Over at IGP Blog, Milton Mueller has posted a WHOIS timeline, which indeed makes for a nice presentation of the institutional drama that ICANN has seen over the years, and that I spent more time on that I'd ever want to be reminded of.
The timeline gets a bit fuzzy on the facts, however, when it comes to the 2003 and 2004 events.
The 2003 WHOIS Steering Committee (results) was actually a meta-committee to write charters for no less than three Task Forces (TF1 on restricting access for marketing purposes, TF2 on the data elements collected and displayed, TF3 on accuracy), all of which were launched at the GNSO council meeting in Carthage in October '03.
The subsequent task forces consumed a lot of time (of course they exceeded their chartered time by far), and my memory of what happened where is getting blurry, to say the least. I do remember that Task Force 3 had an abysmal preliminary report collecting and recommending all the ideas that had been found positively harmful before (and that's quite an achievement, even at ICANN!); I don't remember where that group went afterwards. Task Forces 1 and 2 were merged at the GNSO Council meeting in Kuala Lumpur in July 2004 (when I made my first visit to Boston). Some drama ensued, including what I back then called a torpedo from ICANN staff, a U-turn by the registrars, and an invocation of the ICANN ombudsman just to get an appointment with staff.
Around that time, I dropped out of the process, partially due to frustration, partially due to having moved on. In retrospect, I'm still surprised I stayed around for so long.
