Code

Hiatus

Ross — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 04:53:00 -0700

Not that this is any sort of news, but I’m putting this blog on hiatus. I’ve got wayy too much stuff on the go to keep a close eye on anyone’s stuff but my own.

ICANN | ICANN Board Votes Against .XXX Sponsored Top Level Domain Agreement

Ross — Wed, 10 May 2006 17:34:00 -0700

ICANN Board Votes Against .XXX Sponsored Top Level Domain Agreement

via ICANN (thanks for the link Tim)

I can't wait to hear "why" on this one.

Somedays I really wonder about this organization.

In some respects, this is more disappointing than the Verisign settlement. That was mostly a selfish, power-hungry decision. This just seems plain chicken.

The costs of CALEA

Ross — Mon, 08 May 2006 19:20:00 -0700

Tim Berners-Lee: "Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor." Permanent link to this item in the archive.

– via Scripting News: 5/7/2006.

Susan Crawford: “This is a very big step that won't get as much attention as the Net Neutrality fight….There are costs to innovation -- having to ask permission before launching a new service. There are costs to privacy -- having to design everything to have a back door for law enforcement.”

It seems as if the policy makers are catching up to the technology makers – except the eyeglasses they’re wearing have a much different tint.

Whois Goons

Ross — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 21:54:00 -0800

The Problem with Keeping Placenames out of the Root

Ross — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 21:00:00 -0800

The problem with trying to keep place names out of the root is that all but four of the existing gTLDs are also place names.

#icann

Ross — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 14:10:00 -0800

As is becoming tradition during the ICANN meetings, #icann is open for business. Connect to irc.freenode.net and join the fun.

ICANN Wellington Meeting Notes: Round 1, The calm before the storm....

Ross — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:53:00 -0800

For me, today was the first real day of the ICANN meetings. It was neatly broken up into two discrete bits – everything that happened before lunch, and everything that happened after.

First thing this morning I had a meeting with the GNSO Review team from the London School of Economics. These very pleasant folks are conducting a review of the GNSO’s effectiveness for ICANN’s Board of Directors. We talked for roughly two hours about everything – good, bad and ugly as it related to the function of the GNSO within ICANN. I can’t help but thinking that a review of ICANN by the ICANN Board of Directors might be more suitable.

At the end, they asked me specifically what I wanted to make sure they heard from me. I had three points that I underlined with them:

a) Someone needs to ensure that the expectations of the Board, GNSO and Senior Staff are well communicated and understood. This is management 101 stuff. People cannot succeed for you if they don’t know what you expect of them. People cannot be expected to be accountable for their behavior unless these expectations are clear.

None of this is in place today. The Board doesn’t set clear expectations for the GNSO, and the GNSO doesn’t set clear expectations for the ICANN policy staff that support its policy development activities. And each wonders why the other isn’t doing things in a way that supports the common goals. This is indicative of a classic management failure. i.e. ICANN’s Board has been A Bad Boss. The GNSO Council has been A Bad Boss. We shouldn’t settle for this mediocrity – change must be had.

b) That ICANN is a tremendously opaque organization and that the GNSO has wrongfully inherited much of this legacy. ICANN does not render itself accessible, nor does it properly communicate the basis for its decisions. A lot of this has to do with poor organization and some of it is by design. The GNSO can only be as transparent and accessible as its parent structure. In its current state, the GNSO is tremendously inaccessible, which is more representative of ICANN’s failures, not necessarily of the GNSO itself. Please help us be better by improving yourself. Do something simple – start with your website. Use it as an exercise to start setting best practices and minimum standards for your Supporting Organizations. In the meantime, expect us to continue to live up to the example that you set for us.

c) That ICANN needs to give the GNSO enough room to fail – and succeed. ICANN has a history of attempting to engineer the success of the GNSO. This is a top-down approach that is clearly not working. The GNSO needs to be comfortable in its capabilities and be in a position to exercise a certain amount of discretion in how it achieves its goals. If it fails to live up to the mandate provided to it by ICANN’s Board, the Board should be prepared to designate a successor organization that might be in a better position to fulfill the Board’s expectations. Start with Annex A of the bylaws. Lets move all of the procedural requirements out to a new document that the GNSO manages. The bylaws should only include as much detail as is necessary for you to ensure that our work product is consistent with ICANN’s requirements. Right now, this isn’t even clear because these very important objectives are hidden beneath 20 layers of procedural crud that say silly things like “You have 10 days to produce specific report X” and “You must conduct a serious discovery process in Y time period”. The doesn’t need deadlines from the Board – the GNSO needs the Board’s guidance so that the GNSO can perform. Set your expectations clearly and we’ll live up to them.

Lunch was, well…lunch. If you have lunch at the Intercontinental and are looking for a substantial meal, avoid the chicken breast – a very small chicken breast accompanied by a miniscule portion of poached potato slices. I wondered whether they had left half the dish in the kitchen or something. While tasty, it really didn’t do much to satisfy my appetite.

This afternoon was a mish-mash of meetings. It was an interminable proceeding and I can’t actually say that much of substance was accomplished. The highlight for me was review of some of the starting elements of ICANN’s next budget. If you are a consultant, get in line at the Marina del Rey office. The trough is deep and wide. Cash for consultants everywhere. I asked Kurt Pritz what the impetus for these massive consulting expenditures was and didn’t really get a great answer. In a normal company when you see consulting investments like the ones in the budget document we looked at, you can usually track it back to some explicit strategic decision made to fulfill some growth imperative, deal with competitive threats or to implement massive change processes etc. According to Kurth, these decisions haven’t been explicitly made – which really left me scratching my head. Why is such a heavy investment in consultants being made?

During one of the breaks I had a great discussion with some of the ICANN policy support staff about how we can better organize the GNSO website to maximise its utility to the various stakeholders and participants. I described my vision of the GNSO website as being two parts of a whole – one specific set of resources geared towards ensuring that the GNSO could more effectively coordinate the works of its various task forces, commitee’s and council. This really means better tools for the GNSO. Right now we rely way to much on email and basic website links. We need more interactive group tools like file managers, calendars and the like that make it easier for us to work with one another in the online environment.

We also need to realize that its unlikely that anyone is going to hand us the tools we need to make this happen. If we’re serious about acquiring better tools so that we can guarantee better results, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. I have some thoughts in this area that I’m going to write up to see if I can get the ball rolling in this area.

The second half of the whole includes a set of resources that help the GNSO communicate more effectively with its stakeholders and interested parties. This really just means “making it easier to find stuff on the website” and “making it much easier to understand our processes and become involved in them”. Really though, these communications initiatives would be better suited for implementation on the ICANN website first so that the parent organization has a clear hand in setting the best practices for the rest of its supporting organizations. Not sure why such a hard-core, internet focused organization has such as hard time getting its act together on a basic website strategy. Somebody needs to make this a priority.

We also reviewed the GNSO Rules of Procedure, the basic documents which outline how the GNSO gets stuff done. Some substantive changes were made to the current proposal – all for the better in my opinion. There was some disagreement about how forceful we should get about deadlines for getting items on the agenda. My view was that we should err on being more rigidity in the process because it would lead to greater predictability in the outcome. Marilyn Cade of the Business User Constituency wanted to leave enough flexibility in the process to ensure that we could be responsive to issues that jumped out of the bushes at us.

