No Such Weblog

Seems like the actual next ICANN meeting isn't Carthage, but Marina del Rey -- with just registrars and registries... More from the registrars list.

Here are the notes I sent to ALAC from last week's GNSO Council conference call.

This is a much-belated report from the WHOIS Steering Committees telephone conference two weeks ago. For the ALAC, both Wendy Seltzer and I participated.

Bret Fausett has found some interesting news in SEC filings by register.com.

SchwimmerLegal.com has a nice overview table that links home pages, WHOIS services, and registration and dispute resolution policies for a large number of ccTLDs.

GoDaddy.com offers c-Site as a service that is supposed to make federal copyright registration in the US easier. Bret Fausett calls their marketing overly simplistic, if not outright deceptive. The people behind copyright blog, however, write: How does $9,95 ... sound to give your site protection against theft and unauthorized use? Not bad.

Update: Here's a third lawyer weighing in on the topic.

ICANN's ccNSO Launching Group is now taking membership applications for the Country Code Names Supporting Organization.

Società Internet, the Italian ISOC chapter, has submitted the first at large structure application to ALAC. The committee will now review this application according to the certification process for at-large structures that was adopted in Montreal.

The At-Large Advisory Committee is seeking comments on its draft statement on new gTLDs. The statement argues in favor of a more open sTLD RFP, and lists a number of general principles that any addition of new gTLDs should adhere to. Comments can be submitted to forum@alac.icann.org until September 7. (Of course, you're also free to use this weblog to comment...)

Via Goolgenews: According to Koera IT News, governments and businesses in Asia are in the process of defecting from the current Internet address (domain) structure which is unilaterally administered by the US-led ICANN, and begin to unveil independent alternative services.

The article goes on to talk about some new service offers which appear to aim at providing complete URLs in non-latin scripts, from the protocol identifier to the top level domain. (As much of the referenced information isn't available in any language that I'd understand, I may quite well be misunderstanding this, though.)

Martin Schwimmer has more details on the planned House hearings about the IP lobby's top gripes with ICANN (ICANNwatch broke the story), including a copy of the letter from representatives Lamar Smith and Howard Berman to the Department of Commerce.

Elana Broitman's note to the registrars list reminds me to blog this: ICANN is in the process of implementing its transfers policies, and has convened a Transfers Assistance Group to help with this. Sebastian Ricciardi and myself are representing the ALAC there. The group's first call took place a week ago, and was very constructive. Preliminary results are expected for 9/11, when most of the group will meet in Marina del Rey.

Questions the group has to deal with include what agreements to modify in order to implement the transfers policies, what a standardized form of authorization for a transfer should look like, what to fill in for some of the time lines left open in the policy proper, etc.

Another one from the registrars' list: Representatives from the Intellectual Property Constituency are going to call into the registrars' meeting in Marina del Rey to discuss WHOIS privacy and accuracy.

Also, the IPC's Metalitz will be a witness at the upcoming Congressional hearing on WHOIS on 4 September, with Ted Kassinger (DoC), Ben Edelman, and an unknown FBI representative.

Martin Schwimmer points to a "not flattering" NY Times article on RCOM's latest financial moves: This Company's Shareholders May Regret It if They Don't Sell .

This announcement was just posted: The ALAC has received an infoDev iCSF grant to support travel of qualifying African participants to ICANN's Carthage meetings, and to a workshop held in connection with the meetings.

Over on CircleID, Bruce Young tells a story of an Internet user who gets into trouble because "his" domain name was registered in the name of a webhosting provider that went bankrupt later on.

He demands that ICANN should put in place safeguards which would prevent this from happening. In particular, Young suggests that customers should not just be able to transfer domain names between registrars, but also between "virtual hosts"; that ICANN establish rules to protect customers of such corporations in the event of business failure, up to the content stored there; and that ICANN mandate that when an intermediate company registers a domain on behalf of a customer, the domain record's administrative contact, as a minimum, must reflect the customer, not the company acting on the customer's behalf.

As far as registrars are concerned, ICANN is currently doing its homework on domain name portability.

As far as web hosting companies are concerned, though, these suggestions only look appealing at first sight. Upon closer inspection, they wouldn't be good policy.

Via CircleID comes a pointer to Bob Frankston's essay Implementing .DNS: We're selling numbers. Big numbers and we promise that we'll never sell the same number twice. The benefits: Stable URLs that don't suddenly point to unrelated content, and domain names that come without semantic connotations and all the baggage these bring into the game.

Alexander Svensson notes that .kids.us is going to be launched on Thursday. He takes a critical look (in German) at some of the questions that a kid-safe domain will have to face: Kid-safe content is a relative notion; a movie that's R-rated in the US can be considered harmless here. Also, the policies in place in .kids.us are so restrictive that the only content available is non-interactive, static, and un-linked. "Families would probably be better off with a CD-ROM with kid-safe content", Alexander writes.

