ICANN's dependency on, and subservience to, the United
States.

Nothing happens at the top layer of the internet's naming system without
ICANN approval.  And nothing happens in ICANN that is not subject to the
advice and consent of the United States Department of Commerce.

The Department of Commerce/ICANN system has suppressed competition, has cost
consumers of domain names billions of dollars, and has obstructed innovation
across the entire internet.  ICANN has destroyed the internet end-to-end
principle by forcing decisions about top level domains to flow through ICANN's
expensive and arbitrary procedures.

So for ICANN's chairman to imply that the US government is not using ICANN to
control a critical part of the internet is an exercise in misdirection and is,
ultimately, untrue.

And to add insult to injury, ICANN has adopted rules, most notably the
privacy-busting WHOIS and the trademark-uber-alles UDRP that reach out and
impose a supra national law on all of those end-user "personal"
computers that ICANN's chairman claims are not the property of the US or under
the control of ICANN.  If the US or ICANN do not have internet-wide powers,
then why are we users of the internet forced to list our names, addresses, and
other information in the WHOIS database and why are we forced to submit to
ICANN's UDRP?

Posted by mikki at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whither .ARPA?:


From the Proposed ICANN-Verisign Root Server Management Transition Agreement: "ICANN

and VeriSign agree that they shall:... (c)

Work

together to establish a timetable for the completion of the

transition to ICANN of the coordination and management of the ARPA

TLD...in particular to enable ICANN to edit,

sign and publish the...ARPA zone[] commencing in 2005 and

completing by 2006."

Bill Manning, former head of the IANA and one of the operators of the B Root, posting to the ICANN Comment Forum: "A

final point is the hijacking of the .ARPA domain from the IAB. It is

notclear to me which party incalculated this component into the

agreements (I have my ideas) but theft of the management of this domain

without the approval of the IAB and the US DoC is ... theft."

Posted by mikki at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Internet Users Lose Big:

There is a lot of hoopla about the US
"winning" at the WSIS meeting.

While it may be true that the US browbeat its way to what it wanted, the
result is a stunning defeat for the interests of users of the internet.

There exists no body today that is watching over the internet to ensure that
it continues to operate.

ICANN does not do that, and the WSIS participants were not asking to do it
either.

The fact is: The internet remains in at risk.

There is no body that is responsible to the public that oversees the
operation of critical core resources of the internet to ensure that packets
traverse the net from source IP address to destination IP address with dispatch
and reasonable (but not guaranteed) reliability.

There is no body that is responsible to the public that oversees the
operation of the upper tier of DNS servers to ensure that domain name queries
are answered quickly, accurately, reliably, and without preference for, or prejudice
against, anyone.

The only thing that the United States "won" was a continuation of
the status quo, which is to say ICANN will continue as almost nothing more than
a body that regulates business practices of those who sell domain names.

So, if, or rather when, a network-Katrina hits the internet, we can blame the
folks in the US government who confound business regulation with technical
oversight.

The community of internet users requires more from internet governance than
this.

Posted by mikki at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More on That .COM Metadata:


Karl Auerbach has his own take on the value of the .COM metadata: "The contract gives Versign the right to develop a real-time data mining feed

of a value that can not be easily overestimated.  Verisign, for example,

can develop marketing data about the effectiveness of URL's in TV advertisements

during sports games while the game is still in progress.  The data mining

ability now granted to Verisign by ICANN will allow Verisign to recognize almost

instantly 'what's hot and what's not'.  Advertisers and marketers

are willing to pay big bucks for this kind of information.  It's not only a

potential gold mine for Verisign but it's also a large step in the

transformation of the internet into nothing but a giant advertisement and

internet users into nothing but consumers. But wait, there's more!...."

For even more on this, I talk about the same contract provision in IPR55 (yesterday's podcast).

Posted by mikki at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN+Verisign == Fishy * 3:

There's something very fishy about the new ICANN-Versign
Agreements: internet users get scrod
three different ways.

First we get scrod in the pocketbook.  Even though we get no say
in either ICANN or in this contract, we, the community of internet users, are
going to have to pay higher domain name fees.  The new built-in rate of
inflation will compound at 7% per year on top of an already absurdly high base.

Second we get scrod in the stockroom.  The new contract gives
Verisign the explicit green light to data mine the domain name queries that hit
its servers.

You might be thinking - huh, data mining?  What you probably do not
realize is that every time you enter a URL into a web browser, send an e-mail,
or make a VOIP phone call the entire domain name part of the address goes
into DNS and very frequently makes it all the way to Verisign's servers. 
The contract lets Verisign capture those domain names and your source IP address
so that Verisign can know that you have been visiting the website of www.hampsters_n_ductape.com
every night after the kids have gone to bed.

(Not every query will go to Verisign's servers - many will be handled by
local caches in resolvers near the users.  But with enough samples, and on
the internet samples can accumulate very quickly, Verisign will be able to use
statistical methods to generate rather revealing profiles of trends in mass and,
with more work, preferences of individuals.)

The contract gives Versign the right to develop a real-time data mining feed
of a value that can not be easily overestimated.  Verisign, for example,
can develop marketing data about the effectiveness of URL's in TV advertisements
during sports games while the game is still in progress.  The data mining
ability now granted to Verisign by ICANN will allow Verisign to recognize almost
instantly "what's hot and what's not".  Advertisers and marketers
are willing to pay big bucks for this kind of information.  It's not only a
potential gold mine for Verisign but it's also a large step in the
transformation of the internet into nothing but a giant advertisement and
internet users into nothing but consumers.

But wait, there's more!  The real-time data mining capability that ICANN
is giving to Verisign can also be used by governmental reconnaissance
agencies.  The flow of domain name queries is a kind of "chatter"
which one can blend with other data sources to construct interesting
intelligence.  And whether intelligence is considered valuable very much
depends on whether you are the observer or the observed.

And third, we get scrod in the waiting room.  The new agreement
imposes a plethora of service level obligations on Verisign for the benefit of
domain name registrars and intellectual property lawyers digging through the
privacy-busting whois.  But the agreement imposes no similar service
obligations on Verisign to provide accurate and prompt performance of the
primary job of the domain name system - domain name queries.  In other
words, the contract subordinates the thing that internet users need - prompt and
accurate domain name resolution - and elevates secondary concerns.  The
message is clear - ICANN has obligated Verisign to provide first class service
to registrars and intellectual property lawyers while sending the interests of
internet users into steerage.

To paraphrase Grouch Marx from Cocoanuts: "You can have any kind of a
contract you want.  You can even get scrod.  Oh, how you can get
scrod."

Posted by mikki at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Who Really Installs New Top Level Domains?: "

This morning Bret Fausett wrote a note that concerned the question whether there is US Government involvement in the choice to deploy .xxx. Bret's points are well taken but I believe they reflect the surface and not the substance.

It may be true that the decisions are independent, but what about the actions that transform those decisions into actual changes in the root zone file? Is that sequence of actions performed independent of the USG?

To put it another way, the question is whether the USG is in a position to approve, reject, or modify ICANN's decisions?