While I agree with the point in principle, I don’t think that it makes much practical sense leaving something as important as our agenda open to last minute surprises. I would much prefer to reschedule a meeting, or schedule an emergency meeting according to some special procedures rather than leave everything open until the last minute. Wdidn’t resolve this in the meeting – the right people weren’t at the table, but we will pick it up again in future discussions this week.

I was quite pleased that I managed to convince the group to commit some resources to testing out whether or not we could cheaply and effectively start transcribing the meeting recordings of the GNSO Council. I’ve recently discovered that machine transcription services like Castingwords.com are remarkably effective and very affordable. We’ve submitted an MP3 recording of recent meeting to their service for transcription. If the group is satisfied with the results, we will be undertaking a longer three month trial to determine whether or not there is some lasting value to having our meetings transcribed. Personally, I’m a big fan of transcriptions because I can search them, copy from them and incorporate them into the policy documents that I’m continuously working on. There’s a lot to be said for implementing this degree of accessibility.

This evening will be purposely quiet for me. The calm before the storm. The point of no return. The schedule from tomorrow through next Saturday is non-stop. I’m going to make the most of it, do some reading and try and get a good nights sleep.

Unless you’ve got a better offer.

Of Conflicts and Interests

Ross — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:32:00 -0800

During the GNSO Council meeting in Vancouver, I made the remark that “Everybody at this table is a stakeholder. We all have an interest in this issue.” Councillors were talking about conflicts of interest and abstaining, and in my opinion, generally missing the point about what ICANN and the GNSO is all about.

Before I get too deep into this post, I should clarify what I mean when I use the term “conflict of interest”. A conflict of interest is when someone’s private interests get in the way of their performance of a public duty – that their private interests will benefit from the decisions they make in the course of fulfilling their public duty. Private, in this sense, can be taken to mean “personal or professional” and not necessarily disclosed.

Wikipedia has this to say:

A conflict of interest is a situation in which someone in a position of trust, such as a lawyer, a politician, or an executive or director of a corporation, has competing professional or personal interests. Such competing interests can make it difficult to fulfill his or her duties impartially. Even if there is no evidence of improper actions, a conflict of interest can create an appearance of impropriety that can undermine confidence in the ability of that person to act properly.

– courtesy of Wikipedia

ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization exists mostly to provide ICANN’s Board of Directors with substantive recommendations regarding policy related to Generic Top-Level Domain Names. For instance, the question of whether or not to create new top-level domain names like .web or .rader is an area of policy currently being discussed by the GNSO. The GNSO is made up of constituencies¹ which are theoretically intended to represent the interests of significant stakeholders.

By definition, the GNSO is a collective of special interest groups – each with their own unique perspective, agenda and special areas of interest. The ISPs are worried about networking and connectivity issues, the Non-commercial Users are worried about free speech and privacy issues and the registration providers are worried about the business of selling domain names and managing DNS infrastructure. All of these special interest groups have an explicit role in making policy recommendations to the board and each is directly affected when those recommendations become binding policy.

“But wait…” I hear you saying. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest? How can someone help develop policies that they might directly benefit from?”

That’s the beauty of it. Everyone in the GNSO has a conflict of interest, but each of those interests are different. These differences have the tendency of balancing each other out. For instance, the business users certainly wouldn’t let the registration providers (registries and registrars) pass along a policy recommendation that charged Fortune 500 customers $1,000,000 per year for their domain registrations.

The only time this gets sticky is when ICANN’s Board of Directors tries to listen specifically to individual participants instead of the constituencies and the GNSO itself. We recently heard from ICANN Board member that it was difficult to listen to the GNSO because people’s interests aren’t always apparent. So instead of asking questions about those interests, this board member shut out all input on the subject from anyone affiliated with the GNSO. He based his decisions on what he thought ought to happen based on his perception of the view of the issues as summarized by ICANN’s staff. And ignored the more balanced view of the GNSO in the process. ICANN wasn’t designed in a way that allows direct input to the Board to happen in a fair, unbiased and useful manner. Anything received by the Board from individual participants is an end-run around the process and should be treated as such. I don’t know why the Board continues to invite it – its broken and diminishes the value of the standard processes we’ve all agreed to.

But back to conflicts of interest.

I’m hearing now that the GNSO needs to try and be more neutral in the way it develops its policy recommendations. Neutral to the point of reducing the participation of affected parties in certain circumstances because of how this might appear to the outside world. In a normal organization lacking the structural balance of the GNSO, this might be a reasonable approach. In this case, it further undermines the basic deal that lead to ICANN’s creation.

The basic deal was that the private sector would assume management of the DNS from the United States Government. ICANN was specifically created by the private sector to provide the framework necessary to make this happen. Unfortunately, it appears that Paul Twomey and Vint Cerf have a much different interpretation of the terms of the basic deal. The Twomey/Cerf ICANN framework looks a lot more like a miniature ITU – which has very little to do with the private-sector, and everything to do with Big G governments.

“But wait…” You’re saying.

(That’s the second time! How do I know you’re saying that? You say it a lot.)

“But wait…aren’t governments used to managing things like those managed by ICANN? Doesn’t every government have a ton of experience with regulation and managing economic policy and all the other things that ICANN keeps getting accused of doing badly?”

ICANN isn’t a regulator, it doesn’t regulate and it certainly doesn’t manage economic policy. The people that say that are either misinformed or misinforming. Usually both.

Sometimes ICANN looks like a regulator because it places limits on certain practices and makes other practices mandatory. But think back, where do these limitations and mandatory measures come from? A lot of times, they come from the GNSO. And who is the GNSO? Say it with me – The GNSO are the users and suppliers of the system. Remember – the very same people that help make the policy are often affected by the policy.

ICANN’s GNSO does not need to avoid conflicts of interest in its proceedings, rather, it needs to manage them. It needs to ensure that the utmost transparency exists around the affiliations and interests of its members and ensure that the record is clear regarding the terms of each contribution made to the development of each policy .The GNSO needs to increase the rigor with which it documents the policy development process to ensure that substantive conflicts are noted, and to assist each constituency in ensuring its members are making the appropriate disclosures. The GNSO must avoid calls to implement a regime of safe neutrality. The premise of which are entirely inconsistent with ICANN’s original mandate. Instead, the GNSO needs to implement conflict of interest management policy that deals head on with the challenges created by the involvement of the private sector so that the private sector can bring its expertise to bear in dealing with the challenges that lay ahead of the ICANN community.

Interesting conflict, no?

¹ The Internet Service Provider Constituency, The Intellectual Property Constituency, The Business Users Constituency,
The gTLD Registrar Constituency, The gTLD Registry Constituency and The Non-Commercial Users Constituency.

ICANN: Taking a step back - what's really at stake

Ross — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 09:52:00 -0800

I’ve never really viewed Freedom2Innovate as being a particularly thoughtful blog. Too dogmatic and very little apparent value add. I still troll by once in a while to see what the latest posts have in store. Normally I just move on, but a few things from my most recent visit caught my attention and I can’t help but point out a glaring error that F2I passes on from an equally incorrect CNET op-ed.

…When they forced a reduction in wholesale prices for the .net domain last year, none of the eight major registrars passed the $10 million in savings on to their customers. It went to their bottom line.

- CNET via Free2Innovate.net.

