Month: October 2003

Not only is WSIS one of the more important topics of hallway talk — in a touch of irony, the WSIS logo is featured on the materials distributed at the meeting by the local organizers.

ICANN has hired its new Vice President, Supporting Organization and Committee Support. That Vice President will operate out of ICANN’s new office in Brussels.

Twomey talking about redelegation of ccTLDs. He emphasizes the importance of having documentation that supports a redelegation request. Notes that redelegation is not just a local issue, but might also affect global interoperability. Emphasizes the need for being extremely conservative with regard to redelegation; characterizes US DoC involvement as fail-safe mechanism, not actual exercise of influence over substance of redelegation decisions.

When trying to get a pre-paid SIM card for mobile phone use in Germany, customers had to identify themselves. The data weren’t gathered for operational purposes, but exclusive to be a vailable for law enforcement purposes.Germany’s federal administrative court has now ruled that the national regulator’s order which had lead to this practice had no basis in law, and was violating customers’ privacy rights.

The GNSO’s WHOIS Steering Committee’s work product has now been forwarded to the GNSO Council: Terms of Reference for three task forces, on Restricting access to WHOIS data for marketing purposes, Data collection and display, Accuracy. I don’t think any of the groups involved with the steering committee is entirely happy with these terms of reference, but that may just be a sign for a good compromise.What’s more worrisome is that the commercial user constituencies have recently started campaigning against the general approach, and for a single task force that would address the top 5 issues that started off the steering committee’s work. Such a task force would basically have no chance to make any progress on WHOIS privacy at all.

ICANN has finally posted Paul Twomey’s letter to the GNSO regarding new registry services. Key quote: I hereby make a formal request to the GNSO Council that it commence a GNSO Policy Development Process designed to produce recommendations to the Board for a timely, transparent and predictable process for dealing with proposed future new “services” or significant actions by TLD registries that, because of their architecture or operation, could impact the operational stability, reliability, security or global interoperability of the DNS, that registry, or the Internet.A draft for that letter was read and discussed at the GNSO Council’s telephone conference on 16 October, which resulted in the formal initiation of the policy development process requested by Twomey. What follows are the notes I took during that telephone conference.

Chris Ambler responds to Susan Crawford, and asks what a consensus policy is.It’s not consensus, but this formal thing defined in agreements. In short, you need a thumbs-up from the board, from two-thirds of the relevant supporting organization council, and a written report with a lot of supporting materials that document the community consensus, and the outreach process used.Oh, and the registries can dispute the existence of such a policy until 15 days after the Independent Review Panel has been established by ICANN.

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.

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.

Today’s presentations and statements (as far as they related to the technical side of sitefinder) fit well with what became evident at the last meeting: Verisign is trying to play nice with respect to collateral damage, they are helping people to fix what can be fixed by changing client software, but they are not moving on the wildcard itself.Two problems with that: 1. They are causing cost to others on the net by making changes at the center that have to be worked around at the edges. The side effects of the root-delegation-only BIND patch on .name are just one example. 2. Fixing the collateral damage does not give users the choices they have now (but haven’t with a wildcard).