On July 25th ICANN announced the publication of the Draft Report of the Independent Review of the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH). This study was coordinated for ICANN by the Analysis Group, in conjunction with researchers from the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford as well the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School... while public comments on the draft report will be accepted through September 3rd, this Report was triggered by GAC concerns expressed before the Applicant Guidebook for the new gTLD program was even completed, and is not the work product of a GNSO-created working group and therefore will not directly result in the establishment of any new ICANN policy. more
Controversy over .WEB auction takes a new turn as various sources today pointed to a lawsuit filed against ICANN by Ruby Glen LLC, a subsidiary of Donuts Inc. -- the largest registry for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). more
"Handover of US internet control to ICANN now officially blocked by Republican policy," Kieren McCarthy reporting today in The Register: "The planned transition of the internet's critical technical functions from the US government to a technical body may come under further attack after the Republican Party officially agreed to block it on Monday. more
It's been almost six weeks since the NTIA announced "that the proposal developed by the global Internet multistakeholder community meets the criteria NTIA outlined in March 2014 when it stated its intent to transition the U.S. Government's stewardship role for the Internet domain name system (DNS) technical functions, known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions", and thereby signaled the start of the last lap of the IANA transition marathon. more
The IANA transition still appears to be on track for consummation at the end of the September 30th expiration date of the current contract between NTIA and ICANN in the wake of the May 24th Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing on "Examining the Multistakeholder Plan for Transitioning the Internet Assigned Number Authority". That is, while there are clearly some concerns on both sides of the aisle about terminating the remaining U.S. government ties to ICANN... more
It looks like Senator Cruz' letter writing campaign isn't going to end any time soon. While previously the Senator and former US presidential hopeful was happy exchanging salvoes with ICANN he's now switched gears and is instead focussing on NTIA and the US Department of Commerce. The latest letter is focussed on a very strange interpretation of the IANA transition proposals. more
The following rather alarming text caught my eye today... Had the text appeared under a less august letterhead, or signed by less qualified authors, there would be no cause for alarm. However, the letterhead was World Economic Forum and the authors were William J. Drake, Vinton G. Cerf, and Wolfgang Kleinwächter. As one of three coordinators for the Yeti-DNS project, this feels a bit like I'm in big trouble now. So, let's discuss the matter. more
On March 20th, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Op-ed writer L. Gordon Crovitz published an article titled "Stop Obama's Internet Giveaway". In his opinion piece Mr. Crovitz opposed any near-term transition of the IANA functions... In the course of his article Mr. Crovitz also stated, "Icann already has been kowtowing to authoritarian regimes," alluding to former CEO Fadi Chehade's December 2015 decision to become a Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee to China's World Internet Conference... more
After two years of meetings, comment periods, and more meetings, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers submitted its IANA transition proposal to the US Department of Commerce last week at the end of the ICANN 55 meeting in Marrakech. While this is a critical milestone and the multi-stakeholder community should be commended for its efforts, several concerns still remain. more
What is the current state of DNSSEC deployment around the world and also in Africa? How can you deploy DNSSEC at a massive scale? What is the state of using elliptic curve crypto algorithms in DNSSEC? What more can be done to accelerate DNSSEC deployment? Discussion of all those questions and much more can be found in the DNSSEC Workshop streaming live out of the ICANN 55 meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, on Wednesday, March 9, from 9:00 to 15:15 WET. more
On February 4, 2016, U.S. Senator (and Republican Party Presidential nomination contender) Ted Cruz, joined by Senators James Lankford and Michael Lee, dispatched a letter to ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade stating that "we were surprised and dismayed to learn that you have agreed to co-chair a high-level advisory committee for the World Internet Conference, which is organized by the Chinese government, while you serve as the Chief Executive Officer of ICANN under contract with the United States Government". The letter continued by posing a series of nine questions... more
The new gTLD program of 2012, based on the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) policy recommendations of 2007, has been both a success and mess. In terms of its success, many new and innovative names are being introduced on the Internet, more most every day. The mess has involved ad-hoc, independent decisions by the Board and implementation decisions by ICANN staff that have resulted in variety of problems including a broken community evaluation process... more
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has released a statement today regarding a letter that Cruz, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) received from Fadi Chehade, CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Friday. more
In 2015 we saw many agreements on Internet Governance. 193 Governments agreed in the UN General Assembly on the WSIS 10+ Outcome Document. They agreed to extend the mandate of the IGF for ten years. They agreed to strengthen the multistakeholder approach. And they agreed to make more efforts to bring the next billion users online until 2020. The UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) agreed on a number of confidence building measures to strengthen cybersecurity. more
The December 21 deadline for submission of public comments on the latest CCWG-Accountability draft proposal is quickly approaching. In this second draft of the proposal, great strides have been made toward addressing the accountability issues that members of the community have raised (notably, Lawrence Strickling's recent remarks). As I have previously emphasized, any plan to ensure the accountability of the ICANN Board of Directors must be closely scrutinized before ICANN pursues its implementation. more