The *fact* is that the average selling price for .net domain names is much lower than it was last year prior to the price decrease. Users are getting .net domain names cheaper now than they were a year ago. This is fact, I have data that I can share that supports this.

The error that Free2Innovate is passing on stems from the misperception that “book” or “sticker” prices are equivalent to “street” or “selling” prices. In a competitive market, discounting from the published price is a common activity. Calculating economic pricing impact using book prices is about as accurate as predicting GDP based on sales forecasts – it can be done, but the data is speculative and can’t be used definitively for any economic analysis that requires any measurable degree of certainty.

There are other equally concerning errors in the CNET piece as well. For instance, the connection between domain name registration and domain name resolution services is far less substantial than what the article implies. At no other level of the DNS are these functions so co-mingled as they are at the TLD level. Somehow, the DNS functions at the second-level, and the root-level, quite nicely without the benefit of massive subsidies from registration activities. Furthermore, IP address registration and resolution functions are completely separate as well – and all of these are managed on a non-profit basis without the benefit of massive infrastructure subsidies from related, but mostly tangental functions.

Whether or not one agrees with the terms of ICANNs settlement with Verisign is almost irrelevant. The important issue is how badly the ICANN Board and Staff handled this matter. The factual problems I point out here, are *exactly* the same factual problems that were promulgated by ICANN’s senior staff in their recommendations to ICANN’s Board of Directors. These same errors and misjudgements figured centrally in the Board’s consideration of this highly important matter.

These problems cannot simply be swept under the rug by pronouncements that ICANN must move on and attend to other work. In fact, it is more critical now than ever before to stop and take a look at the quality of the decisions made, and the quality of the recommendations supplied to the Board to inform their decisions. ICANN must also realize that it is no where near transparent or accountable enough that we can simply take its word that “this is a good decision” when the facts clearly show that ICANN has not followed their own processes, that key data and decision points are not part of the public record and that the ICANN staff, at best, provided the board with an incomplete understanding of the facts relative to the situation.

I’m no longer arguing about the status of the Verisign settlement. In fact, let’s take a deep breath and move on. We lost, they won. Water under the bridge.

Rather, I’m arguing about the future of ICANN.

I’m arguing against the scope-creep and increasingly opaque shroud that has fallen over an organization that I would formally have called ours. I’m arguing against the encroachment of the United States judiciary system and Department of Commerce onto the public commons, a commons that still belongs to you and I. I’m arguing against an uninformed and unaccountable “coordinator” imposing its world-view and values on the community. I’m arguing against a private California contractor who’s vision of bottom-up, consensus based decision includes “consulting” with its stakeholders via the Washington Post and New York Times – against an organization that views using the courts of California and Virginia and the sub-committee hearing rooms of Washington D.C. as appropriate venues for making its most important sdecisions. I’m arguing against a Board of Directors who feels that it is acceptable to justify their decisions by denigrating the actions of the well-intended people that most support it.

I’m arguing for an organization that balances my interests – personally, and professionally - with the interests of every single other user – public and private, small and large, individual, corporate and governmental - of the Internet’s domain name system. An organization that acts as steward of the community, and caretaker of the public trust. I’m arguing for the vision and ideals that we signed on for when we endorsed the future promised by the Green Paper, White Paper and original ICANN bylaws. Ideals embodied in an organization that can look its stakeholders in the eye and ask it hard questions about all types of situations, good or bad, so that we can be part of the solution – or at the very least, understand the hard and uncomfortable decisions, whether we actually like them or not.

I’m arguing for MyCANN.

And you should be too.

ICANN's Registrar Community on the ropes: Can the cheese stand alone?

Ross — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:20:00 -0800

Bret makes some great points about the Registrar community and its lack of involvement over the years with the more serious, and less profitable, issues that ICANN has been faced with since its inceptions.

You can draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign a perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

– icann.Blog

The same issues that are now biting the Registrar community square in the ass.

First they ghettoized Individual Users, and we did not speak out—
because we did not represent Individual Users;
Then they isolated and ridiculed the activist Board members and critics, and we did not speak out—
because we are not activist Board members or critics;
Then they dissolved the DNSO General Assembly, and we did not speak out—
because we did not participate in the DNSO General Assembly;
Then they antagonized the Country Code Managers, who resisted fairly well, but we still did not speak out—
because we were not Country Code Managers;
Now they are marginalizing the Registrar community —
…and few are left to speak with us.

…with apologies to Martin Niemöller.

P2P Music Sharing - Little Net Impact on Music Sales

Ross — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 07:02:00 -0800

An extensive study has been published that pretty much confirms everything we've long suspected about the effects of P2P music sharing on actual music sales.

…research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music on downloaders' computers, that P2P users frequently try music on P2P services before they buy, that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic, and that reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services.

– CRTC via Michael Geist

The source of this study?

Canada's version of the RIAA, the Canadian Record Industry Association. The entire CRIA study can be found on the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) web site here.

Oddly, the main press release on the CRIA website breathelessly trumpets that…

The downward spiral of music sales in Canada resumed in 2005 as illegal file swapping exacted a high toll on the country's artists and music industry.

– CRIA, March 2, 2006

Geist notes that CRIA’s own survey critically asks about why people bought less music to better understand this “downward spiral of music sales”. CRIA’s answer?

…Only 10% of respondents cited the availability of music downloads. Instead, people cited a long list of alternatives that have nothing to do with downloading including price (16%), nothing of interest (14%), lack of time (13%), collection is big enough (9%), don't buy (7%), listen to radio (7%), change in tastes (6%), no CD player (3%), have an MP3 player (2%), lack of opportunity to buy (2%), watch more tv (2%), age (1%), only buy what I like (1%). Simply put, P2P simply is not a major factor behind decisions to buy less music.

– Michael Geist, March 17, 2006

None of this should come as a surprise to the “pro-user zealots” out there. It might come as a surprise to the RIAA. I wonder what our Government is going to do with this? Hopefully these facts don’t get twisted around to form the basis of new laws that take away more of my rights.

ICANN Board Neglects Community Input

Ross — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 19:18:00 -0800

ICANN Board member Veni Markovski lays a lot of blame at the feet of the ICANN community over at CircleID;

I think that the policy development in this case did not happen the way it should have… But I don’t think it’s ICANN’s fault. I think it’s a failure of the ICANN community, and the continuous processing in which it has been involved for quite a while. I told a number of times the ICANN community, during our meetings with them, don’t just tell us the problems, we know them. Suggest the solutions, participate in their formation. That didn’t happen.

– Veni Markovski, "Finally the .com Discussion is Over..."

ICANN’s Board of Directors and staff are becoming increasingly hostile to the “community”. Veni’s note isn’t the first indication of this, nor will it be the last. It is one of the more obvious. While blaming the community for failing ICANN, Veni completely ignores the fact that the Board sat on important consensus policy recommendations from the GNSO for months and ICANN’s staff have yet to implement them.

In July of last year, the GNSO adopted a resolution to make a formal consensus policy recommendation to the ICANN Board regarding procedures that ICANN could use to manage requests for consent and related contractual amendments to allow changes in the architecture or operation of a gTLD registry.

So Veni, when you asked to to suggest solutions and participate in their formation, the community listened. We participated and suggested solutions.

And so far, ICANN has done nothing meaningful with our input. Agreements reached since the adoption of this consensus policy completely ignore it, and ICANN staff have yet to complete its implementation, almost four full months since its adoption.

