ICANN

IANA Stewardship Transition: Full Steam Ahead

Last week the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) met in Los Angeles to review and discuss public comments concerning the Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions. Upon review of the comments received, the ICG decided to continue advancing the proposal as planned, aiming to make as much progress as possible by the time of ICANN 54, scheduled for October 19-22.

One Step Closer to an Accountable ICANN

We believe that certain updates in the latest draft that limit the scope of ICANN's Mission, as specified in paragraph 188, could explicitly prevent ICANN from actively enforcing its contracts with Registries and Registrars or use contracts as a tool to implement consensus policies in the future. We suggest in our comments that revised bylaw text be added explicitly stating that the enforcement and creation of ICANN's contracts with Registries and Registrars...

3 Strategies for Keeping ICANN and IANA On-Mission and Out of Politics

Over the last year, the ICANN community has been raging on about two issues: the looming IANA transition away from the US government, and how to ensure the organization is accountable to all the Internet's stakeholders. While the issues have run on separate tracks, they both boil down to one question: can ICANN be trusted to be a good steward of the Internet's future? The answer to this question will go a long way in deciding ICANN's future.

Why is ICANN Tax Exempt?

ICANN, as we all know, is a California non-profit that is tax exempt in the US as a charity, under section 501(c)(3) of the US tax code. But it's a rather unusual charity. Typical charities support the arts, or education, or sports, or relief for the poor. ICANN doesn't do anything like that. So what's the basis for its tax exemption? We don't have to guess, it's all in the application they filed in 1999.

Challenges for .brands - From Strategy to Implementation Planning

While your strategy and objectives speak more broadly to why you're launching a .brand TLD, your implementation plan covers the all-important 'how'. Once you complete your strategy workshop session to agree upon objectives and approach, how do you actually launch a .brand TLD? You need an implementation plan to guide you from strategy to launch, and beyond. At its core, the implementation plan is a checklist; just like a pilot landing a plane, you need to run through your checklist to ensure you don't miss any crucial elements.

The Mission Has Already Crept

ICANN's mission, and the avoidance of "mission creep", is currently the subject of intense debate in the Internet community. Multiple cross-community working groups are dealing with the proposal by an agency of the United States government, NTIA, to give up the last vestiges of its control of the IANA function. Many of the new organizational structures under consideration purport to deal with ICANN's expanding mission.

DotConnectAfrica Trust Response to John Jeffrey’s ICANN Legal Blog Posting

The attention of DotConnectAfrica Trust (DCA Trust) has been drawn to a recent blog posting by John Jeffrey, the ICANN General Counsel and Company Secretary, who wrote to clarify what he termed as "misinformation and erroneous reporting that have framed parts of the discussion" regarding the recent DCA vs. ICANN IRP Final Declaration. As we can't see a way of making comments on his blog, DCA Trust as a directly affected party, will respond to the issues Mr. Jeffrey has advanced...

ICANN Should Curb Anonymous Domain Name Abuses

E-commerce has revolutionized how businesses sell to consumers -- including those involved in illicit activities, such as websites peddling illegal narcotics, pirated movies and music, or counterfeit handbags. For example, 96 percent of Internet pharmacies do not comply with U.S. laws, and as they ship pills tainted with paint thinner, arsenic, and rat poison, they put the health and safety of consumers at risk. Why don't law enforcement officials do more to combat this problem? Partly because of the difficulty of identifying who is actually operating the illegal pharmacies. It is time to fix this, while allowing anonymity for those who deserve it.

The IANA Stewardship Transition - Now Is the Time to Share Your Views

The IANA Stewardship Transition process may have started more than a year ago, but last week it reached its pinnacle with the publication of the compiled Proposal to Transition the Stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions from the US Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to the Global Multistakeholder Community" by the IANA Coordination Group (ICG).

ICANN Wins a Very Weak TLD Lawsuit

Back in the 1990s as the Internet was starting to become visible to the world, several people had the bright idea of setting up their own top level domains and selling names in competition with what was then the monopoly registrar Network Solutions (NSI). For these new TLDs to be usable, either the TLD operators had to persuade people to use their root servers rather than the IANA servers, or else get their TLDs into the IANA root. Attempts to get people to use other roots never were very successful...