No Such Weblog

The DNSO secretariat has posted preliminary minutes of yesterday’s Names Council telephone conference; an MP3 recording is also available. Besides the election of Bruce Tonkin as the NC’s new chair, there was some decision on whether or not the Transfer Task Force should also handle deleted domain name issues in general.

As Philip Sheppard has just announced, Bruce Tonkin (registrars constituency) has been elected Chair of the Names Council. Congratulations and best wishes to Bruce!

Just in case you didn’t already see it on ICANNwatch: There’s a highly remarkable comment in the public forum on the preliminary .org evaluation report. It’s certainly worth reading.

Here’s a first fragment of a draft for a WHOIS policy primer. This one’s a walk-through of the registrar accreditation agreements (actually, there are two of these, with small differences), which is hopefully at least a bit more understandable than the agreements themselves. Missing bits: A review of the .name appendix to the RAA (which is currently missing from the ICANN web site), which may contain changes to query-based access, and an overview of registries’ WHOIS provisions. In any event, the most important policies (at least from a privacy point of view…) are contained in the RAA: Even the thick registries basically make the same query-based access available as registrars (with .name as an exception), with the same non-restrictions on use of the data, and, possibly, advanced query possibilities. Bulk access to thick registries’ whois data is more limited than with registrars. So I hope that this is useful even in its current incomplete state. I’ll add more when I find the time. That means, in particular, not this week.

Peter Dengate Thrush has sent a message to ICANN chairman Vint Cerf and to the GA mailing list in which he asks a couple of questions on the status of ICP-1, and points to the ccTLDs’ response to the ERC’s Blueprint for ICANN Reform.

In his response, Cerf claims that ICP-1 is simply a statement of long-standing practice and doesn’t seem to represent new policy. ICP-1 makes explicit a way to implement the policy outlined in RFC 1591 but doesn’t appear to create new policy, as I understand it. The response does not address Thrush’s comments about ICANN’s zone transfer requirement.

The ICANN board has, according to the preliminary report of today’s meeting, passed a resolution approving Verisign’s Wait Listing Service proposal. The resolution was passed with Auerbach and Abril i Abril opposed, Müller-Maguhn and Kyong abstaining, and 11 others in favor.

On the GA list, Karl Auerbach writes that he has been convinced by the discussion there that he should vote against WLS today. I’m not sure he should be.

ICANN has posted the Names Policy Development Process Assistance Group’s recommendation. If you find that document too long, Alexander Svensson has an excellent chart of the process suggested.

ICANN has set up a public archive of comments received on the preliminary .org report.

Here’s a short digest of .org coverage in the online press: The Register emphasizes ISOC’s need for sustainable income, and quotes anonymous rival bidders who pointed to criticisms of favoritism. C|Net has a very high-level round-up of the basic facts, opinions, and conspiracy theories. The Washington Post discusses these conspiracy theories (and their rebuttal from Stuart Lynn) in some more detail, and quotes Milton Mueller as saying that ICANN should have simply presented the board with the data from the evaluations. news.com.au discusses this whole thing from a more local point of view, and pays particular attention to Unity Registry’s bid and their experience in migrating an existing registry to EPP, as opposed to building an EPP registry from scratch. Finally, an internetnews.com article mentions doubts about ISOC’s ability to run .org – from a financial point of view: But one source close to the bidding process wonders why ISOC’s own auditor’s had doubts about the company’s financial ability to take over the .org registry, one of the key criteria for selection as registry. “If you look at their bid, it talks about their balances and their liabilities, and says that “these factors and others to the company raise substantial doubt about the Internet Society’s ability to continue as a going concern,” the source said. “If their own auditors are concerned, then why are they getting this recommendation?”