“It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.”
– Nikolai Gogol (1809 - 1852)

Revisiting Redemption

Ross — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 13:20:00 -0800

A registrant recently wrote to me inquiring whether or not I could help them get their domain name back after they accidentally let it expire and someone else re-registered it.

“No problem,” I thought to myself. “Tell the poor guy about how ICANN’s Redemption Grace Period policy will do exactly that.”

Turns out I was dead wrong. In digging into this, I found out that the RGP is actually an optional registry service – not consensus policy. This means that neither registrars, nor registries are obliged to make this valuable domain name recovery process available to registrants.

Later this exact same day, the Wall Street Journal printed a piece on exactly this same subject – they’ve hidden it behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it, but the article contained a quote from ICANN’s CEO, Paul Twomey, indicating that the people have raised concerns about this process, but that no one has proposed a formal policy to deal with it.

The quote kind of bothered me. The GNSO can only do so much to make sure that it is on the right track from a policy perspective. The first time I heard about the issue was because a desperate domain owner reached out to me on his own accord because he thought that I might be able to do something about it. Further, my digging uncovered that the domain owner in question had already been in touch with ICANN staff and that staff frequently receives inquiries from domain owners with various problems. My problem is that I had to find this out for myself. I would really like to see ICANN staff be more proactive in helping the GNSO understand what issues registrants are faced with and be more involved in the conversation regarding what the internet user community needs from our consensus policy processes.

Some have advocated that the GNSO just needs to listen more. But the problem is that in many respects, we don’t have enough people to listen to. There are no unfiltered inputs from individual users into the GNSO – except when they reach out to people like me on an ad hoc basis. Having a clean feedback from ICANN’s staff into our discussions would augment the input we get from Registrar customers, the business users constituency, the non-commercial users constituency and the ALAC.

But I digress… Earlier this afternoon, I found the time to do the basic research necessary to figure out exactly what had to happen in order to get the consensus policy development process moving and sent a request to the GNSO Council to do exactly that. The text of my proposal (minus the copyrighted newspaper article) is reproduced below. I will link to it directly once the GNSO Council mailing list archive catches up.

Bruce, fellow Councillors,

At our next meeting, I would like to propose the initiation of a new policy development process concerning the Redemption Grace Period and request that this topic be added to our agenda.

It has recently come to my attention recently that the current implementation (detailed at http://www.icann.org/bucharest/redemption-topic.htm) is an optional registry service which may not be meeting the needs of registrants as originally envisaged when it was implemented. Recent press reports (see below) and registrant complaints indicate that names are being lost despite the implementation of this registry service.

I have spent a lot of time considering whether or not Council can afford to take on additional work given our current workload and have come to the view that because of the widespread support for the Redemption Grace Period amongst the constituencies (as documented on the ICANN website) and the pre-existence of strong policy and implementation proposals that already have consensus support of the stakeholders, we should be able to confirm the Redemption Grace Period proposals as consensus policy fairly quickly and without much additional effort or contentious debate.

Because of the pre-existing consensus on this issue, I will propose to move this forward without creating a task force per Annex A, Section 8 of the ICANN Bylaws once we have agreed to initiate a PDP and been provided with an issues report by the staff. (http://www.icann.org/general/bylaws.htm#AnnexA-8). i.e. the fast-track.

In the very least, creation of an issues report will gather up substantive data on this subject and allow us to make an informed decision regarding whether or not circumstances like those detailed below are widespread enough to justify launching a full-fledged PDP.

Your consideration of this matter would be extremely appreciated. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to drop me a note (or give me a ring).

-ross

Update: Here is a direct link to the actual request I sent to the GNSO Council Chair, Bruce Tonkin.

GNSO Review Overview

Ross — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 10:22:00 -0800

The ICANN Board is undertaking a review of the GNSO. This is a requirement of ICANN’s Bylaws which are intended to ensure that the GNSO retains its relevance and accountability to its stakeholders, so no surprises there.

The Board has retained The London School of Economics Public Policy Group to undertake the review for the sum of $150,000. The School will be using a variety of methods to collect data to feed into their report, including interviews, survey’s and direct observation. The survey is currently running now and they (and I) are encouraging all members of the community to take some time to make their views on this subject known. If you haven’t already received a survey password, you can ask for one to be sent to you.

Each group of stakeholders is getting a slightly different set of questions. Here is a rundown of the questions they are asking of the Registrar community. In addition to the questions reproduced here, they have also made room for several free form responses.

I’m looking forward to seeing the results that come back.

