Month: April 2004

ICANN has asked the GNSO Council to consider “guidance … concerning the criteria for designating a successor operator for .net”. A subcommittee of the GNSO Council will deal with this; this committee is expected to meet first in the week beginning 12 April.

The Domain Registry of America regularly reminds me of expiration dates of my domain names — even if the current registrar will automatically renew the names in question –, and of the kinds of practices that ICANN’s current WHOIS policies enable.Latest letter here.

From Free2Innovate.net (asking to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor?): ICANN has issued an updated Inter-Registrar Transfers Policy “intended to provide a procedure for the smooth transition of a domain name from one registrar to another when such a change is requested by the domain name holder.” It only took ICANN one year and four months to launch the new policy after it was endorsed in a “final report” first issued Nov. 30, 2002. That’s faster than normal for ICANN.UPDATE: Thomas Roesler blames NetSol for the delay.This is doubly wrong: What ICANN posted yesterday could be the final transfers policy — but isn’t because NSI wrote that letter. That’s the delay I’m blaming them for.Concerning all the other delays, it’s worth remembering how this mess begun, and what NSI said back then.

ICANN has posted another update on transfers. Part of that update is a letter from NSI’s Champion Mitchell (aka Best Actor Rome 2004). In that letter, NSI suggests that a default-ack mechanism (as agreed on in the new policy) will lead to fraud and slamming. NSI essentially suggests adopting a default-nack policy with standardized forms instead. At the very least, it seems, NSI would prefer another delay until all dispute resolution and appeals processes are in place, and until everything is implemented on the registry side.Of course, this discussion has been going on since at least summer 2001. It’s fascinating (I’m avoiding the word “frustrating”) that NSI is now attempting to reopen this policy issue, and it is even more fascinating that they have succeeded in causing another delay in the implementation process of a consensus policy adopted by GNSO Council (in February 2003) and Board (in April 2003), and brought into implementation shape by a hard-working assistance group since July 2003.