We have seen evidence that the USG is completely willing and able to bypass ICANN: A couple of years ago the United States Government ignored ICANN when the USG had the root zone file modified to reflect the USG's redelegation of the .us ccTLD.

Thus we have smoke - is there fire? It seems that we need to dig deeper to find the answer.

In the list of principles I wrote about the other day I listed this principle: 'The first step towards governance is a clear understanding of what it is that needs to be governed and what the goals of that governance are.'

So lets ask, what is really the ultimate step of adding a TLD?

More properly we should ask: whose fingers are they that will enter the letters 'xxx' into the file or database that constitutes the root zone file?

Way back in 2003 ICANN published it's CRADA report. (Go here for my comments on that report.)

That report describes the then existing mechanism through which TLDs are added to the root zone file. It is a process in which the USG is directly involved. And the body that ultimately makes the changes to the file is Verisign. Here's is how the CRADA describes this process:

In the current implementation, root-zone change requests from top-level domain (TLD) operators are received by ICANN, which is responsible for reviewing the appropriateness of these requests as part of its performance of the IANA function. Once their appropriateness is verified, ICANN sends these requests to the United States Department of Commerce for approval; these approvals are then transmitted to VeriSign, which makes the changes as requested by ICANN and approved by the Commerce Department.

That's what it was in 2003. I am not aware that the change suggested in the CRADA (to shift Verisign's role to ICANN [or IANA]) has ever actually been implemented.

But even if the CRADA change were to be implemented, the only thing that shifts is the responsibility for making the final 'edits' from Verisign to ICANN. Here is the important part: the loop in which the USG must approve (which implies the power to reject) TLD changes remains with the USG.

It appears to me, backed by the language of ICANN and the US Government, that the USG retains a significant authority the addition, removal, and alteration (and thus redelegation) of Top Level Domains. To my mind the only open question is whether the the USG is willing and able to act in this process independently of a change request from ICANN (and the .us situation suggests that the USG is willing and able.)

(Via CaveBear Blog.)

Posted by mikki at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time for Euthanasia: "

ICANN once had a vibrant public sector. But that period ended several years ago when meaningful public participation in ICANN was eliminated during a process that ICANN, in its best NewSpeak, called 'reform.'

Today ICANN's palace eunuch, the 'interim' ALAC, sent forth it latest missive. It is a pathetic document devoid of content yet filled with phrases of submission and dependency.

ICANN's purpose is to serve the public, the community of internet users. Yet ICANN's ALAC, and much less ICANN itself, remembers ICANN's purpose and ICANN's promises.

ICANN's ALAC was crippled at at its conception. We of the community of internet users have patiently stood aside hoping that perhaps we would be proved wrong and that the ALAC might actually grow into something of value. During this time ICANN plied the ALAC with money and staff support. Attempts were made to froth-up up membership; but few signed on.

The ALAC was given a fair chance to succeed. But it has not done so.

It is time to write off ICANN's ALAC as the failure it is.

(Via CaveBear Blog.)

Posted by mikki at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN's Directors Once Again Shirk Their Responsbilities: "

I see that ICANN's Board approved several resolutions concerning IP address allocations.

Among these resolutions was one in which ICANN's Board unanimously adopted an 'IPv4 Global Allocation Policy'.

IP address allocation policy is the most crucial matter ever to come before ICANN's board. IP addresses are the fuel on which the internet runs. Without an IP address a person or computer is simply not part of the internet. A policy that says who can get addresses and under what terms has a breathtaking impact on the shape of future internet growth. Such a policy will have a significant impact on what enterprises survive and what enterprises fail. The economic and social ramifications of IP address policy vastly overshadow the effects of ICANN's domain name policies.

Any policy regarding IP address allocation, therefore, ought to be made only with the greatest degree of lucidity and with the greatest attention to its technical, economic, and social effects.

Unfortunately, once again, ICANN fiddled and danced - and made jokes - and avoided the difficult, but necessary, work of actually engaging with the issues of this extremely important matter.

The resolution adopting this policy asserts the following 'facts':

'the Board has considered the public comments that were submitted to the forum'

[the Board] 'determined that existing procedures adequately address the issues that were raised

[N]o objection was raised by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee or other ICANN advisory bodies

There were four comments made on this policy during its comment period. All of these comments cited substantial concrete concerns about fundamental aspects of the policy.

ICANN has never responded to any of these comments. There is no reason to believe that ICANN's Board or any board member is even aware of those comments.

I challenge ICANN to demonstrate that any board member ever read these comments, much less considered them when making his or her decision on the IPv4 address policy.

As for the board's assertion that 'existing procedures adequately address the issues that were raised'. Hogwash. There is no indication that the board or any of its members actually reached this conclusion except by being led to it by the nose by 'staff'. And the assertion is also factually incorrect. Not one of the concerns raised is covered by any existing procedures.

And finally - as for objections by the so-called 'Security and Stability Advisory Committee': Because that committee operates in total secrecy how can anyone tell what that committee says or does?

Once more we have the members of ICANN's board acting as nothing more than mindless monkeys who respond with affirmative noises to whatever is put in front of them.

There is no indication that any ICANN Board member actually performed his or her duty to make an independent and informed judgment on what is, in truth the most critical, and in fact the only truly technical, matter ever to come before ICANN: IP address allocation policy.

ICANN has many flaws, but perhaps its greatest flaw is that the members of its Board of Directors again and again and again insult the internet community and violate their duties by refusing to take the time to try to comprehend and understand the issues put before them and refusing to make their own independent decisions.

ICANN's Board, both as a body and as individuals, has demonstrated once again that even when compared to the extremely lax standards of the past board's of Enron, Tyco, and MCI/Worldcom, ICANN's board and its members comes out gravely wanting.

ICANN's directors should be ashamed of themselves. Not even one director has indicated that he or she is treating his or her role with the kind of attention and respect that the community of internet users deserves and which the law requires.

(Via CaveBear Blog.)

Posted by mikki at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Internet Governance Project Proposes ICANN Reforms: "An academic group studying Internet governance has released a report calling for structural changes in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The paper calls for clear limitations on ICANN's role, putting ICANN under the purview of an international body instead of the U.S. government, and restoring elections for seats on ICANN's board. CDT believes continued reform of ICANN is necessary, but remains seriously concerned about greater intergovernmental or UN control of Internet naming and numbering."

(Via Center for Democracy and Technology.)

Posted by mikki at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN ".travel" Scandal (Ernest Miller): "

Many have forgotten about the procedural and regulatory abomination that is ICANN. But the folks at ICANN Watch have not, and they report yet another scandal regarding domain names. In this case, the bogus procedures that have allowed the international airline cartel (IATA) to take over the '.travel' domain by proxy (ICANN reveals '.travel' sponsor is a front).

Read the whole thing and wonder why ICANN is still in charge of the domain name system.

(Via Copyfight.)

Posted by mikki at 02:33 PM | Permalink

ICANN Versus the College of Cardinals - Which Is More Opaque and Closed?: "

A few years ago I suggested that we know more about how the college of cardinals selects a new pope than we know about how ICANN makes its decisions. (My suggestion was picked up and repeated by Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts.)