Thinking about how familiar your organisation is with the work of the GNSO, please give a score for each of the areas below.
What the GNSO does [RANK 1–7]
How the GNSO operates [RANK 1–7]
The main policy issues that the GNSO is currently working on [RANK 1–7]
How the GNSO fits into the wider ICANN community [RANK 1–7]
Thinking about how often your organisation has contact with the GNSO, please tell us roughly how often you do each of the following.
Visit the GNSO website [RANK 1–7]
Speak to other members of the Registrar Constituency about an issue relating to GNSO policy development [RANK 1–7]
Express a view to Registrar Constituency GNSO Council representatives about issues or procedures relating to policy development [RANK 1–7]
Take part in a formal Policy Development Process (PDP) [RANK 1–7]
Participate in major GNSO meetings either in person or in conference [RANK 1–7]
How effectively does the Registrar Constituency use its website (http://www.icann-registrars.org/) for each of the following?
Posting contact details of office holders [RANK 1–7]
Keeping members contact details up-to-date [RANK 1–7]
Making relevant reports and minutes available [RANK 1–7]
Providing audio files of meetings [RANK 1–7]
Keeping up-to-date with relevant GNSO news and issues [RANK 1–7]
Facilitating open discussion on key issues [RANK 1–7]
Attracting new members to the Constituency [RANK 1–7]
How efficiently does the Registrar Constituency do each of the following?
Use audio and video conferencing [RANK 1–7]
Facilitate face-to-face meetings for Constituency members [RANK 1–7]
Use consistent procedures for establishing consensus across Constituency members [RANK 1–7]
Produce authoritative written statements of Constituency positions [RANK 1–7]
Make data available on the degree of consensus across Constituency members [RANK 1–7]
Deliver statements of Constituency positions to the GNSO Council in good time [RANK 1–7]
Thinking about how comprehensively your views are taken into account under the existing Constituency arrangements, please give a score on the extent to which...
The Registrar Constituency takes account of the views of your organisation [RANK 1–7]
The Registrar Constituency takes account of the views of registrars worldwide [RANK 1–7]
The Registrar Constituency represents the views of its members to the GNSO Council [RANK 1–7]
The Registrar Constituency’s views are understood by other ICANN Supporting Organizations [RANK 1–7]
The ICANN Board takes into account the views of the Registrar Constituency in key decisions [RANK 1–7]
Please score each of the six GNSO Constituencies in terms of how effectively they develop policy positions representing their members’ interests.
gTLD Registries [RANK 1–7]
Registrars [RANK 1–7]
Internet Service Providers [RANK 1–7]
Commercial and Business Users [RANK 1–7]
Non-Commercial Users [RANK 1–7]
Intellectual Property interests [RANK 1–7]
Thinking again about the six GNSO Constituencies, please score each one in terms of how much influence they have on the final policy positions of the GNSO Council.
gTLD Registries [RANK 1–7]
Registrars [RANK 1–7]
Internet Service Providers [RANK 1–7]
Commercial and Business Users [RANK 1–7]
Non-Commercial Users [RANK 1–7]
Intellectual Property interests [RANK 1–7]
Thinking about how different organisations comply with ICANN Bylaws and operating procedures, please score each of the following on the extent to which...
The gTLD Registries comply with ICANN bylaws and operating procedures [RANK 1–7]
The Registrars comply with ICANN bylaws and operating procedures [RANK 1–7]
The GNSO Council complies with ICANN bylaws and operating procedures [RANK 1–7]
Other Supporting Organisations follow ICANN bylaws and operating procedures [RANK 1–7]
ICANN follows its own bylaws and operating procedures [RANK 1–7]
Thinking now about the GNSO Council specifically, please score how effectively the website (http://www.gnso.icann.org) is used for each of the following.
Making relevant reports and minutes available [RANK 1–7]
Providing audio files of meetings [RANK 1–7]
Keeping up-to-date with relevant GNSO news and issues [RANK 1–7]
Facilitating open discussion on key issues [RANK 1–7]
Encouraging views and comments from a wide range of interests [RANK 1–7]
Building the organisational profile of the GNSO [RANK 1–7]
Thinking now more generally about the work of the GNSO Council, how efficiently does it do each of the following.
Give sufficient notice on calls for comments and statements [RANK 1–7]
Use consistent procedures for establishing consensus across Constituencies [RANK 1–7]
Make data available on the degree of consensus in the Council [RANK 1–7]
Post procedures and results of elections to the Council [RANK 1–7]
Facilitate face-to-face contact between the GNSO Council and Constituency members [RANK 1–7]
Provide information and resources in languages other than English [RANK 1–7]
Thinking about how the GNSO Council ensures transparency in its policy development, please give a score for each of the following.
Providing feedback to the Registrar Constituency on their comments on key issues [RANK 1–7]
Providing explanation to the Registrar Constituency when suggestions are not (or only partly) adopted [RANK 1–7]
Providing briefing to the Registrar Constituency on major decisions [RANK 1–7]
Ensuring open and fair nominations and elections to the GNSO Council [RANK 1–7]
Representing the views of registrars worldwide [RANK 1–7]
Thinking about how effectively the Policy Development Process (PDP) works, please score the GNSO on each of the following.
Picking the right issues for development [RANK 1–7]
Identifying issues early enough [RANK 1–7]
Scoping policy work appropriately [RANK 1–7]
Sticking to agreed time schedules [RANK 1–7]
Ensuring that the PDP incorporates the widest practicable range of views [RANK 1–7]
Making use of external expertise and research [RANK 1–7]
Delivering practicable recommendations to the ICANN Board [RANK 1–7]
Making the best use of policy support resources [RANK 1–7]
Thinking about the following 5 recent examples of Policy Development Processes (PDPs), please score each one in terms of the quality of policy produced. Where PDPs are still in progress, please score the quality of the policy to date.
Expired Domain Deletion PDP [RANK 1–7]
Whois Accuracy and Bulk Access PDP [RANK 1–7]
Whois and Whois Contacts PDP [RANK 1–7]
gTLD Registry Services Contracts PDP [RANK 1–7]
Introduction of new gTLDs PDP [RANK 1–7]
Thinking about the influence of the GNSO overall, please give a score for each of the following
Influencing major gTLD policy decisions made at ICANN Board level [RANK 1–7]
Influencing relevant gTLD-related decisions made in other key parts of the ICANN community [RANK 1–7]
Influencing governments and international policy makers on relevant issues [RANK 1–7]
Influencing the views of individual Internet users on relevant issues [RANK 1–7]
Influencing the views of commercial stakeholders on relevant issues [RANK 1–7]
Here are some likely challenges facing the GNSO in the next two or three years. Please rate how important each one will be to your organisation.
Raising the profile of the GNSO as a policy development body [RANK 1–7]
Improving the quality of gTLD policy making [RANK 1–7]
Broadening the range of organisations participating in gTLD policy development [RANK 1–7]
Encouraging more intensive participation by major organisations in gTLD policy development [RANK 1–7]
Improving transparency and openness in gTLD policy development [RANK 1–7]
Representing more effectively the views of Internet users worldwide [RANK 1–7]

Now playing: "Lights" from the album "The Back Room" by Editors.

gTLD Registry Constituency Goes off Half-Cocked

Ross — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 11:05:00 -0800

This is shaping up to be an interesting fight – an unwanted, out-of-left-field, silly fight – but still interesting in a “slow-down-to-gawk-at-the-car-wreck” kind of way. On one hand we have most of the GNSO community looking to undertake a review of the gaps between ICANN’s policy and ICANN’s contracts, and the other, the Registry community saying that a review of this sort is beyond ICANN’s scope.

The GNSO Council is, through the TOR, essentially demanding a seat at the negotiating table to determine issues outside of ICANN’s mission. This demand is nonsensical and should be resisted by the Board. Tempting as it may be to avoid controversy, in this case critiques must be addressed head on to avoid setting a precedent that will hobble ICANN for years to come. Acceding to the demands of a few with respect to commercial issues outside of ICANN’s core mission deprives the community of the Board’s informed judgment, limits its future negotiating flexibility and, at the same time, makes it increasingly difficult to resist those who would use ICANN’s agreements with DNS service providers to create an anti-competitive regulatory regime.
– GNSO Registry Constituency Statement

Wow. Talk about a stretch. The Registry community really cranked up the rhetoric here. Demands of a few? Nonsensical?

A couple of thoughts. First, it is a fact that ICANN’s staff, without the benefit of clear consensus policy related to many issues, simply makes stuff up when they are negotiating these contracts. There is no consensus policy, for instance, requiring registries to publish Whois data, use standardized provisioning protocols, implement specific security practices, and so on – yet all of the Registry agreements include language dealing with each of these issues in differing ways.

The proposed policy development process will clarify the expectations of the community for the Board and the Staff when it comes to implementing new and existing registry agreements.

Further to this, I simply don’t trust the staff (or board for that matter) to just “make stuff up”. They lack both the technical, commercial and operational experience to understand the implications of their decisions. They need informed input from those who actually have to deal with the consequences. The alternative is to simply leave the Staff and Board to trust the advice of those they are negotiating with.

Which doesn’t sound like much of a plan.

Furthermore, I’m rather surprised that the Registries are taking such a hostile approach to the policy development effort. The GNSO Council is in the midst of hammering out what the scope of this policy development exercise, which is naturally bounded by ICANN’s mission, mandate and bylaws. The Terms of Reference will be reviewed by ICANN’s legal counsel to ensure that it is consistent with ICANN’s scope. If anything, the GNSO Council needs cooperative input from the registry community to ensure that the work is relevant and that the resultant policy recommendations are well-founded, appropriate, meaningful and useful for the overall purpose of the community – including the registries.

My suggestion to the registries is to calm down, cut back the rhetoric and take a look at the reality of the situation. The facts don’t match your contentions and your hostility towards your customers and users is pretty disturbing.

Now playing: "Good Grief" from the album "Foo Fighters" by Foo Fighters.

Internet Pro Radio | icann.Blog :: Halfway Between Marina del Rey and Brussels

Ross — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 15:20:00 -0800

As Bret points out, the GNSO had its first discussions on allocating new gTLDs last week.

