Mehmet Akcin writes: As announced today as part of RIPE meeting in Lisbon, Portugal by Joe Abley, DNS Group Director at ICANN, and Matt Larson, Vice President of DNS Research at VeriSign, in their presentation (Page 25), DNSSEC for the root zone is proposed to be fully deployed by July 1, 2010. The Draft Timeline suggests Root zone being signed by December 1, 2009 while initially staying internal to ICANN and VeriSign. The incremental roll out of the signed root would then take place from January until July 2010. more
Joly MacFie writes: The Internet Society's New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) will be holding a public forum at NYU on Oct 8 2009 to discuss, in the post JPA world, civic representation in ICANN. Specific concerns are the current restructuring of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council, and the replacement of the At-Large Liaison to the ICANN Board by a seated member. Will the creation of new constituencies serve to balkanize the Noncommercial users and dilute their influence? Will an At-large board member be less answerable to the rank and file? These questions and more will be discussed. The public are welcome to attend and the event will be webcast live. more
The Affirmation gladdens me. The Affirmation worries me. The Affirmation makes me wonder what is next. I am of course referring to the Affirmation of Commitments between the United States Department of Commerce (DoC) and ICANN. In the respect that the US is loosening its grip on ICANN a little, this is a good thing. Symbolically, of course it is gigantic... more
The US Department of Commerce and ICANN announced today an Affirmation of Commitments. One of the important elements of that document was in section 4, namely that "ICANN and DOC recognize that there is a group of participants that engage in ICANN's processes to a greater extent than Internet users generally." more
There has been much said and written recently about the issue of registry-registrar cross ownership with regard to New Top Level Domains ("New TLDs"). It is clear that there appears to be a fair amount of confusion about the issue and the positions espoused by various parties. To assist the ICANN community in understanding the issue -- the points of agreement and debate -- I offer the following overview on behalf of Network Solutions and Central Registry Solutions... more
Offensive domain-name registrations require strategic corporate decisions. Second, they require different strategic and tactical remedies when third parties register desired names. Thus, different organizational approaches are necessary to manage domain name risks and rewards. The essay identifies the strategic differences and remedies for the two types of domain names, and outlines the implications for internal work-flow organizational structures. more
In a recent post to CircleID entitled New Domains and ICANN Accountability, Steve DelBianco paints himself as "frustrated" that ICANN didn't take a different path toward new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). Mr. DelBianco was one of four witnesses at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts and Competition on September 23, 2009. He is a creative advocate for his clients, an engaging speaker, and a skillful writer, and he produced a synopsis of the hearing which sounded convincing -- until I tried to make sense of it. more
On September 23, ICANN's Chief Operating Officer, Doug Brent was asked by ranking members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee why they were continuing to move forward with the launch of new gTLDs when they had not yet been able to resolve complaints. Brent stated that Internet users have long called for the expansion of new gTLDs and that winners of new gTLDs would have to abide by a lengthy set of rules. Brent went on to say that "ICANN did not casually think this plan up." more
An open letter signed by various members of the domain name industry, including heads of some of the top domain name registries and registrars, was sent today to ICANN CEO and Board of Directors urging them to direct their staff to implement the introduction of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) without further delay. "The time to act is now," says the letter for "many reason" including: Consumer Demand; Safety Considerations; Internet Stability; Innovation; ICANN’s own credibility more
Earlier this year, ICANN began to seriously consider the various effects of adding DNS protocol features and new entries into the Root Zone. With the NTIA announcement that the Root Zone would be signed this year, a root scaling study team was formed to assess the scalability of the processes used to create and publish the Root Zone. Properly considered, this study should have lasted longer than the 120 days -- but the results suggest that scaling up the root zone is not without risk -- and these risks should be considered before "green-lighting" any significant changes to the root zone or its processes. I, for one, would be interested in any comments, observations, etc. (The caveats: This was, by most measures, a rush job. My spin: This is or should be a risk assessment tool.) Full report available here [PDF]. more
Today, four years after the launch of the Catalan linguistic and cultural registry, Google reports that there are 90 million pages of Catalan content under the some 36 thousand .CAT domains. As imperfect as Google's tools are as a metric, the correct observation is that the use of .CAT by Catalans vastly exceeds the expectations of its initial proponents... more
An open letter from nearly 150 individual and organizational members of ICANN's Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) has been submitted to ICANN's board of directors and CEO. The letter has expresses serious concern over a recent ICANN Board decision regarding the restructuring of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO). From the letter: "We believe that the Noncommercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) chartering process has been seriously flawed on both procedural and substantive grounds. We appeal to you to address these problems before permanent damage is done to ICANN's reputation, to the GNSO reform process, and to the interests of noncommercial users of the Internet." more
Congratulations and thanks to ICANN for hosting the North America Regional meeting at the Sheraton in downtown Toronto, Canada. This event was done first class and was in my opinion a highly successful meeting... At this regional ICANN meeting many interesting topics were covered. Some topics though not at the foremost of my mind, surprisingly were not only highly interesting but very informative. more
I outline two possible drawbacks with the idea of first revealing rules for the new proposed Top-Level Domains (TLDs) and then for second-level registrations. I propose a lottery process to initially allocate second-level domain names. A number of people have voiced concerns about the idea of automatically granting the winner of the TLD a monopoly power over second-level domain registrations. We should also be worried about the financial interest ICANN has in not providing the rules for the two-level registrations simultaneously. more
I recently learned about a meeting that took place between ICANN staff and Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) members Kathy Kleiman and Konstantinos Komaitis regarding the Implementation Recommendations Team (IRT) recommendations for the protection of intellectual property rights in new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs). My comment relates to the White Paper published by Ms. Kleiman and Mr. Komaitis with respect to the notion of having multiple Regional Trademark clearinghouses (TMCs). For the reasons stated in this comment, the KK Proposal fails a number of the benchmarking checklists used by the IRT in evaluating proposals. more
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