It is sad when anyone passes. And the loss of a major world figure, particularly one with a strong sense of ethics and morality (even if we individually may differ on certain specific issues) is not a matter to be taken lightly.

Nevertheless, such things do happen. We now have an opportunity to put my claim to the test.

ICANN is meeting in Argentina this week. If anything ICANN has become even more opaque and closed than it was back in year 2000 when I first made the comparison between the selection of a new pope and ICANN's opaque and closed processes.

Perhaps ICANN can demonstrate that it can leap over the exceedingly low hurdle of being more open and transparent than the college of cardinals.

But the outlook is poor.

There is already reason to believe that ICANN won't be successful in that effort. Already it has been reported that a major amount of time was spent, or rather wasted, trying to seal a meeting that is supposed to be open to public inspection, if not to public participation.

The internet is not governed by a Pope and ICANN is not a College of Cardinals. We the community of internet users deserve better than the secrecy and unaccountability that ICANN has been feeding us ever since it was formed.

(Via CaveBear Blog.)

Posted by mikki at 09:23 AM | Permalink

I notice how much energy the US Government is expending in order to endorse and support relatively open and public elections in Iraq despite the potential that people who oppose the status quo government might be elected.

By comparison I note how little energy the US Government (via the US Department of Commerce and its sub-agency NTIA) have expended to endorse and support the restoration of relatively open and public elections in NTIA's foster child, ICANN.

There are a lot of really scary people - people who might have more than a passing relationship with the kind of nasty folks who shoot guns, fire RPG's, and launch mortar rounds into their opponents or innocents - who could win in Iraq. Yet the US and Iraq are moving forward. (We all might want to pause for a moment this weekend and launch into the luminiferous ether a thought of peace and good will with a hope for a stable outcome to the election.)

ICANN, with the backing of the US Government, dropped public elections. The unstated reason was that they were afraid that more people like myself or Andy Mueller-Maguhn might be elected. (There is little doubt in my mind that I would have been re-elected had ICANN permitted an election.)

I guess that in the world of ICANN and the US Department of Commerce, the chance that Andy Mueller-Maguhn or I might be re-elected to ICANN is more to be feared than the chance that some unsavory folks might be elected in Iraq.

It is pretty obvious that ICANN's "reformed" board selection process has resulted in exactly what it was intended to do: fill the Board of Directors with quiet timid creatures who are afraid to ask questions, afraid to demand accountability, afraid to focus ICANN, afraid to impose onto ICANN a clear job description, and afraid hold ICANN to that description. The individual directors of ICANN have made themselves so insignificant that it is hard to remember who they are.

ICANN is in at least as much need of publicly elected board members as Iraq is in need of a publicly elected government.

Posted by mikki at 07:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Declan McCullugh's list

http://news.com.com/ICANN+partying+like+its+1999/2010-1071_3-5495758.html

ICANN partying like it's 1999
December 20, 2004, 4:00 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh

It's been five years since Internet users had to worry about paying an extra $1 or so annual fee--akin to a tax--for each .com, .net or .org domain name they own.

Now the international organization that oversees domain names has rediscovered the idea. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) believes it needs a fatter budget funded by domain name fees--and plans to start charging domain name owners in a process that will begin next year.

Starting sometime in 2005, owners of .net domain names will have to pay a 75-cent additional annual fee to ICANN. There's nothing stopping ICANN from upping the levy in the future, and its executives have indicated that other top-level domains will be targeted as well.

Before deciding to play tax collector, though, ICANN should consider what happened back in 1999 that caused it to concoct and then abandon the idea.

[...remainder snipped...]
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Posted by mikki at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Karl Auerbach

Recently Susan Crawford in her blog wrote a note entitled "Why Internet Governance Is (or Isn't) Like Climate Change".

That note indirectly suggests the question - "What exactly about the internet is in need of governance?" (Or, to put it the other way around, "What parts of the internet are those that can't be handled by private enterprise left to operate in a competitive system under the typical legal constraints applicable to businesses in general?")

There is no doubt that ICANN represents an extension of governmental types of powers on a far more broad scope than is justified - ICANN is a poster child of the kind of excessively intrusive, overly expensive, and innovation crushing bureaucracy that has evolved in the half century since the end of WW-II.

And there is justifiable fear that the current WGIG efforts under the auspices of the UN will expand and replicate than kind of regulatory system rather than restrain it.

So Susan's question is well posed.

And I believe the answer to her question is this: Yes, there are aspects of the internet that require and are amenable to limited forms of governance.

In a note, "Governing the Internet, A Functional Approach", that I submitted to a meeting at the ITU in early 2004 I advocated the idea of finding specific, concrete, and well defined aspects of the internet that are in need of oversight.

In that paper I discussed the following areas as those that are in need of governance: (For more detail please see the original paper.)

1. A system of IP address allocation that meshes well with the IP packet routing systems. (Note: in this paper, I am referring only to unicast IP addresses. There are other forms of IP addresses, such as multicast IP addresses, that are outside the scope of this paper.)

2. A system of inter-carrier/inter-ISP traffic exchange in which end users can obtain usable assurances that designated traffic flows will achieve specified levels of service. (Note that I am using the word "assurance". I use this word to mean something less than a hard "guarantee.")

3. A system of allocation of protocol numbers and other similar identifiers.

4. The responsible and accountable oversight of a suite of Domain Name System (DNS) root servers.

5. The management of the DNS root zone file, including the clerical task of preparing the root zone file for distribution to the root servers and the task of developing and applying policies to determine which new top-level domains will be allowed entry into the root zone.

Areas 1, 2, and 4 are not are being actively overseen by ICANN. Item 3 is largely an administrative task performed by ICANN on behalf of the IETF. And it is debatable whether ICANN is adequately dealing with area 5.

For quite some time it has been my opinion that the way we should approach internet governance is to build small and limited bodies of governance. Each body would have one, and only one, area of responsibility. And each would have authority and responsibilities that are shrink-wrapped to precisely what is needed to do the needed task and no more. In addition, each such body would have a finite lifespan of only a few years; each body would cease to exist unless the community of internet users or community of nations found that body to be useful and appropriate to its designated purpose.

This is an approach that is nearly the opposite of ICANN's ever changing amoeba-like structures and its amorphous and rapidly ramifying scope of power and authority. What I am suggesting are several surgically shaped bodies, of fixed scope and authority, subject to taught reins of accountability, that are each imbued with a the minimum degree of discretionary powers needed to accomplish a specific task.

I first published my list of topics that ought to be the initial areas of internet oversight in June of 2002. Except for the addition of matters concerning the ability of users to obtain cross-ISP service's that list has not grown. This fact gives me confidence that my list is an appropriate and viable answer to Susan Crawford's question.

Posted by mikki at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Karl Auerbach

Ross Rader in his blog wrote an item "Om misses the boat"

I agree with much of it - it is true that ICANN is responding to some proposals for top level domains, that is, if "some" is measured as 9 out of about 55 applications - about 16%.

I disagree when Ross says "Sometimes these proposals are solid enough to get ICANN's blessing."

Why should ICANN care about the business solidity of a proposal? Why should ICANN care whether a TLD offering will survive as a business or fail and its assets fall into receivership?