The Names Council of ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization gathered over the weekend, halfway between ICANN's offices in Marina del Rey and Brussels, for a rare face-to-face meeting in Washington, D.C. The subject was new gTLDs.

– icann.Blog

Its worthwhile pointing out that despite the fact that ICANN is collecting millions of dollars per year from registrants and registrars to fund activities like this, that ICANN didn’t spend one nickle funding this meeting.

So who paid for it? Well, the meeting space was kindly donated by AT&T and each attendee paid for their own airfare and accomodation. Since ICANN doesn’t fund GNSO activities, each participant had to kick in an additional $40 to cover lunch for two days and photocopying fees. As a registrar, it basically means that we end up paying twice.

How ICANN treats its GNSO is getting embarassing. Its bad enough that the representatives that the GNSO elects to the ICANN Board of Directors don’t seem to understand the views and interests of the GNSO, but recent events really make me wonder if ICANN is somehow trying to get rid of the GNSO.

For instance the GNSO Council was recently informed by ICANN’s General Counsel that our voting methods contravened ICANN’s bylaws. The problem? We allow elected members not in attendance to pass a proxy to someone who would be attending. When you have a large group from the four corners of the world getting together on a very regular basis, its impossible to schedule teleconferences at times that work for everyone. As a result, a practice of passing proxies emerged many years ago – before the current bylaws were even written. The problem? ICANN’s bylaws prevent the GNSO from fixing this problem without a vote of ICANN’s Board of Directors – making it impossible for the GNSO to fix the problem without, well…begging.

So in the midst of this, it almost seems appropriate that ICANN is forcing senior people from numerous companies to beg for meeting space and pay for photocopies just to enjoy the privilege of making bottom-up, consensus based policy recommendations to a board and staff that increasingly appear to be pursuing their own agenda.

Now playing: "Matamoros Banks" from the album "Devils & Dust" by Bruce Springsteen.

The Root of ICANN"s Problems with China's Problematic Root

Ross — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 13:25:00 -0800

China yesterday announced that they are launching IDN's in their own root. A lot of people missed the real story yesterday in their haste to blame something else on ICANN. It ain’t a new root - they've had their own for a couple of years now - all safely tucked out of the way and immune to US interference, and China isn’t routing around .com, .net, etc. – at least not in any new way.

However, this doesn’t mean that ICANN has clean hands on this issue. Under Paul Twomey (and his predecessor, Stuart Lynn) ICANN has miserably failed to do anything remotely productive with the IDN issue. ICANN has been batting around the issue for a number of years now and has, for all practical purposes, made no substantive progress.

It seems China is tired of having to use English characters to access the web and so has created domains accessable by using Chinese characters.

There are a lot of nations whose people feel the same way. They want to access the net using their own language and characters. There is more to the argument than that, to be sure, but that appears to be the crux of it. In addition, nations such as China resent the control the US government has over ICANN, and ultimately over the net itself.

– On Computers Tips

Sure, committee’s have been formed (not just one, but at least two), “guidelines” have been drafted (not once, but at least twice) and workshops have been worked and reports have been reported (more times than I can shake a stick at)– but nothing has been done. The internet isn’t really any closer to implementing IDNs now than it was five years ago.

So all in, I can’t really blame China for taking matters into their own hands, at least not as it relates to IDNs. My next question is how long will it be before the other non-English economies do the same? One must wonder why France, Germany, Spain and Japan aren’t doing the same thing. Surely ICANN isn’t preventing them, anymore than ICANN prevented China.

The only difference between China’s action and Japan’s inaction is a warm diplomatic relationship with the United States. Japan cares what the United States Government thinks, while China doesn’t give a rats-ass – at least not about this issue anyways. Does anyone really believe that the USG would pull out all the stops to keep the DNS root whole and universal?

“Send in the troops Dick, they launched their own IDNs!”

Nope – me neither. It seems our cherished DNS is about to become a diplomatic casualty. But at least we have regional liaisons in the developing world.

I feel outreached.

Now playing: "By My Side" from the album "X" by INXS.

ICANN Munges RSS

Ross — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 10:12:00 -0800

Hey ICANN! “feed://” is not a protocol!

I expect more from the people that run IANA – heck, they hand out the protocol assignments. You think they’d at least check their own resources to figure out if a) “feed://” was valid or b) refrain from making stuff up in the first place.

Why does this matter? This is the protocol they’ve embedded in the link to their RSS feed. It also means that this is a non-conforming feed. This matters because, as with all other things ICANN, it makes it tremendously tough for the average user to get at the information they are looking for.

Please fix it!

Updated: Fixing it won’t matter - the feed hasn’t been updated since November.

Now playing: "Ghosts" from the album "Ghosts" by Dirty Vegas.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | A bit of BitTorrent bother

Ross — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 09:53:00 -0800

An usually candid, but well-written article from the Beeb that tries to lay out some of the deeper truths behind the good and not-so-good of filesharing.

Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end. But there's a third explanation as well. Sometimes it's legitimate.

– BBC NEWS

ICANN Settlement in Brief

Ross — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 07:59:00 -0800

I don't think I could have summarized better.

What ICANN really honestly hasn't realised is that its authority is hanging by a thread. …
…the fact remains that ICANN retains the same culture where …CEO Paul Twomey continues to cut any secret deal he can that will give him control of a more powerful organisation. The problem with getting used to cutting dodgy deals is that, after a while, the human being becomes incapable of recognising when they should just say No. The individual loses that vital bit of wider clarity which marks great men from powerful men.
ICANN has been through a hell of a lot in the past decade but just when it thinks it is the most powerful and stable it has ever been, the irony is that it has never been weaker.

– Kieren McCarthy

Former ICANN CEO - Verisign Deal a Massive Capitulation?

Ross — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 11:09:00 -0800

Mike Roberts, former CEO of ICANN (prior to Paul Twomey's predecessor, Stuart Lynn) has posted his view of the circumstances surrounding ICANN's proposed settlement of its litigation with ICANN.

I’ve extracted the high points below, but I encourage you to read the document in its entirety - Mike makes a very succint and compelling case that describes precisely what the real issues are.

ICANN Board Chair Vint Cerf now works for a company whose motto is, “Do No Evil.” So how could Vint and his fellow board members be engaged in a massive capitulation to the enterprise greed of dot-com operator VeriSign?
In 1997, the White House packaged up what had become a growing scandal over jumbo profits in dot-com and asked Commerce Secretary Daley to “privatize” the domain name system. In 1998, Commerce published a white paper with the terms that formed the basis for awarding DNS “technical coordination” duties to ICANN, which was formed as a California non-profit corporation expressly for the purpose of assuming those duties.
Is there any end to the campaign of legal and financial intimidation that VeriSign continues to wage against ICANN? Are the legal troubles left over from expedient decisions in the 1990’s so serious in light of the international politicization of the DNS that we just need to throw in the chips and start over?
Unfortunately, the recent leadership at the Department of Commerce and at ICANN has been so preoccupied dodging bullets that none of the long term issues are being articulated or debated. Instead, we are treated to squabbles over contract language designed to perpetuate a comfortable and permanent annuity for the shareholders of VeriSign at the expense of domain name holders. If this is the American free enterprise system in action, it’s a pretty sad commentary.