While the objections are well-taken, I have a problem with his final conclusion, that not delegating .kids in 2000 may have been the best decision ICANN has ever made. On the merits, he's right. But should ICANN look at these merits? Shouldn't it have permitted a .kids domain, and let it fail?

ALAC proudly presents: alac.info (aka: Blogging At Large), the committee weblog. The hope is that we can turn this into a place where you can regularly find first-hand notes from committee members on current topics.

Of course, alac.info has the blogging software's comment feature enabled, so please feel free to let us know your views.

Vittorio Bertola looks at the possible ways in which the ALAC could focus its work, and implicitly takes up some recent criticism.

Karl Auerbach (who doesn't seem to believe in trackback) responds to yesterday's notes on representativity, and tries to figure out what I meant.

Not ICANN-related, but aggregator-related: Library Stuff reports that My Yahoo now has a really nice RSS aggregator module. Current bugs mostly look like they'll be fixed quickly: Currently, that aggregator can't deal with description-only feeds (like Scripting News or (void *)), and it seems to have problems to properly digest time stamps in "non-funky" Userland or Blogware feeds. "Funky" Movable Type blogs work perfectly, though.

Heise reports (in German) about a preliminary injunction by a court in Hamburgt which found "be-mobile.de" to be confusingly similar to "t-mobile.de", since both domain names sound similar. Previously, a lower court that apparently focused on the written form of the domain names had found no confusing similarity, and had not granted the injunction.

Further discussion (in German).

Florian Hitzelberger has interviewed Sabine Dolderer (.de; Google translation) on a number of topics, including ICANN reform -- There is no new era. ICANN 2.0 is just presenting itself in a more friendly way than ICANN 1.0. --; ccNSO and the question whether .de will join -- We're currently assessing whether the possible benefits of joining the ccNSO would outweigh the problems. The problem is, we don't find such benefits. --; possible government control over .de; whether or not .de will adopt the UDRP -- There's neither a reason, nor demand for doing this. --; international uniform WHOIS policies -- A globally uniform policy would fail due to divergent privacy laws. --; and a host of other topics. Worth reading.

The written testimony for yesterday's WHOIS hearing is now available from the web page of the subcommittee on courts, the Internet, and intellectual property: Metalitz; Edelman; Farnan (FBI); Kassinger (DoC).

From NANOG: During the root zone (.) update later today, specifically with root zone serial number 2003090501, the entries for .org will be modified. Effective with the 2003090501 load, the entry will reflect the removal of the Verisign NSTLD.COM nameservers. The .org zone file will continue to be pushed to the Verisign nameservers for a short period of time.

Heise online reports about a judgment from a Hamburg court that would limit the availability of .ag domain names in Germany to "Aktiengesellschaften" (abbreviated AG), the equivalent of a corporation.

Writes Paul Twomey to Chuck Gomes: We understand that VeriSign has stated it intends to launch offering the WLS to the public in October 2003. We wish to reiterate, and reaffirm our mutual understanding, that the WLS may not be launched until 1) negotiations on conditions for offering the WLS are final and the contractual amendments to the .com and .net agreements effected and 2) in accordance with our Memorandum of Understanding with the United States Department of Commerce, the Department of Commerce has approved the contractual amendments as required by Section 1 of the MoU, as amended.

On the substance of WLS implementation, ICANN accepts Verisign's proposal for implementing registrant notification, and suggests an alternative to condition (c), the registrar "black-out" provision. The alternative proposal is to introduce penalties for registrar abuse of "insider knowledge" into the RRA, review enforcement of that provision in the VeriSign neutrality audit, and to introduce a general blackout period for WLS subscriptions which would start 10 days prior to the scheduled expiration date of a domain name, and would continue through the duration of the auto-renew grace period.

Assuming that GNSO's deletes policy becomes effective, this approach will adress the concern I had raised about this last year.

Bruce Tonkin on US Patent Application 2002/0145992 A1: In my view this is a straight forward application of database technology.

Some reactions to the recent WHOIS hearings from the registrars list: Mike Palage and Rob Hall attended the hearing; Elana Broitman suggested to send a letter to the subcommittee in order to add the registrars' perspective to the congressional record. That letter won't be sent on behalf of the registrars' constituency, though.

From Congressman Lamar Smith's opening statement of last week's WHOIS hearings: Mr. Berman and I wrote Secretary Evans on August 8 requesting that, among other things, any succeeding MOU: (1) be limited to one-year, (2) preserve public access to online systems, like "Whois," and (3) take steps to improve the integrity of registrant contact information. ... In response, we will hear testimony that Commerce: (1) intends to extend the MOU with ICANN for more than one year, (2) "recognize[s]" the value of public access to online systems, like "Whois," and (3) intends to include no affirmative steps in the MOU in an effort to improve ICANN's underwhelming enforcement record. While Commerce intends to add a laundry list of seven "milestones" to assess ICANN's future performance, not one of these deals principally with Whois, contract enforcement, or intellectual property protections. This, too, is inexcusable.