It is improper for ICANN to impose business qualifications on those who wish to try their hand at running a domain name business. For ICANN to make such conditions is to restrain trade.

ICANN can not articulate any rational technical basis for those business conditions it imposes. That is because there is none.

In other words, ICANN is engaged in nothing more than naked and unjustified economic, business, and social engineering.

Is this legal? I am not enough of an expert to know whether it is legal or not within the US. If it is then US law is flawed. As for the question of legality in other countries, that is a question for those in those other countries to ask.

ICANN's restraint of trade has resulted in a moribund and effectively closed marketplace of DNS registry/Top-Level-Domain providers. As in the case of all such monopolies the result has been a a failure of innovation of products and a system that protects inflated prices. In both cases the community of internet users are the losers.

ICANN should ask at most two questions of those who wish to run new TLDs:

1. Will the applicant adhere to internet standards?

2. Will the applicant refrain from using its position to mount an attack on the infrastructure or users of the net?

Perhaps ICANN could insist that an applicant obtain a letter from an independent business auditor indicating that the applicant has appropriate and adequate business asset protection practices so that should the applicant's business fail there will be enough pieces left around for the customers or a receiver to resurrect the operation and keep the portfolio of names in play.

Posted by mikki at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So what's ICANN doing with our money? From Bret Fausett

Approved Board Resolutions for 20 December 2004: "The Board approved these resolutions by a vote of 8-1, with an abstention by Mouhamet Diop."

This is where my 75 cents is going? What other charitable contributions does ICANN plan to make? Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least a half dozen similarly worthy causes. This really strikes me as wrong.

My take is that ICANN is making a voluntary, chartitable contribution to a quasi-government agency discussing things outside ICANN's core mission. If ICANN has $100,000 to drop on this, then it can fund At Large election of directors or lower the fees charged to registries and registrars (and hence domain name registrants). This is a bad development and even worse as precedent.

Posted by mikki at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Circle ID

ICANN's latest announcement of preliminary approval for two new top level domains (.mobi and .jobs) and it's recently ended meetings in Cape Town, South Africa, have sparked off renewed discussions for the introduction of new TLDs -- more specifically, the expansion of sponsored and generic top level domains (TLDs). The following is a collection of recent commentaries made by both technical and non-technical members of the community with regards to the expansion of the domain name space. To... [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Karl Auerbach

Remember how I've been harping on the reckless actions of the US Department of Commerce's NTIA and ICANN in allowing the removal of 15% of IPv4 information and its replacement by IPv6 information?

(If you missed it you can read it in my postings: Driving Blind, Something's Happening But We Don't Know What It Is, Do We Mr. Jones?, Follow-up on my note: An Open Letter to NTIA, ICANN, and IANA, and An Open Letter to NTIA, ICANN, and IANA.

Remember how NTIA and ICANN assured me that they would never allow a change that risks the stability of the net.

Well, despite the absence of any technical evaluation of the risks, such a change was made by NTIA and ICANN. And now reports of instability have begun to surface.

What has happened is this: With the introduction of IPv6 based name servers, some resolvers running on hosts that have IPv6 enabled (which includes the default settings on many recent releases of Linux) but which don't have actual IPv6 connectivity, seem to be trying to talk to those IPv6 based servers. It takes time for these never-to-be-answered queries to time out and for the resolver to move on to a usable IPv4 address. Users perceive delays (four seconds) for names to resolve.

More about this can be found in a posting on the NANOG mailing list and on comp.protocols.dns.bind.

Yesterday I spent about 20 minutes to set up a test to try to reproduce the problem. I used a spare computer with a single interface. I used Fedora Core 3 (with up-to-date patches) with IPv4 connectivity and its default IPv6 configuration but no IPv6 connectivity on, or out of, the subnet to which it was attached. I used bind-9.2.4-2 with its default configuration. I ran a half dozen informal tests in which I monitored all the packets coming in and out while I started bind afresh and performed queries via the machines' resolver. I did not observe any attempts to use IPv6 packets - in other words I did not observe the reported misbehavior. However I did notice that some queries (e.g. dig @localhost www.no-such-name.fr) generated as many as 46 IPv4-based query and response packets (including queries for AAAA and A6 records.)

For the moment let's assume that the Nanog and comp.protocols.dns.bind reports are accurate and that my inability to reproduce the problem was due to some flaw in my setup or in my methodology.

Now you might say: "Four seconds? Big deal." Would you say that if you were using a VOIP phone trying to call for help because your house is burning or your child has stopped breathing? OK, perhaps that's an extreme case - but it certainly is a foreseeable one. But at internet speeds, even a few seconds are important - Would you be happy if you lost a bid on e-Bay or lost out on a stock deal because you got stalled by a cascade of these delays? At the least such delay can be very frustrating.

NTIA conceived and backed ICANN for the specific purpose of protecting the technical stability of the internet. Both bodies emit large numbers of words asserting that this is what ICANN is for and what ICANN does. Yet if we look to their actions rather than their words there is no evidence that NTIA and ICANN actually care about assuming actual responsibility and exercising actual oversight to ensure that the internet's DNS actually runs efficiently, reliably, and accurately 24x7x365.

Is NTIA or ICANN even aware of these issues? Yes they are, but only because I actually called NTIA and, after several days of attempts, spoke to people there. And I have had e-mail correspondence about this matter with ICANN (which, by the way is not visible on ICANN's correspondence web page.)

Has NTIA or ICANN initiated a study or tried to reproduce the problem? There is no indication that they have - or that they intend to do so.

We have a dangerous situation. We have an oversight gap. There is an absence of management. Nobody is making sure that the various parts of the Domain Name System are all flying at all, much less that they are safely flying in the same direction. The Challenger and Columbia disasters showed us what can happen when there are oversight gaps and negligent managers. NTIA and ICANN have created an undefended vulnerability through which a catastrophic failure, or successful attack, of DNS, and thus of the entire internet, is possible.

It's pretty clear that ICANN's goal is to be the jealous overlord of domain name business practices and products.

And its also pretty clear that the goal of NTIA is to make political brownie points and award itself a gold star for privatization.

It is also quite clear that NTIA and ICANN are reducing the stability of the internet by distracting attention from the absence of coherent supervision over those things that actually affect the reliability, efficiency, and accuracy of the upper layers of the Domain Name System.

We can let NTIA and ICANN live in their fantasy worlds. NTIA can have its little gold star. And ICANN can try to defend itself against an increasing number of claims made under an increasing number of national laws that it has become merely a combination of industrial actors who are collaborating among themselves to restrain and restrict the participants in the DNS marketplace and to establish prices and product specifications and devoid of any technical basis for doing so.

In the meantime we do need to establish a responsible authority to ensure that the DNS and IP address allocation systems are being managed and operated safely. This is a vacuum that must be filled.

Posted by mikki at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Karl Auerbach

I have no idea who wrote that wonderful piece, Time for Reformation of the Internet, posted by Susan Crawford. (It wasn't me - I never use the word "netizen".)

Elliot Noss of Tucows wrote a partial rebuttal, I must be attending the wrong ICANN meetings.

