Late last month, ICANN took a major step toward addressing some ongoing concerns by signing a new agreement with the U.S. government entitled the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) heralded as a "dramatic step forward" for full management of the Internet's domain name system through a "multi-stakeholder model of consultation." ...While the Joint Project Agreement may indeed represent an important change, a closer examination of its terms suggest that there may be a hidden price tag behind ICANN newfound path toward independence -- the privacy of domain name registrants. more
Apparently, at this stage, it is only a proposed ruling. But I am no lawyer. This story has been discussed before, when Spamhaus, which is located in the UK, was sued in the US by a spammer. They refused to come before the court as "they do no business in Illinois, and are located in the UK...After this court ruling, Spamhaus.org was under a DDoS attack, in my opinion for the purpose of preventing users from reaching the information it provided about the court ruling. This was done along-side a Joe Job, sending fake email appearing to come from Spamhaus's CEO... more
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
ICANN today issued a press release and a series of documents about its relationship with the U.S. Department of Commerce. ...ICANN is no longer bound by the specific set of milestones that were in its prior MoU with DOC. With this freedom comes great responsibility. Without detailed government oversight, and without market competition for policymaking for domain names, ICANN (and the ICANN Board) has a great obligation to be accountable to its community. more
Bret Fausett's recent assessment of Tralliance's ".museum-like" wild card is just dead wrong. If Tralliance is so focused on monetizing its search results, why, then, would we not capitalize on the cornerstone of our registry, directory.travel? The fact is .travel is a sponsored space on the Net that is designed to do one thing and one thing only: Serve its constituency. For years the community has heard me at the open forum microphone reminding the ICANN board of directors that the industry was anxious to have its own domain to enable it to improve business efficiency... more
Why shouldn't there be a .gadi TLD? Why not one for Microsoft? This post is not about alternate roots or why they are bad, this post is about something else. We do need to go over some background (from my perspective) very quickly though. ICANN has a steel-fist control over what happens in the DNS realm. They decide what is allowed, and who gets money from it. Whether it's VeriSign for .com or any registrar for the domains they sell. They decide if .gadi should exist or not. ...What I am here to discuss is why Microsoft, as a non-arbitrary choice this time, indeed, of all the world, should kick it aside, creating an alternate root while at the same time not disturbing the world's DNS. more
The London School of Economics review of the GNSO was recently released by ICANN. ...The review is refreshing. But first, a pause: Do you know what the GNSO is or what it does? Do ICANN's processes seem difficult to understand? I bet (unless you've been going to ICANN meetings) you don't know much about this. And the focus of the report on the impenetrability of ICANN's work is refreshing and very useful. more
Internet Governance is the buzzword, especially over the past couple of years, with debates and negotiations taking place almost with the same intensity and pathos of delicate issues, such as terrorism. But Internet Governance is a delicate issue. At the beginning, there was the web that made everything better... Life was good and exciting. That was Internet 1.0. But consider Internet 2.0, currently in development. No longer an egalitarian utopia, it has become much like the rest of our society -- divided by class, geography, culture, religion and politics. And its growing fragmentation threatens us all -- because we will be asked to take sides. more
The 2004 new sTLD round brought about a new type of TLD in the form of .asia and .cat. As we always struggle for words to capture their nature, I call them "geoTLDs". Culture, language and ethnicity are also part of geography. Contrary to ccTLDs, geoTLDs do not have a territorial meaning. They are a wonderful addition to the Internet as they provide a way to demonstrate one's commitment to a community that is not defined by borders, yet linked to where the individual chooses to be. ...Will they be? They will, unless we do the wrong thing now. more
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
The new and proposed ICANN registry contracts contain no definite price terms, and thus permit potential tiered pricing on a per domain name basis. This has raised concern within the community that a registry operator might abuse its sole source position to engage in pricing practices detrimental to registrants. ...Notwithstanding the possibility of tiered pricing on a per domain name basis in connection with the recently executed sponsored registry contracts (.MOBI, .JOBS, .TRAVEL, .CAT, and .TEL), there have been numerous comments submitted in connection with this possibility in connection with the proposed contracts for the .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG registry contracts. There were four messages that motivate me to write this article... more
Way back in 2000-2001, ICANN approved a handful of new top level domains, and entered into agreements with their promoters. Three of the sponsored domains, are coming up for renewal next year, so they've sent in their renewal proposals. A sponsored domain is one that restricts who can register to members of a particular community, in this case respectively co-ops, museums, and the airline industry. Let's take a look and see how they're doing. more
In September 2005 ICANN approved the first top–level Internet domain to be dedicated to a particular human language and culture: '.cat'. A related paper was recently published in First Monday by Peter Gerrand, titled "The Catalan campaign to win the new .cat top level domain". As explained in its abstract, the paper explains: "While '.cat' creates a precedent for greater use on the Internet of 'minority languages', there are significant hurdles for other candidates for language–based top–level domains. The paper discusses the concomitant factors needed to support the greater use of any minority language on the Internet." more
If you're brave, today you can finally download the Internet Explorer 7 public beta. Why should you be interested? Not because the browser's wonderful. It isn't -- initial reports are that it's not ready for prime-time. But you might be interested to know that as of today, users of IE will be able to use internationalized domain names (IDNs). ...Many other browsers are already IDN-capable, including Firefox, but most people in the world use Explorer. Think China, Japan, India. Think most of the world's population... Think of millions of new Internet users working in their own language, customers for commercial goods and services. But think also about intellectual property nightmares, think about phishing, think about whether there's one interoperable Internet, or several Internets acting very weird. These issues and others will become big news when people start using IDNs massively -- and with support from Internet Explorer, that's about to happen. more
Most of us would be put off if a court issued a press release cheering the number of prisoners its judges had put behind bars or the number of tenants it had helped landlords to evict. That seems antithetical to the neutral adjudication of disputes, and ethical rules regularly decry such "appearance of bias." Yet WIPO seems to think it perfectly natural to crow about its arbitrators' favoritism for complainants against "cybersquatters" in UDRP proceedings. It issued a release that reads like a solicitation for trademark claimants' business, not a promotion of neutral arbitration services... more
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