Month: November 2003

ICANN, on 31 October: The recent ICANN meeting in Carthage, Tunisia was a rich source of information and discussion of the many issues involved with the development of this Issues Report. In order to fully reflect this information, the posting of the full Issues Report will be postponed until no later than 7 November 2003.

The GNSO is soliciting public comments on the issue areas that will be covered by the WHOIS Task Forces that were kicked off in Carthage: Data mining prevention (dow1(at)gnso.icann.org; archived comments); Data elements collected and displayed (dow2(at)gnso.icann.org; archived comments); Improving accuracy of collected data (dow3(at)gnso.icann.org; archived comments).This is the first of several public comment periods that are part of the new policy-development process. Comments are accepted until 28 November 2003.

Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland has unexpected and sad news for the ICANN community.

Op 5 november 2003 is volkomen onverwacht overleden

Hans Kraaijenbrink
Voorzitter van het bestuur van SIDN

Wij zijn diep geschokt door zijn plotseling overlijden.
Van 2001 tot zijn overlijden heeft Hans leiding gegeven aan SIDN. Doorde inzet van zijn vele talenten heeft hij de vernieuwingen rond SIDN inde afgelopen periode voortdurend in goede banen geleid. Wij verliezen inhem een scherpzinnige en dierbare collega en voorzitter.

Hans Kraaijenbrink had been a member of ICANN’s initial board, and served as a board member until this summer. During the reform process, he was one of the members of ICANN’s Evolution and Reform Committee. Only three weeks ago, the board appointed Hans Kraaijenbrink as the chair of the 2004 nominating committee.

Heise reports that the AN.ON project has won another victory in court.An illegal order from a lower court had forced the anonymization service to implement and activate a wiretapping function. When a higher court suspended that order, police obtained a search warrant and seized the data gathered when the (illegal) wiretapping function was active.That search has now been found to be illegal.Later: Press release.

You know your economy is in bad regard when standard Nigeria-style spam claims it comes from an auditor with Deutsche Bank.

It seems like Richard Henderson didn’t hear the answer to his public forum question about proof-of-concept reports.The answer was: http://www.icann.org/tlds /agreements/info /poc-afilias-082702.pdf.(In other words, these reports are added to the TLD contract overview page.)

To begin with, Carthage was an extremely well-organized ICANN meeting. Participants were picked up by the local organizers at the airport and brought to the hotels with buses; wireless was up as early as Friday in the main meeting area (no Internet access was available in the rooms, though).The social events left room for improvement: It’s important that these give meeting participants enough possibility to network and talk to many others who are also at the conference. Gala diners (and similar fixed-place events) with loud music aren’t very helpful for that purpose.Meeting bags are another topic: They should be light, it should be possible to carry them over the shoulder, and they should be useful for carrying a laptop including its power adapter around.

In Carthage, I posted two blog items from the GNSO Council session in which I participated as the ALAC’s liaison.The first one announced that the Council had kicked off three WHOIS Task Forces; the second “covered” subsequent administrative decisions, and the council’s work on a resolution regarding the sTLD RFP.After the session, I had a discussion with several council members who had issues with this, and found my blogging activities inappropriate for various reasons.There are two main directions from which objections can come. One, blogging should never take priority over participating in the meeting, and it must not distract from focusing on council work. Two, an acting person is taking the journalist’s role and reporting about the council session, which is inherently a conflict of interest; also, the quality of the reporting suffers from the priorities an acting person has to set.With a little bit of distance to the Carthage Council meeting, I believe that the only way for me to take these objections into account is to refrain from blogging Council discussions. In the future, I’ll limit any real-time blogging from GNSO Council sessions to giving a terse account of resolutions adopted, to the extent time and attention permit.Later: I just notice that Amadeu Abril i Abril (who sat next to me on the council) has blogged some thoughts about the same debate.

At the October 15 SECSAC meeting, VeriSign had presented results from a survey of end users in the US, the UK, Germany, and China. According to the VeriSign slides, 61% of users surveyed in Germany preferred SiteFinder somewhat or strongly; 76% in China, 81% in the UK, and 84% in the US.Back on October 15, I asked how many of the respondents to the surveys quoted (which included users from Germany and China) do not speak English, and started wondering what language was used for the survey questions.I’m now hearing that the survey was conducted in English.

ICANN has now published an Excerpt from Draft Version of Staff Manager痴 Issues Report for the Development of a Process for the Introduction of New or Modified Registry Services, consisting of 40 questions regarding the introduction of new registry services. The final issues report is now scheduled for November 7.Some of the questions in this first draft are questions of fact; I’d hope that the final issues report actually gives the answers to these questions. Among the policy questions, it’s particularly interesting that ICANN now starts asking who should provide registry services: The registry, or maybe a different party that has been determined, e.g., by a public bidding process?