No Such Weblog

The GNSO Council is going to discuss WIPO recommendations regarding names and acronyms of International Intergovernmental Organizations and country names on its telephone conference on 17 April.

Louis Touton has published the General Counsel’s Analysis Regarding Challenge to Non-Commercial Users Constituency Election of GNSO Council Representatives. That analysis concludes that it would not be appropriate, based on Mr. Younger’s challenge, to set aside the written designation of the NCUC’s GNSO Council representatives.

The analysis also contains a number of Additional Observations which seem to hint at some doubts about the NCUC’s functioning as a constituency, and suggest that a redesign of the constituency may be appropriate.

The Nominating Committee has published its (lengthy) Formal Call for Recommendations and Statements of Interest. The deadline for statements of interest is 5 May; the target date for announcing the committee’s selections is early June.

…seem to be widely mis-understood.

I’ve revived the aggregator — it’s a site where you can find an aggregated version of a bunch of weblogs (possibly?) relevant to ICANN issues.

The Register has an interesting article concerning the “second superpower” piece Jim Moore has recently published in his brand-new Harvard blog. The article looks at the way in which Moore took over Google’s idea of the “second superpower” in no time at all. Down and out in the magic kingdom, anyone?

ICANN has published an Advisory which explains the so-called 15-day period in the RAA’s WHOIS accuracy provisions, and also explains where the 15 working day period in ICANN’s September 2002 letter to the Verisign registrar came from, namely, registrar compliance provisions.

Esther Dyson on ICANN reform, user participation, and more fundamental issues: Yes, it matters to some extent who is on ICANN’s board — or who is in power in Iraq — but it’s not as important as it may seem. Change the structure and you don’t necessarily change the texture that determines much of what actually goes on. Structure helps change things over time, but it doesn’t work on its own. People need to know what to do to use and reinforce the structure. She then (accurately) observes the importance of having a physical seat at the negotiating table, as opposed to just participating online.

I’d emphasize the word “just” in the sentence above: Online participation works much better once you had a beer (or Caipirinha) with the people you are working with (or against). Of course, cynics would express this by saying that making friends and manipulating people is much easier that way…

I don’t think this made it into ICANN blogsphere, yet… Immediately before the GNSO council’s 20 February telephone conference (at which the WHOIS Task Force’s consensus policies were adopted), I posted this statement on WHOIS policy on behalf of the Interim ALAC.

Some relatively recent, but pre-Rio, slides on WHOIS policy (and ICANN in general) are available here. I used these for a talk on WHOIS policy I gave to the International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications, in the week before the Rio meetings.