– Mike Roberts, “The Villain in the ICANN-VeriSign Struggle is the U.S. Government”, via Lextext

I don’t believe that this failure is simply a natural outcome of the events that Mike outlines. In my mind, the failure stems from the decisions that aren’t being made, the analyses that haven’t been done and the understandings that aren’t being induced. ICANN staff have not taken the time to understand the nature of the economic relationships that could facilitate the competition they should be striving to implement, they haven’t considered the scenarios under which they can put their disputes with Verisign to bed and the best way to do so and they have not undertaken even the most basic calculus that fully considers the true implications of the deal they are recommending to the Board of Directors.

Perhaps Mike is right. Depending on where the ICANN Board takes us, it might be time for us to throw in our chips and start over. Could the board be facing a vote of confidence by ICANN’s stakeholders?

The Taming of the Shill

Ross — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 08:15:00 -0800

After I posted my note about the forum shills last night, Marcus Faure (not a lobbyist, but rather a registrar operator) called out a lot of people including Paul Macrides as being paid agents with an agenda. Paul's response?

Ah you caught us! We DO know each other. We are not lobbyists, thank god, but husband and wife.

- Paul Macrides

Dude – you’re married to a guy named Apostolos? On the next Oprah – “The Secret Life of a Shill”

Verisign/ICANN Settlement Comment Shills

Ross — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 22:11:00 -0800

Similar to the last minute showing of “independant software developers” that lined up at the microphone during the Vancouver public forum and made the same statement of support in favor of the proposed settlement, someone is stuffing the comment forum in favor of the latest version of the settlement agreement.

i.e.

It's clear why the registrars are mounting an email and legal campaign to block this settlement because it gets them out of the way of you conducting business. What's NOT clear is why you would listen to them.

– Paul Macrides

and

It's clear why the registrars are mounting an email and legal campaign to block this settlement because it gets them out of the way of you conducting business. What's NOT clear is why you would listen to them.

– Apostolos Kyriakoudis

Funny thing is, registrars are actually pretty disorganized on this issue right now. Most registrars are unified in the respect that they oppose the settlement, and each is doing their bit to ensure that the word gets out to the larger internet community, but I’m not aware of any coordinated letter writing campaigns or other such attempts to unduly magnify our voice in the process.

And I’ll guarantee that there’s not a single registrar shilling the comments forum like Paul and Apostolos…

Comments on the Verisign/ICANN Agreement...

Ross — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:18:00 -0800

I'm reading through the various comments on the ICANN/Verisign proposed litigation settlement agreement and some of the comments have been striking various chords with me...here are a few of them with some of my own thoughts along the way...

One of the most misleading lines was in the analysis of public comments, where someone (no staffer signed their name to the document, to take responsibility for it) summarized the feelings toward price increases as "Regarding registrants, there was some expression that there might be some negative effects due to the potential price increases, but, the majority across constituencies expressed that the increase in cost was negligible when compared to the value of a domain name registration."

– George Kirikos

George makes a couple of really good points here. First, the staff analysis isn’t signed. Score one more for transparency. Second, this statement is a borderline lie. Someone needs to be held accountable for this document, the analysis and its recommendations. They are substantially misleading and should not be relied upon by anyone, let alone the ICANN Board of Directors, as a basis for any decision making. Take the time to read the submissions (as I am doing right now) and form your own opinions.

[This agreement] ...will put me out of business so once again you can quote me when I say. "If you do sign this deal I will spend my very last dime on an additional lawsuit."

- John Jeffers

This sentiment seems to be spreading.

How about not using the lawsuit (which they would lose) as a negotiation tool in a new contract.

– J J

Well… how about it? This of course, is the most obvious question that could be asked, yet its also an unanswered question. ICANN staff have yet to state why the agreement needs to be settled in the first place.

I would like to see the price of the .com's raised to around $100.00 per year. Domain squatting is so very out of control.

– beanz

Well beanz, the problem is that upping the price to $100 per year doesn’t prevent “squatting”. In fact, it plays right into the hands of the secondary market as prices for primary market names increase. The higher that registration prices get, the lower the number of amateur secondary market players gets. This means that there will be less competition for good names going into the secondary market and less noise and uncertainty as to the “true” value of these names. The net effect would be that the secondary market would be an almost 100% pro player market. There are still tons of good names out there for $15 – I just registered rockandrollreviews.com for instance – and a ton more on the secondary market priced between $15 and $60. You just have to be patient and have a fair idea of where to look. Talk to your domain reseller about where these names can be found – they’ll be more than happy to help you out.

Why would you want to jump through these hoops? Well, because it would mean that you would only be paying up to $60 for the first year’s registration of your new names, and then renew them at only $15 per year or so. Over five years, you could saving $380 or more per name. Personally, I don’t give your comment much credence. I’ve never met a consumer that wants to pay more – ever.

The registry agreements provide for price caps for domain-name registrations and other registry services because the sole-source basis on which those services necessarily must be provided creates the potential for abusive charges. Where a registry operator is placed in a position of market power (particularly customer lock-in) by virtue of its appointment by ICANN, it has been viewed to be appropriate to guard against abuses of this market power.

- ICANN's General Counsel

Problem is, they said this almost four years ago and feel very comfortable ignoring their own assessments when its convenient for them.

Our desire is to cash out and invest our profits in VRSN because we predict their stock will skyrocket as a result. We would be really disappointed if you did anything other than sign.

– Rogue

Rogue’s comments were made facetiously – but the basic point remains.

Better now than later for this settlement agreement. The internet's infrastructure is increasingly under assault from DDOS and other malicious attacks. And security-related investment is why I think that the settlement agreement's presumptive renewal is a good thing. A long-term steward has the motivation to properly maintain the network, just like a homeowner will keep up a house better than a renter. Essentially, it's the difference between doing just good enough, and providing an incentive for designing a farsighted solution for a more secure DNS.

– Arpad Toth

Arpad makes the mistake of assuming that the only party that can increase the security of the DNS is the operator of .com. If Verisign had any good ideas about the security of the DNS, it would be selling something to the root server operators and other TLD managers. To the best of my knowledge, the best they’ve come up with is SSL certs. yawn.

I can't comprehend the reason that ICANN is even considering a settlement… I must be missing something...

– S. Tuck

We’re in the same boat S.

Don't let them make you sign this and eliminate competition in the one domain that drives the internet.

– Ross Leavitt

I’ve found people named Ross to be very insightful. In particular case, be sure not to miss the subtle point that Ross makes – .com drives the internet. This Ross would add that we need not only to ensure that .com is managed in a manner that promotes competition, but also that ICANN needs to clean up its agenda and get moving on creating new competitive operators by allowing more gTLDs into the root.

The revised settlement is whip cream on a road apple.

– Hal Meyer

Eewww.

ICANN has consistently maintained that it was in the right with respect to the legal dispute, and would ultimately win the dispute. The reason for the sudden back-down is puzzling.

– Bruce Tonkin

Yes – puzzling is a very nice word for it.

ICANN did not negotiate any changes to the presumptive renewal clause. As for the pricing issue...under the first proposed .COM Agreement, VeriSign's total revenues would be $3.43 billion dollars. Under the revised proposed .COM Agreement, VeriSign's total revenues would be $3.29 billion dollars. The difference between the two is $140 million dollars, or 4%. …the likely real net effect is a paltry 4% savings in cost to registrars (and then presumably consumers) over the length of the Agreement... there is no significant change between the first proposed .COM Agreement and the revised proposed .COM Agreement.

