No Such Weblog

Tonight, I have shut down the mutt bug tracking system: The system (a debbugs installation) wasn't able to cope with the spam thrown at it, and I didn't have the resources needed to harden it against the assault.

It's sad that spam makes e-mail-based automated systems increasingly useless.

The excellent anonymous Still at Large blog points to this proposal currently under discussion with the registrar constituency. Basically, that proposal amounts to rejecting those recommendations from GNSO WHOIS Task Force 1+2 that haven't been torpedoed by ICANN staff. Since the registrar constituency is (besides registrants) one of the parties "most affected" by the proposed policies, that constituency's vote will have to be taken very seriously.

As one of the members of TF1+2, I'm of course unhappy that the group has finally come full circle, and that the work done over the past year (it's not just 175 days -- there were TF1 and TF2 before!) seems mostly moot today: On conflicts between applicable law and the RAA, we're waiting for ICANN staff (still no appointment, sorry); on tiered access, we're apparently back to "fact-finding" (not that we spent spring 04 on that, in two separate groups); and now, on notification and consent, we can look for a new consensus, because the contracted party objects.

Looking for new consensus, though, becomes increasingly difficult: The registrar constituency is now about to reject a consensus that has been negotiated (and, I seem to recall, approved) by that very constituency's representatives. It is doing so at a stage in overall WHOIS policy-development at which the formal PDP is being used as a process for documenting agreement.

The message that the registrar statement is about to send to the overall ICANN community is that its representatives on Task Forces can't be taken seriously. That's far worse news than all the missed deadlines and other systemic flaws in ICANN's policy-making process.