Month: September 2003

Escapable Logic has a piece named “Publicize the Internet” that looks at the Internet as an important tool for democracy, and hopes that a president named Dean might help rescue it from losing its end-to-end character even further.Elliot Noss is more optimistic and suggests that it’s all, in fact, quite easy: Just make sure that you get most of your services from “competitive service providers,” i.e., from those who innovate and offer services at the net’s edges — and have a natural incentive to defend the net’s end-to-end character, as it enables their business models.

The GNSO secretariat points to some updated travel information for participants in ICANN’s Carthage meetings at http://www.icanncarthage.tn/.

Memo to anyone who ever sets up a mailing list: Never, ever let the envelope sender for list messages point back to the list.

One of the more interesting slashdot stories of the week-end dealt with the suspected relationship between the sobig worms and the recent series of denial of service attacks against various spam-blocking services.The slashdot item was triggered by this article from the register; in a comment, Kristian Kntopp points to some interesting analysis of the various Sobig variants.

Bret Fausett is moving to .org. Welcome to the wildcard-free part of the DNS!

ICANN has posted an Information Page on Verisign’s Wildcard Service Deployment on its web site.It strikes me that this kind of content would greatly profit from being provided as an RSS feed.

ICANN has started to put incoming correspondence regarding sitefinder on its web site..au’s Chris Disspain writes to Paul Twomey to echo many of the concerns with Sitefinder that have been raised by the SecSAC, and adds a specific focus on the process used (or, rather, not used) when introducing the service.Register.com copies ICANN on a letter its law firm has sent to Verisign’s chief litigation counsel, to protest Verisign’s recently established SiteFinder service and to call upon VeriSign to immediately cease operation of the same. … [T]he SiteFinder service consitutes an abuse of Verisign’s power as the .com and .net registry, deceives the Internet community, confuses domain name registrants, and interferes with the business relation between Register.com and its registrants by means of deceptive acts and practices. The letter then focuses on the impact sitefinder has on registered domain names that have no name servers listed.

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.

The GNSO Council’s resolution on Sitefinder, as adopted today with the votes of all constituencies, except the registries (who abstained), and the IPC (which didn’t attend) has just been posted by the GNSO Secretariat.Commentary from Karl Auerbach is here.

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.