Elliot's company, Tucows, has been a leader in registrar innovation and competition. And Tucows has constantly been among the most imaginative, progressive, responsible, and socially engaged companies engaged in these debates.

Elliot focuses on the registrar/registry distinction. I agree with Elliot that there does exist real competition and innovation among domain name registrars.

But the points made by Time for Reformation of the Internet go far beyond registries and registrars.

ICANN has significantly shaped and restricted the scope of that competition and innovation by imposing requirement after requirement on the kinds of products that registries can offer to registrars and that registrars can offer to the public. Many of those requirements, such as the requirement that registration business data (whois) be made public, are made at the expense of the community of internet users and for the benefit of the intellectual property industry. Other ICANN requirements are simply arbitrary. For example ICANN has never once justified the requirement that domain names be registered for one to ten years in increments of one full year. That arbitrary ICANN requirement has destroyed the potential for product innovation and competition by registrars at the short-term and long-term ends of the spectrum.

Elliot mentions the claim made by ICANN that consumers are saving money as the result of there being an ICANN. While it is true that prices for domain names have dropped since ICANN came into being it is far from true that prices are anywhere near as low as they could be. As Elliot correctly points out there is a significant difference between legacy registries, such as Verisign with .com, and the registrars that sell the those registries products. What is not mentioned is the degree to which ICANN has created a price support system for those legacy registries that forces domain name consumers to pay as much as $300,000,000 per year in windfall profits to those legacy registries.

When the current Verisign contract came before ICANN - the contract that gave Verisign .com in perpetuity - I voted against it in part because it had no mechanism to drive down the $6 fiat price that ICANN gifted unto Verisign.

There is a distinction between those legacy registries and those that have not yet been created. Legacy registries, such as those for .com and .net, have captive customers. These captives are people who have had no real choice of contract terms - they have been forced to build their brands and network names on Top Level Domains that are largely indistinguishable when measured in terms of contractual provisions and terms. It is necessary that these captive customers be protected against registry abuse. However, for future registries, if there were many choices and real competition, new customers could pick and chose among the offerings and obtain long term commitments to protect themselves from predatory practices by the registry. ICANN, unfortunately, has given no sign that it will ever allow such a system to be conceived much less that it be born and grow into a mature industry.

Real competition and innovation of product offerings by registries has been suffocated by ICANN's refusal to allow any except a very few rigidly limited new TLDs. So registrars are forced to resell at retail a product that at wholesale is largely undifferentiated. Consumers, who are at the end of the distribution chain, are still forced to chose among domain name products in which the principal differences are a few dollars in price and the means of maintaining name servers and contact information. This lack of deep differences between retail product offerings is a hallmark of a marketplace that has little more than a thin skin of competition over a highly non-competitive skeleton.

It is very sad that the United States Department of Commerce has created a system that causes this kind of market distortion. It is worse the the United States Department of Commerce has not only allowed, but actually supported, this kind of restraint of trade of the products related to the internet's domain name system. And it is downright detestable to consider how the United States Department of Commerce has fostered the false belief that ICANN is actually protecting the public against technical failures of the internet's domain name system or IP address allocation systems.

Time for Reformation of the Internet said many things concerning ICANN's regime of dogmatic absolutism rather than principled balancing of interests. I found much truth and merit in what was said.

Time for Reform only weakly addressed ICANN's failure to concern itself with the actual technical stability of the internet and ICANN's attempt to become the willing courtesan of the intellectual property industry.

Item #20 in Time for Reformation of the Internet was this:

20. The internet would improve if ICANN were simply to disappear

I have a great deal of sympathy for that assertion. But I also have concern about the transition that would follow. I wrote about exactly that point in my testimony to the US Senate in June 2002. Below is what I said in 2002. I believe that, except for the sale of the Network Solutions registrar by Verisign, that not much has changed in the intervening 2 1/2 years.

What Would Happen To The Internet If ICANN Were To Vanish?

Much of the debate over ICANN is colored by the fear of what might occur were there to be no ICANN.

ICANN does not have its hands on any of the technical knobs or levers that control the Internet. Those are firmly in the hands of ISPs, Network Solutions/Verisign, and those who operate the root DNS servers.

Were ICANN to vanish the Internet would continue to run. Few would notice the absence.

Were there no ICANN the DNS registration businesses would continue to accept money and register names. With the passage of time the already low standards of this business might erode further.

The UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy) system runs largely by itself. The Federal ACPA (Anti Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act) would remain in place.

ICANN has already established a glacial pace for the introduction of new top-level domains. ICANN's absence will not cause perceptible additional delay in the creation of new top-level domains.

ICANN has already abrogated the making of IP address allocation policy to the regional IP address registries; those registries will continue to do what they have always done with or without ICANN.

ICANN has no agreements with the root server operators; the root servers will continue to be operated as an ad hoc confederation, as has been the case for many years.

The only function that would be immediately affected would be the IANA function. IANA is an important clerical job, particularly with regard to the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs.) IANA is not a big job, nor does it have real-time impact on the Internet. (In fact there is a credible body of evidence to suggest that ICANN delays certain clerical tasks on behalf of ccTLDs for months on end in an effort to coerce ccTLDs to sign contracts with ICANN.)

There are those who will try to divert outside reforms of ICANN by asserting that touching ICANN will cause the Internet to collapse or otherwise be damaged. The truth is quite the reverse. ICANN's ties to the technical and operational stability of the Internet are tenuous at best. A full inquiry into ICANN, a full reform of ICANN, or a complete rebid of the agreements under which ICANN operates would not damage the Internet.

Posted by mikki at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Bret Fausett. Gee, ya think maybe ICANN will listen? Hell no.

Is it time to bring back the election of At-Large Directors? I think so. I've been reading the ICANN Strategic Plan. It's a nice document. These are all fine goals. But when you step back from it and think about the totality of what ICANN is trying to do, you realize that ICANN hasn't made any hard choices about priorities. The new budget allows it to fund everything. So let's get back to the At Large. Remember, one of the reasons we abandoned the concept of global, online elections was because it wasn't "affordable" (see 'Whereas' Clause #14). The new ICANN, however, can afford it. So when can we start? [Lextext]

Posted by mikki at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Karl Auerbach

I have had time to dig deeper into ICANN's so-called Strategic Plan. (See First thoughts on ICANN's so-called "Plan" and Vodoo Economics a la ICANN)

Like ICANN's former CRADA Report this "Strategic Plan" is buzzword-full but content-empty.

If we look into section 1 we find the following:

Section 1a.i: We see that ICANN is doing nothing more than planning to adopt better paper-pushing procedures to better serve the IETF when the IETF needs a number allocated.

Section 1a.ii: It is good that ICANN is thinking about cooperating in the construction of a DNS test bed. Some of us have been doing this kind of testing for years on our own dime and have been suggesting to ICANN that this would be a good thing to have. It is only this week that on the NANOG mailing list there has been a discussion of measurements being made privately about the question of routing jitter with regard to anycast roots. Unfortunately ICANN intends merely to "cooperate" - ICANN is not actually stating an intention to do anything more. ICANN is not committing to provide staffing, space, or funding for this. As usual, ICANN is making a promise to do nothing.