Elana Broitman has posted a presentation on what she calls Interim Whois Solutions. I'd rather talk about dirty hacks; some of the proposed steps -- like returning GIFs over port 43 WHOIS -- simply don't look feasible.

Representatives of the US government are going to have a conference call on WHOIS with members of the registrars' constituency on 17 September. Government-side participants: Lader, Sene, Layton (NTIA); Mithal (FTC); LoGalbo (DOJ); Larsen (IRS); Cotton (USPTO).

... or: When is a hyperlink a hyperlink?

Alexander Svensson continues to cover the development of .kids.us, and has a close look at the first site established there. Particularly fascinating -- with regard to policies in place that forbid hyperlinks that take a user outside of the kids.us domain-- is a links page Alexander has found -- it points to web sites outside .kids.us with content about American presidents. Instead of using actual hyperlinks, the URLs are simply listed there, as part of the page text.

Update: Jeff Neumann responds (thanks) that listing web sites in the way it's done on the Smithsonian's page is perfectly acceptable in .kids.us. Fascinating.

Bruce Tonkin has posted notes from the WHOIS discussion that was held in Marina del Rey a week ago. The registrars' priorities according to these notes seem to be (in this order) restricting data mining, changing the amount of data that must be displayed to the general public, and further addressing accuracy issues raised by the IP and law enforcement communities.

ICANN has just announced that its new MoU with the US Department of Commerce will last until September 30, 2006.

The new .au WHOIS policy (background materials) in a nutshell: The names and e-mail addresses of the registrant and the technical contact are the only personal data disclosed. There are restrictions on the number of queries that a user can send to the WHOIS service. Law enforcement requests are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

On the Council's agenda for today: Actions from the last meeting, i.e., WIPO2 committee, UDRP issue prioritization, number of representatives per constituency, new gTLDs; TLD wildcard entries; WHOIS steering group update; UDRP issue prioritization.

Alexander Svensson takes a look at the WSIS process, and notes that the ongoing Prepcom-3 is probably a good example of what internet governance in a government-led ICANN replacement could look like: Governments negotiate behind closed doors, large parts of industry and civil society are permitted to wait on the hallway. That perspective doesn't look terribly promising -- unofficial reports coming in from prepcom-3 quite frankly sound a lot more bizarre than any ICANN meeting I've experienced so far.

An interesting comment concerning the Redemption Grace Period was sent to the ALAC's forum list yesterday. The story: A registrant doesn't get renewal notices from his registrar (Network Solutions) -- but, after expiry, there is an offer to use the Redemption Grace Period to get the domain name back, for $ 150 instead of the usual $ 30. Apparently, an attempt to transfer the domain name away from NSI had failed earlier on.

Update: A similar story is told in this message to Dave Farber's IP list. This particular registrant seems to believe that the domain name in question was successfully transferred away from NSI prior to expiry, though.

Ed Foster reports about registrants who transferred their domain names away from Network Solutions, but on October 1 received expiration notices that offered to renew the domain names in question for an extra fee. NetSol later sent a letter apologizing for sending out erroneous notices to former clients.

Sounds like the pattern observed in messages to the ALAC's forum address and to Dave Farber's IP list in early October.

The marketing spin: At exactly this time, hundreds of thousands of extremely attractive names, taken on most other TLDs like .com, .net, .org, .biz and .info, suddenly becomes available, probably for the last time in many years. .NAME is the last TLD to become fully open of the 7 new top-level-domains introduced by ICANN in 2001.

Unsponsred registry operators to ICANN: The unsponsored registry members of gTLD Registries Constituency (.biz, .com, .info, .name, .net, .org and .pro) are concerned that a process for the introduction of Registry Services involving a policy development process within the ICANN community may pose serious competition issues. Referral of new Registry Services through a PDP, or even community consultation, when some members of the community may be viewed as competitors with the gTLD Registries for certain Registry Services could potentially inhibit and interfere with the business of the gTLD Registries.

Paul Twomey had asked the GNSO to develop a process for the approval of new registry services in the context of ICANN's demand that Verisign stop its sitefinder service. A GNSO Council conference call to discuss this is scheduled for Thursday this week.

Press release: VeriSign to Sell Network Solutions Business to Pivotal Private Equity.

VeriSign is selling most of its Netwrok Solutions registrar business. The .com/.net registry is remaining with VeriSign.

The GNSO Council last night voted to ask ICANN for an issues report on creating a process for reviewing new registry services; this was in response to a request from Paul Twomey. At the call, a draft letter from Twomey to the council was read that contains the formal request, and makes the actual scope of the planned policy-development process more clear. That letter is expected to be published today.

I'll be posting extensive notes from the call once that letter is out and I had a chance to make sure that my notes on its content are correct.