– Jeff Field

This is perhaps the most interesting comment made in the entire comment archive. I hadn’t bothered to run the numbers, and had therefore over-estimated the size of the changes from the first proposal to this one. No changes, no surprise.

…how can you possibly justify allowing them effectively perpetual rights to the contract? Not that I believe Verisign is doing a particularly bad job today (although I'm sure you'll hear from people who do have some opinions about that), but certainly it'll keep them honest if they know they may loose the deal next time the contract is up. That's how business works -- if you don't measure up, you're likely to be replaced by somebody who will. Nothing good can come from guaranteeing them the contract for as long as they want it.

– Matt Sturtz

Matt is definitely right. This about basic business at the end of the day. I’m worried about whether or not the ICANN staff have figured this out and wonder if they know what business they are really in. Hint: ICANN has very little to do with appeasing the governments of the world.

After Verisign's horrid past behavior that includes effectively breaking the DNS system, how can ICAAN even consider allowing Verisign to continue as .com registry operator?

– Troy Arnold

Yet another great question that ICANN’s staff has chosen to leave unanswered.

The evolution of the internet from its current form into what we all want [security, user-policy, high-speed services, DRM, edutainment etc] requires that we work together. We cannot continue to spend critical resources on endless negotiations.

– Bob Hutchinson

This guy is obviously talking about a much different internet than the one I want. The last thing I want is security, user policy, high-speed services, DRM and god forbid, edutainment, built into the network. I also wonder where this guy gets the idea that ICANN and its stakeholders somehow centrally figure in the development of these unholy impositions. ICANN doesn’t run Hollywood or the phone companies – they can fuck up the internet without ICANN’s help.

As a private-public partnership, ICANN is dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the Internet; to promoting competition; to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities; and to developing policy appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes. This is a snip from your website about your purpose. As I understand the settlement this would be in direct opposition to part of your purpose, "promoting competition".

– Wayne Bairstow

When asked about how this proposal promotes ICANN’s security and stability goals, John Jeffries, ICANN’s General Counsel, provided some great answers with a high level of detail. When asked about how this proposal promotes ICANN’s competition goals, John essentially refused to answer the question. Wayne is pointing out a very basic flaw in the position taken by ICANN’s staff, and they have yet to explain it.

At the very worst a legal battle looks less damaging than a botched deal.

– Katherine Pilna

It also looks a lot less damaging than ignoring your stakeholders.

Paul Twomey was at RSA speaking about security. It seems like Twomey spends his time talking about things but not actually DOING anything about them.

- Patrick O'Neale

It would also seem natural to ask what Paul Twomey was doing speaking at a conference sponsored by Verisign while still in the middle of litigation with them.

Now I think its time for me to go work on my comments.

The Great HDCP Fiasco

Ross — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 08:11:00 -0800

With some help from Intel and Microsoft, Hollywood is pushing new crippleware designed to limit your fair-use rights. The new standard, HDCP, implements content protection between your graphics card and your monitor. If both components don't agree that you don't hold a valid license to use the content, then you won't be able to view it.

HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This content protection system is mandatory for high-definition playback of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. If you want to watch movies at 1980x1080, your system will need to support HDCP. If you don’t have HDCP support, you’ll only get a quarter of the resolution.

– via Firing Squad.

Problem for Hollywood is, Silicon Valley is less prepared to support HDCP than was originally thought. FiringSquad is reporting that there are no graphics cards and only ten or so monitors that support the standard.

We’ve been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons support HDCP. If you’ve just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, you’ve just wasted your money.
NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of board manufacturers. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you’ve just wasted your money.
HDCP is an artificial requirement – there’s no reason why HD-DVD or Blu-Ray needs content protection. Although the movie industry is among the wealthiest of all industries, Hollywood has made things tougher in their paranoia of software piracy.

– via Firing Squad.

This may or may not be a huge problem for Hollywood. I’m not a big fan of the media PC – I mean, I personally think they are great, but in terms of market potential, a lot of work in the area of usability needs to be done before the mass market is going to be willing to replace their DVD player and television set with a Media PC. In the home electronics market, I think we’ll continue to see slow, gradual adoption of the hardware necessary to satisfy Hollywood’s demands. My next television will probably support it, and so will my next DVD player – why would I buy low-def with hi-def sitting on the shelf right beside it?

TorStar on SamScam...

Ross — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 12:08:00 -0800

TorStar editorial on SamScam...

Parliament risks getting only one side of the story because the MP most connected to copyright reform appears to be in the pocket of interest groups.

– TheStar.com

A TorStar editorial yesterday gets most of it right, but completely misses the fact that what BigMedia is trying to accomplish is not only impossible, but violates my fair use rights. We are being taxed on blank media, a tax that goes directly to artists, to ensure that when I make a copy of a CD for personal use, that the artists get compensated. This isn't good enough for BigMedia, so they want to take that right away from me.

This is the crux of the matter - for me. I like what I have and I won’t give it up without a fight.

Broadcast Flag is back

Ross — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 06:41:00 -0800

I love this quote from a recent entry over at BoingBoing regarding "The Son of Broadcast Flag"

There are two things to be certain of this century:

1. Everything that can be expressed as bits will be expressed as bits

2. Bits will only get easier to copy

[via Boing Boing]

"Son of Broadcast Flag" is an extension to an earlier legislative bid to embed DRM cues into digital broadcast. The sequel, the Digital Content Protection Act of 2006, encompasses most forms of digital media including iPods, Playstation portables, and so on. The net result of this legislation, if passed, is that only digital media technology that isn't disruptive to existing entertainment industry models will be legal.

Innovations like MP3 wouldn’t be possible under this new law. It would also mean the absolute end to our legal rights of fair use. Check the link at BoingBoing – anything I could say here has already been said there.

Speaking of pro-user zealots...

Ross — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 16:49:00 -0800

A draft version of the GNU Public License v3.0 is out for comment. I’m not finished reading it yet, but I thought I would share this paragraph from one of the supporting documents.

Technology that restricts users' traditional rights in copyrighted works, often known as Digital Restrictions Management or Digital Rights Management (DRM), is another threat to free software. As a campaign to limit users' rights, the adoption of DRM is fundamentally at odds with the spirit of the free software movement. Unfree software implementing DRM technology is simply a prison in which users can be put to deprive them of the rights that the law would otherwise allow them. Our aim is, and must be, the abolition of DRM as a social practice. Anything less than complete victory leaves the freedom of software in grave peril.

– Rationale Document GPLv3.

The problem with DRM isn’t limited to its philosophical differences with the GPL, in fact, you could abstract out the free software specifics from this extract, and the problems with DRM would still remain. Try this out…

Technology that restricts users' traditional rights in copyrighted works, often known as Digital Restrictions Management or Digital Rights Management (DRM), is another threat. DRM technology is simply a prison in which users can be put to deprive them of the rights that the law would otherwise allow them. Our aim is, and must be, the abolition of DRM as a social practice.

The problem I’m getting at here is the capacity of DRM to enable content distributors (notice I didn’t say content producers – Sarah Harmer is not the problem, Sony is) to trample on my rights as a Canadian citizen. My government says I can make copies for personal use, levies taxes on me on this basis but yet, it is somehow just for Sony to take that right away? And people wonder why Sam Bulte gets my hackles up.