Also in Section 1a.ii we see that ICANN is planning on moving the L root server - again. The first move was described in the CRADA report nearly two years ago and, from my conversations with ICANN, was an expensive move that was fully intended to resolve all the issues that are apparently going to be re-solved. The term "Brownian motion" - motion for motion's sake - seems appropriate.

In Section 1a.iii ICANN promises to do more reporting. Given that ICANN has virtually no existing history of doing reporting - Where, for example, is the report on this summer's outage of .org? - any reporting would be an improvement over the status quo. However, the reporting that is enumerated by this section is nothing more than reports about business related activities rather than the kind of operational information that we need to evaluate how well the internet DNS and IP address systems allocation systems are running and how well ICANN is protecting us against technical instability in those systems.

In section 1a.iv ICANN promises to work harder to maintain the root zone file. That's nice. That file has a rate of change on the order of one item changed per day, and that is mainly changes in the NS records for ccTLD name servers. Verisign has been doing this job for years with only a few (and now quite ancient) problems - ICANN is making a big deal about an issue that has already been solved.

Section 1a.v contains a bold bit of claim jumping. In that section ICANN asserts that the L root server was "entrusted to ICANN". That is not true. The internet community has never "entrusted ICANN" with the operation of the L root server. The truth is that the L root server was entrusted to IANA, not to ICANN. ICANN operates the L root server only through ICANN's undertaking of the IANA function under a purchase order from the US National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration. Should ICANN relinquish or lose the IANA function (for example if the IETF transfers that function as part of the IETF's presently ongoing re-organization, then ICANN would have to say "bye bye" to the L root server.

Section 1a.v makes no service level commitments - so just like every other root server operator, ICANN (channeling for IANA) is unwilling to make any concrete service level promises to the internet community. The most that ICANN-as-IANA promises is to build what amounts to a routinely hardened facility and to chat it up with people in ICANN sponsored committees. ICANN needs to give enforceable, specific, and verifiable promises about server availability, responsively, and accuracy. In addition, ICANN/IANA needs to demonstrate a viable, and practiced, suite of disaster contingency plans and demonstrate that it has the human and fiscal resources to draw upon should the need arise.

Section 1b, beginning on page 32, is similarly full of sound and fury that, in the end, signifies nothing.

Section 1b.i is a laugh. ICANN has from the beginning promised to do these things yet it has never done so except twice. The first was with regard to internationalized domain names. The second was in response to Versign's "Sitefinder". In every other instance, ICANN has passively watched as other actors make decisions. For example, ICANN allowed the removal of IPv4 information from the root zone, an action that weakens the resilience of DNS during times of stress, without as much as a chirp of concern or even the ability to articulate reasons for its non-concern.

Section 1b.ii is simply a claim to a more expansive role for ICANN. We have plenty of groups already working on internet security. Even if ICANN could be a contender in this area it would be simply one more Johhny Come Lately. But ICANN has demonstrated an amazing incompetence in this area. For example ICANN has long known that data escrow would help DNS registrars recover from disasters. Yet ICANN has never bothered to require that registrars engage in good information protection practices. Given ICANN's general technical incapacities it would not be wise to allow ICANN to expand into yet another realm. In addition, one has to ask where is the community concensus that drove ICANN to put this idea into its "Strategic Plan"?

Section 1b.iii is a subtle misrepresentation - ICANN counts even vacuous "understandings" to be counted as firm "agreements". If one actually examines ICANN's existing or proposed "understandings" with root server operators and address registries one sees that they are documents that contain no binding obligations on either side. These understandings are more akin to papers describing a divorce than ones describing a partnership. The community of internet users is looking to ICANN for protection against network instability; yet ICANN has, through these understandings, abandoned any role of oversight.

Section 1b.iii also overstates the rate in which even these empty understandings are being entered into. One would think from the language of ICANN's plan that ccTLDs are anxiously queuing up in long lines to sign ICANN's "pay and obey" ccTLD agreements. In truth they are not - the rate of ccTLD agreements has been very slow and there is no sign that ICANN has done more than sign up the easy ccTLD pickings. Not even ICANN's home country, and the country of its founding governmental agency, has bothered to sign ICANN's ccTLD agreement.

As for the Strategic Plan's section 2 - "Competition and Choice" - all I can say is this: Why should ICANN even be engaged in what amounts to legislative activities that regulate business practices, determine property rights, impose judicial mechanisms, and select who among competitors can enter a marketplace?

There are two kinds of words - there are words that simply consume ink and occupy space. And there are words that communicate concrete ideas, intentions, and promises. With regard to ICANN's principal role as protector of internet stability ICANN has filled its so-called "Strategic Plan" with the first kind of words. There is nothing in this plan that says anything that goes beyond vague promises and platitudes. And to make it more unappetizing, the words that are used are the same tired words and empty phrases that ICANN has been pawning off ever since its inception.

There is one thing that can be said on a positive note: ICANN certainly put a lot of work into creating a pretty document.

Posted by mikki at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN at long last finally issued its so-called "Strategic Plan".

It's not a very good plan, at least not when viewed from the perspective of the users of the internet or from the perspective of a business that uses DNS or wants to enter the DNS business.

ICANN's plan does nothing to protect the technical stability of the net. ICANN is supposed to be our fire department to make sure that the net doesn't burn down. But ICANN seems rather more interested in trying to be the king of some other hill leaving the community of internet users unprotected and the internet vulnerable.

Below is the initial comment on this plan that I sent to ICANN's "comment" address:

To: strategic-plan-comments@icann.org

There is nothing in this plan that deals with ICANN's primary mision: the technical stability of the internet's domain name and IP addressing systems.

To be more specific, there is nothing in this plan that indicates that ICANN will have any role or duty whatsoever regarding the ability of the upper layers of the domain name system (DNS) to operate reliabily, efficiently, promptly, and accurately.

There is nothing in this plan that deals with the proper preparation of the root zone file and its dissemination to root servers.

There is nothing in this plan that deals with responsible operation of the root servers in normal times or in times of stress.

There is nothing in this plan that deals with sensible and balanced allocation of IP addresses.

Instead this plan is completely about business and economic regulation and, by implication, about the prohibition of innovation that is not in accord with ICANN's business and economic rules.

That is not only *not* a narrow mission but it is also a completely inappropriate mission for ICANN. The mission that ICANN describes for itself is that of a national legislature or heavy regulatory agency.

The community of internet users require from ICANN a guarantee that the internet's core infrastructures including the upper tiers of DNS and IP address allocation operate reliably.

The internet community does not require a body that imposes economic, business, and social policy on the internet.

Yet it is that former requirement that this plan ignores and it is that latter non-requirement that this plan proposes.

--karl--
Karl Auerbach
Santa Cruz, California, USA
Former elected ICANN Director for North America

Posted by mikki at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ICANN has initiated arbitration (before the ICC's International Court of Arbitration) against VeriSign under the .net Registry Agreement, seeking declaratory judgments that many things VeriSign has done or attempted to do over the years (Sitefinder, ConsoliDate, IDN, WLS, and stemming the abusive actions of shell registrars when they destructively query the registry for secondary market purposes) violate that agreement. [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes it takes a non-lawyer to show us just how far overboard the law has gone. In this case, it's trademark law and Cory's wonderful description of how TM lost its way.

