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)