New post over on Name Brief, which was getting sort of dusty. Watch this carefully because it's a small version of the debate that will ensue if ICANN auctions TLDs and then proposes to do good deeds with the proceeds.

I found this bit from the most recent Board minutes intriguing:


I didn't think the issue of "not maintaining" the registry-registrar split was even on the table for discussion. This comment came up in the context of a very interesting Board discussion on the staff's progress developing an implementation plan for new gTLDs, and you should probably read the whole thing for context. Still, I'd be interesting in knowing the provenance of this particular work item. Anyone know?

FWIW, I'm generally aware of conversations about whether to allow some of the low-interest TLDs, like .aero and .museum, to offer registrations direct to the public -- and the heated disagreement on both sides of that issue -- but I was not aware it was something that ICANN was examining.

Hey, guess what just showed up on my iPod? This week's This Week in Law, which focuses almost exclusively on domain name law. I haven't listened to it yet, but then again, I don't really need to. I was on the show.

Great stuff from the folks at RIPE NCC. Must reading....and watching!

Here's a copy of a new proposed piece of legislation that will be getting some press the next few days. It's called the "Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008," or the  APCPA. It's ostensibly aimed at stopping Phishing -- a laudable goal -- but in some places the cure is as bad as the disease.

Take, for example, Section (c)(2), at pages 10-11 of the PDF, which says that a registrar must takedown any whois proxy information if it receives a letter or facsimile or email from anyone in the world claiming that the Act has been violated. The Act imposes no obligations that the written notice be made in good faith, and places no penalties on people who send proxy-takedown letters in bad faith.

The irony is that the proxy-takedown letter itself could be false --  false identity, pseudonym, or made anonymously -- and the registrar would have a duty to takedown the proxy information.

If passed in this form, this provision could have incredible anonymous speech ramifications, as all you'd have to do to unmask someone is submit a proxy takedown letter.

Here's a copy of the Complaint, as it was circulated earlier today on one of the ICANN-related mailing lists.

Comes this press release about a new lawsuit filed here in Los Angeles against Network Solutions:


Imagine? Isn't that exactly what happens when you go into a car dealership and ask to buy one of their cars? You have to buy that car on their lot from them.

Network Solutions is doing exactly what car dealerships do every day, taking inventory from the manufacturer (the registry) and putting the car on its own NetSol car lot.

You may find fault with the NetSol practice, but the fault isn't because it's not working the way a car dealership works. It's working exactly the way a car dealership works.

The more I think about .TRAVEL, the more I think it would make a very interesting business case study...probably for what not to do at launch. This is a domain that really could have benefited by the domainer community. Had they allowed entrepreneurial registrants to come in and build aggregation/portal businesses on various .travel names, they could have built out the TLD quickly. There's a fair amount of money to be made on travel-related affiliate marketing, and the PPC value of travel is reasonably high also. Domainers would have had a powerful incentive to build travel-related businesses around generic .travel names. Certified, authenticated travel businesses were never going to be the first-movers in this TLD (a fact clear only in hindsight, perhaps), yet the typical first-movers with the knowledge and capital to build it out were excluded from participation.

If I were Tralliance, I'd call the last few years the longest sunrise period for a new TLD launch in history, and I'd petition ICANN to allow me to open up TRAVEL to anyone who wants to operate a travel Internet-based service.

From the ever vigilant Edward Hasbrouck comes news that Tralliance parent company TheGlobe.com is planning to sell Tralliance and its .TRAVEL top-level domain registry. I don't think this poses any overarching ICANN policy issues -- you can sell a company and keep its current bundle of contractual relationships intact -- but I do wonder about the business decision.

This is interesting to me because I don't understand why TheGlobe thinks this is not a good business. As of the October 2007 Registry Report to ICANN, .TRAVEL has 28,529 names under management, with 26 different registrars. They resell for about $99. (I can't find the registry level fee anywhere. Anyone else?) I suppose I don't understand why you can't turn a fair profit on that number of names * the registry fee. Granted, this is not .COM, or even .INFO, so it may not have met expectations, but businesses with annual revenue of a few million dollars a year are the backbone of the U.S. economy. It seems to me that you could easily net $500K/year on your current business with upside for future growth, and I don't know that TheGlobe's other business lines, whatever they are, are turning much of a profit at all.

In response to my post yesterday, ICANN's Manager of Public Participation asks if I've gone mad. No, not all. The problem is that ICANN's postings from Dehli are coming too late to be meaningful to those half a world away. When I wrote yesterday's post, no transcripts from Monday's sessions had been posted. The Real Video and Audio files aren't archived, so if you don't catch a session live -- in the middle of my night, here in Los Angeles -- the files aren't available later.

Today, Tuesday, I can finally read the transcript for Monday's sessions. But the live Tuesday meeting is now complete (as I write this, it's 11:00 pm in Dehli), and none of Tuesday's transcripts are posted. And the Real feeds produce error messages.

So the message I take from this is that remote observers -- "participants" is too charitable a term -- always must work 36 hours behind the live meeting. For me, this is frustrating.

I'll admit that across the entire world probably fewer than a dozen people are interested in following ICANN's Dehli meeting closely, so the allocation of resources to prompt posting is understandably not high on anyone's priority list. Still, I can't help but wonder whether improved remote participation mechanisms would make interest in ICANN's work increase.

Ok, so pretend you were someone in the United States (like me) who wanted to follow what ICANN was doing in Dehli (like me) and who wanted to read transcripts or watch videos or listen to audio of today's events (like me). Where would you go?

I'm a customer of Network Solutions, so I get their marketing emails from time to time. I received one this morning for an upcoming seminar on how to use blogs in business. "In less than 30 minutes, you’ll see how blogs can have a direct impact on your Search Engine Optimization efforts and how any business, including YOURS, can benefit from having a blog."

Now go to www.networksolutions.com and find the Network Solutions blog.