Spurred by James Surowiecki's Wired piece on the decline of brand power, Cory looks back at how far we've come from the days when "consumer confusion" was the law's paramount concern.

Says Cory: This is a timely piece because the rhetoric of branding has been used to make unprecedented incursions against privacy, competition and speech.

It used to be that trademarks were intended to protect "consumers" (that's us) from being tricked into buying goods under false pretenses. If it said "Coca-Cola" on the can, there had better be Coke inside, and not Pepsi or Crazy-Bob's-Discount-House-of-Soda brand. When a competitor of Coke's shipped a bottle of stuff that was misleadingly packaged or labelled, Coke's authority to sue its competition derived from its need to protect us, not its bottom line. It didn't get to sue because it owned Coca-Cola, but because it was acting as a proxy for its customers, who were being decieved by con-artists who mislabelled their goods.

...

But as time went by, trademarks stopped being about us and started being the embodiment of brands (which, as Surowiecki points out, are on the wane and were probably never as important as we thought to begin with).

This meant that trademarks weren't just things that helped the public know what they were buying -- they are a kind of pseudo-property. Pseudo-property that could be defended on the basis that it "belongs" to a company, who need to be protected from having the value of their marks "diluted" or "tarnished."

Read it all, it's Chilling.

Posted by mikki at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DNRC's Karl Auerbach has an excellent point about the "stability of the Internet" that is not being addressed by ICANN or others.

I am writing this note in order to express my concern about an impending change in the root of the Domain Name System (DNS) and two of the largest Top Level Domains (TLDs). I am concerned that there is a risk of disruption to the net that has not been adequately evaluated and I am concerned that this change is being deployed without adequate monitoring or safeguards. [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ICANN Congressional hearings -- like most all Congressional hearings -- are typically dull. The testimony is scripted and well rehearsed, and little new information comes out. Today's hearing was no different. The interesting moments, all of which were unscripted in response to questions, came when:

• John Kneuer, NTIA, testified that ICANN staff and DOC/NTIA staff confer weekly, often daily, about ICANN's work and progress on the MOU. He also said that he and his staff meet regularly with ICANN stakeholders about ICANN's work.
  
• Mr. Kneuer and Paul Twomey suggested that the reason ICANN's strategic plan hadn't been released to the public yet (almost a year after the first draft circulated privately) might have something to do with confidentiality and trade secrets.
  
• Bill Manning, ISI, noted that the greatest threats to the stability of the Internet were the users.

Posted by mikki at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From DNRC Board Member Bret Fausett

Graeme Wearden, reporting in ZDNet UK: "Individual Internet users are being frozen out of a key debate on the future governance of the Internet, Web visionary Esther Dyson warned on Friday.... 'I feel the process is going off the rails,' Dyson told the audience at the debate organised by the Oxford Internet Institute and the Internet Society UK....According to Dyson, WGIG is not the right way to address the problems facing the Internet. 'When you concentrate power, whether it's the low-rent, measly power ICANN had, or full-blown global governmental power, that focus of power attracts the wrong people,' Dyson said. 'People who are self-appointed to represent other people are there, governments are there, the private sector is there, but the world at large isn't.'"

Yeah. What she said.

Posted by mikki at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Netburg is a nice place to live. It barely existed a decade ago. Today it is home to millions of people and corporations worldwide are moving their headquarters.

Netburg is built of wood, nice dry wood; the kind that catches fire easily.

Netburg has a problem. There are people and groups around the world who send incendiary devices into Netburg 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. So far only small parts of Netburg have burned. But everyone knows that a big fire could happen at any time.

Netburg does not have a fire department. It has thirteen self-appointed fireman who have invested their own money in trucks and equipment. But those fireman aren't obligated to put out fires or to be impartial about choosing whose fires to put out and whose buildings it will let burn. To date these fireman have had the self motivation, the resources, and good will to do the job.

Continue reading "A Little Tale - From Karl Auerbach" »

Posted by mikki at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When domain name conflicts between manufacturers and distributors rest on contractual disputes over the use of the trademark owners' marks, ICANN UDRP panels have frequently denied relief. See generally the cases cited and discussed in Western Holdings, LLC v. JPC Enterprise, LLC d/b/a Cutting Edge Fitness and d/b/a Strivectin SD Sales & Distribution, D2004-0426 (WIPO August 5, 2004) by Mark Partridge as sole panelist. The decision summarizes other ICANN UDRP decisions involving... [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Karl Auerbach's CaveBear Blog

Yesterday the following announcement from Verisign appeared on the NANOG mailing list:

VeriSign Naming and Directory Services will
change the serial number format and "minimum" value in the .com
and .net zones' SOA records on or shortly after 9 February 2004.

The current serial number format is
YYYYMMDDNN. (The zones are generated twice per day, so NN is usually either 00 or 01.) The new format will be the UTC time at the moment of zone generation encoded as the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. (00:00:00 GMT, 1 January 1970.) For example, a zone published on 9 February 2004 might have serial number "1076370400". The .com and .net zones will still be generated twice per day, but this serial number format change is in preparation for potentially more frequent updates to these zones.

...

There should be no end-user impact resulting from these changes (though it's conceivable that some people have processes that rely on the semantics of the .com/.net serial number.) But because these zones are widely used and closely watched, we want to let the Internet community know about the changes in advance.

Continue reading "Is ICANN Blowing It Again?" »

Posted by mikki at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From CircleID

Harvard Law School's distinguished Berkman Center for Internet & Society has published a preliminary study, "Public Participation In ICANN." ...The problem with the preliminary study is that it fundamentally misunderstands the role of ICANN in Internet governance. Specifically, ICANN's duty is not and should not be to simply carry out the will of the "Internet user community." Instead, ICANN's duty is to carry out the responsibilities the organization agreed to in... [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An organization which purports to be "the voice of world business" is proposing a de facto U.N. takeover of ICANN. The proposal by a senior official of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) would place ICANN under the U.N. umbrella and give a strong role to U.N. agencies and to various national governments, including those that suppress free speech and free enterprise. In a move of breathtaking arrogance, the ICC refused to even invite ICANN or U.S. government representatives... [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This could be a completely interesting showdown. Something that absolutely must be watched.

An organization which purports to be "the voice of world business" is proposing a de facto U.N. takeover of ICANN. The proposal by a senior official of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) would place ICANN under the U.N. umbrella and give a strong role to U.N. agencies and to various national governments, including those that suppress free speech and free enterprise. In a move of breathtaking arrogance, the ICC refused to even invite ICANN or U.S. government representatives... [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at Pacific Research Institute, says it's time to rethink the concept of an Internet gatekeeper.

[...]To be sure, ICANN has a board of distinguished experts, including Internet legend Vint Cerf. But while the organization is key in helping to establish complex technical standards, it often finds itself steeped in controversy over what many see as its overzealous urge for policymaking.

Part of ICANN's stated purpose is to develop policy through "private-sector, bottom-up, consensus-based means," but as most people know, consensus is often impossible and issues must be settled in other ways. [...]

