Episode One, in which I take on one of the 107 categories of Grammy nominations and play all of the nominated songs in the category (plus a few others). Yeehaw!

New and improved. Twice the music, half the file size. I'm learning!

E-Commerce Times: ICANN Stands To Reap Windfall from New Domain Fee.  "In the short term, the tax could add US$4 million annually to ICANN's coffers, an amount that could skyrocket to more than $30 million if it is extended to additional domains...."

'Should 75 cents appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all....'

Declan McCullagh: "ICANN Proposes New Net Tax. The international organisation that oversees domain names has levied a 75-cent-per-domain charge. Why are they doing it, and can they get away with it?...."

Another Internet Pro Radio show over at the ol' podcasting station. Nothing ICANN-related, mostly music.

From CNET: "'Mr. Ballmer, now we still have to type in 'weather.com.cn' to check the weather. Most Chinese people can't do that. They just want to type in 'tian qi' (Chinese for weather),' he said. Short of a more concrete answer, Ballmer acknowledged that Microsoft needs to work better with the various domain name authorities to resolve this problem."

An Internet Pro Radio show for Tuesday, December 14th. No discussion of ICANN, so ICANN Blog followers can feel free to skip....unless they like music for grownups.

 

ICANN Press Release: "ICANN is pleased to announce that the independent evaluation process, which began earlier this year has resulted in two further sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD) applications moving to the next stage. As the process for selecting new sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLDs) continues from a pool of ten applications, ICANN has entered into commercial and technical negotiations with two additional candidate registries, .JOBS and .MOBI. No limit was set on the number of sTLDs, and this now adds to the two candidate registries (.POST and .TRAVEL) announced in October."

CBS Marketwatch:  "Take a look at the undiscovered Tucows."

P.S. TCOW is not "unloved" at my house. We've continued to buy it over the last year.

Lenovo? I don't get this.

I suppose you could say that Internet governance jumped the shark the same day that someone put the two words "Internet" and "governance" together for the first time. Still, if you ever gave the concept of governing the Internet any credence, surely this subway map of Internet governance, seemingly torn from the pages of The Onion, will give you pause. Hmmm, let's see, if I get on at Indigenous People, change to the Green Line at Copyright Station, I can be at DNS Policy by lunch time!

ComputerWeekly.com: "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) is to choose a new registrar for the .net domain next spring...."

AllAfrica.com: "ICANN Rules Out ITU Merger."

I posted a new photo to AThousandWords.

I posted a comment to Elliot Noss' question: "bret, susan what do you think?"

Elliot Noss has an excellent take on the anonymously penned 'Reformation' article posted on Susan Crawford's site. The point that registries and registrars operate from different places in the Internet's infrastructure is a good one. Sitefinder illustrates the problem. You can make a good faith argument -- tenable if not necessarily persuasive -- that Sitefinder provides an enhanced user experience for http queries by presenting users with an extra set of resources to help them find what they want when their original query fails. I get that.

What you can't defend, however, is the abrupt manner in which Sitefinder was launched. This is precisely because Sitefinder wasn't launched "from the edge." It was launched from a core infrastructure service and others were expecting the operation of that core service to remain consistent or, as they say, "stable." (Related note from me to ICANN here.)  An unannounced new service launch from a registrar or an ISP wouldn't have had the same impact, namely because disgruntled users could have moved to other providers. That's the fundamental difference between registries and registrars.  

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