Internet Governance

Vertical Integration: A View from the Bottom Up

An interesting thing happened on the way to ICANN's new Affirmation of Commitments. ICANN staff has consistently recommended a reversal of its longstanding policy that prohibits a registry from acting as a registrar in its own top level domain ("TLD"). We see two good reasons why this anti-consumer proposal is unacceptable.

Afilias Statement on ICANN Affirmation of Committments with US Department of Commerce

Today Afilias President & CEO Hal Lubsen released a statement concerning ICANN's new Affirmation of Commitments with the US Department of Commerce.

Comments on ICANN’s IRT Final Report

Several months ago, at the end of the ICANN Mexico City conference, the ICANN Board announced the establishment of an "Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT) comprised of an internationally diverse group of people to develop and propose solutions to the over-arching issue of trademark protection.

The Internet as a Democratic Utility

In the wake of our recent news that .ORG has officially registered 7 million domains, some comments made to CNN by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark this week really resonated with me. The article, entitled "Internet Can Strengthen Democracy" discusses many of the same issues we have found to be the driving forces behind .ORG's consistent year-over-year growth -- community building, interaction, and inclusivity.

Did We Miss ICANN’s Reply?

On July 29, the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) and Public Interest Registry (PIR) sent out a joint letter to ICANN asking it to consider the interests of the end-users as core to its policies in Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) implementation... As of today's date, August 21, 2008, we have yet to receive even an acknowledgement of receipt of our letter...