[CNET News.com]

Posted by mikki at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a move that will likely encourage further discrimination against any company that doesn't happen to be named 'Verisign,' ICANN has been given the green light to continue

A federal judge denies a preliminary injunction filed against the organization that oversees the Internet's domain name hierarchy and address space. [CNET News.com]

Posted by mikki at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From DNRC Board Member Karl Auerbach

Bret Fausett quite reasonably argues that ICANN's TLD (Top Level Domain) "test bed" is dead.

I was trained in the hard sciences - mainly chemistry and physics. And I spent some of my undergraduate years doing research on high input-power chemical lasers. I also spent time in the soft sciences where I did research on patterns of urban mobility. In all of this work we used a technique called "the scientific method" - it involves observation, formulation of hypothesis, predictions based on the hypothesis, and experiments to test those predictions (and indirectly the hypothesis.)

ICANN never really followed any process, much less one as structured those used in the hard sciences, to focus its observations of the behavior of new TLDs. ICANN's information gathering was never better than ad hoc. And there were neither hypotheses, predictions, nor experiments. ICANN's TLD test bed process was not scientific; quite the opposite: it was chaotic and arbitrary.

Nor was ICANN's test bed process particularly useful for the creation of a body of data that might be useful for an unscientific after-the-fact inquiry. ICANN's data gathering, even when it was performed, was mainly of business information that has no apparent relationship to the stability of the internet's domain name system. No records were made of actual DNS activity and behavior as the new TLDs were being deployed. No measures were made of the accessibility or usability of those new TLDs.

(It wasn't that there was not interest - Louis Touton and I wanted to quantitatively monitor the cross-fade of queries away from the old .org servers and onto the new ones as part of the Verisign-to-PIR transition of .org. However, that effort was too low on ICANN's list of priorities and thus a golden opportunity to observe DNS behavior in the wild was lost. Such data would have been invaluable when trying to comprehend the impact of a future planned or unplanned operational transition of a large DNS zone.)

To give but one example of something that we ought to have investigated: There are thousands upon thousands of web page forms out there on the net that have Javascript or cgi-bin programs that do not accept top level domain names with four or more characters. The people who operate the TLDs with such names have pointed out repeatedly that this limitation has substantially hindered the usability and acceptance of their offerings. Yet, ICANN does not even have this problem listed as something that is to be investigated in the "testbed", and after several years, ICANN has not even a qualitative estimate of the extend of this problem, much less initiated a curative initiative to try to inform the web community that these limitations on web forms are overly restrictive.

ICANN's TLD "test bed" has little value except as a body of anecdotal data.

I agree with Bret that we should abandon the pretense that there is a "test" in progress or that there ever really was a "test".

It is high time for ICANN to move forward on new Top Level Domains - and not merely of the kind that, even in the absence of real tests, have shown little, if any, evidence of cognizable benefit to the community of internet users.

Posted by mikki at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A wonderful piece by DNRC Board Member Karl Auerbach

The people who want ICANN to create .travel are saying that ICANN's delay is "insufferable".

I have discussed the hubris of the .travel proponents in the past.

It is indeed insufferable that ICANN is delaying new TLDs - ICANN has demonstrated no reason why top level domains should not be created at a rapid rate. It is time for ICANN to adopt an combination auction/lottery system as has been proposed by several observers. See http://dcc.syr.edu/miscarticles/NewTLDs-MM-LM.pdf

The .travel people seem to believe, however, that they have some divine right to their own top level domain. They are incorrect.

Certainly they have a right derived from the continued existence of their application of year 2000. But each of the 39 other applicants who were not selected that year have that same right. There is no reason for any of us to believe that .travel will benefit the community of internet users. Rather .travel will be of value merely to one particular industry segment. If we are to allocate top level domains to industry segments, then there are certainly more deserving industries - farming, teaching, labor, and public health and safety all come to mind as being more socially valuable than the travel business.

Yes, ICANN's TLD policy is a disaster. But the damaged victim of that policy is not .travel. No. The real damage has been to the public who have been deprived of a meaningful and useful expansion of the internet name space.

Posted by mikki at 09:19 AM | Permalink

More from Karl Auerbach

I see that ICANN's GNSO issued a resolution regarding the Verisign Registry Site Finder "service".

Verisign's action is very serious. Verisign's act repudiates the end-to-end principle, the foundation upon which the Internet is constructed. Verisign's act implies the end of coherent governance of the Internet and the abandonment of the net to monopolistic manipulation.

In contrast to the seriousness of Verisign's action, the GNSO's resolution is weak, equivocal, and timid.

In an article today, Verisign's CEO asserted that what Verisign has done is benign and that only a noisy few are concerned.

With timid and euphemistic resolutions such as the one passed by the GNSO, no one ought to be surprised if people begin to believe Verisign's words and "Site Finder" becomes the established status quo.

Posted by mikki at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, in a blinding display of openness and transparency, ICANN decides to overrun users and possibly even national interests (we don't know because they haven't told us....) in a secret plan to redelegate dot MD.

Read more from ICANNWatch.

Bankrupt .MD Operator Protests ICANN Action on .MD Redelegation [ICANNWatch]

Posted by mikki at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bruce Young tells a story of an Internet user who gets into trouble because "his" domain name was registered in the name of a web hosting provider that went bankrupt later on...As far as registrars are concerned, ICANN is currently doing its homework on domain name portability. As far as web hosting companies are concerned, though, these suggestions only look appealing at first sight. Upon... [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

House Committee to Hold Whois Hearings, Kowtow to IP Interests [ICANNWatch]

Posted by mikki at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It looks as if ICANN is going to require applicants for new TLDs to agree (in advance) not to negotiate a changed contract with ICANN. We agree that streamlining the process is in everyone's interest. Along those lines, we are proposing a substantially thinner contract that ICANN and new registries could use. Existing registries should also be allowed to sign up to this contract, if they wish. [CircleID]

Posted by mikki at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[ICANNWatch]

Posted by mikki at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Communications subcommittee of the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is holding a hearing on ICANN today, July 31, 2003. at 2:30pm EDT. You can listen in via http://www.capitolhearings.org/ (scan down for the appropriate item for Room SR-253). I'm not sure where the written materials will be posted - I'll post the URL when I find out. I was a witness at the two prior hearing, one in 2001 and another in 2002 - it's quite an experience. My submission to this year's hearing is online at http://www.cavebear.com/rw/senate-july-31-2003.htm What's going to be said by the witnesses? I don't know. But I have some guesses: ICANN will once again try to make us believe that it is responsive to the public. NTIA will once again threaten to pull the contractual plug on ICANN. CDT will present its usual - an extremely competent and extremely reasonable position, wrapped in... [CaveBear Blog]

Posted by mikki at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CDT Associate Director Alan Davidson will testify July 31 at a Senate hearing on domain name management and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN.) CDT supports ICANN's coordination of key Internet naming and numbering systems, but believes it demands greater public accountability and continued government oversight. CDT is also issuing a new report on July 31 suggesting how to measure ICANN's performance over time. July 30, 2003 [Center for Democracy and Technology]

Posted by mikki at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)