Keith Teare, writing on the ICANN-Verisign Comment Forum: "I believe that the ICANN staff, led by Paul Twomey and the board, led by Vint Cerf, have done an amazing job of recognizing the need for ICANN to enter a new era or market driven growth in the domain name industry. Despite the heat there is primarily light in the proposed settlement. The industry should congratulate them and now move on to execute their individual strategies based on this new reality. There are many innovations to come and those who focus on the past are likely to be it's victim. Post-settlement the future looks bright for those who grasp it's potential."

If you're not here in Vancouver, you're missing a lot. I tell you what you should catch up on from the real-time captioning and then fill you in on what you won't hear on the webcast. Rumors and inside info from the hallways of the conference center. (iPro Radio No. 62 / 10 Minutes) Header Music: "This Is Your Wake Up Call" by Peter Case.

In one of the new cases, ICANN claims that the Court "ruled in ICANN's favor and denied an application for a Temporary Restraining Order." I suppose. What ICANN didn't say is that the Court simply took the Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order as notice of a Motion for a Preliminary Injunction. (It's actually not surprising that emergency relief wasn't granted since ICANN already had pledged not to decide anything this week in Vancouver.) The Court asked for the briefs to be filed on December 5, 2005, and a hearing will be held on February 6, 2006 at 10:00 a.m. Stay tuned.

Here's a copy of the Court's Order. I'd be careful not to read too much into this, either way. I don't think the Court yet has an opinion on the merits, just the timing. Thanks to the reader who sent in a copy of the Order.

Tonight's podcast is from the ALAC Dinner at which we recount the events from today's GAC meeting that prompted ICANN Chair Vint Cerf to take .XXX off the Vancouver agenda. My table includes Jean Armour Polly (North America), Xue Hong (Asia Pacific), and Sebastian Ricciardi (Latin America). (iPro Radio No. 61 / 12 Minutes). Header Music: "Rocks for Dinner" by Kevin Johnson.

So no sooner had I podcast my forecast that .XXX would be approved here in Vancouver, than ICANN Chair Vint Cerf announced in the open GAC meeting that he was taking the issue off the agenda...indefinitely. More tomorrow.

Here's a Wiki Page from today's workshop, with links to the mp3 files and the "theme" summary.

In today's podcast, I provide the briefest of summaries about the  ICANN-Verisign Settlement Workshop held today in Vancouver and note some of the unusual sights at this particular ICANN meeting. (iPro Radio 60 / 12 Minutes) Header Music: "The Bad Old Days" by Kevin Johnson.

Here's the second mp3 (52.3 megabytes) of today's cross-constituency workshop on the ICANN-Verisign Settlement Agreement and the associated .COM Registry Agreement. This second part includes a wide-ranging, open discussion about the issues and remaining questions around the proposed settlement.

Here's the first mp3 (32.1 megabytes) of today's cross-constituency workshop on the ICANN-Verisign Settlement Agreement and the associated .COM Registry Agreement. This first part includes presentations from business users, ISPs, intellectual property owners, end-users and domain name registrants, and domain name registrars.

Two channels have been set up by people here in Vancouver: Joi Ito has one and Robert Guerra has another.

CFIT Press Release: "The Coalition for ICANN Transparency Inc. (CFIT) filed suit today against VeriSign, Inc. and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) seeking various judicial rulings and an injunction relating to the new .net and proposed .com Registry Agreements."

WADND Press Release: "The World Association of Domain Name Developers (WADND) today filed suit in the United States District Court in San Jose, California against VeriSign and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) alleging that the two have engaged in antitrust activities, including conspiracy, price fixing and monopolizing the '.com' and '.net' domain name markets."

GoDaddy Statement on ICANN Comment Page: "ICANN recently announced that it has reached a proposed agreement to end all pending litigation with VeriSign. We understand the ICANN Staff's desire to find an amicable resolution to this long-standing dispute. The Go Daddy Group has supported and will continue to support the principles under which the ICANN was formed. However, we believe that the proposed new .COM Registry Agreement indicates that the Staff has lost touch with those principles and the proposed agreement should not be approved without the following changes...."

Looks like GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons also has the issue slated for his weekly Radio GoDaddy podcast too. (You can subscribe in the margin of this page; look for the "Podrolling" section. I don't miss any of the Radio GoDaddy's podcasts.)

I made it. Light blogging until tomorrow, but I have lots of things to post. I've been told that the .COM workshop tomorrow (11:30 am to 2:30 pm local time) will not be webcast. If that's true, I'll podcast it.

Mike Anderson, writing on the ICANN Comment page: "Have you considered standing up to the bully?"

Before heading off to the ICANN meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia, I review the agenda, day by day, and talk about a few of the things I think will be interesting in the week ahead. (iPro Radio 59 / 13 Minutes) Header Music: "Untitled 70s Composition" by yours truly (assembled in Garage Band, my newest software addiction).

I'm back from vacation (and the work that awaited me on my return) and talking about why advertisers on network television should be angry about the fact that the networks to which they pay millions of dollars want to shut down Tivo's new "feature." (iPro Radio 58 / 11 Minutes) Header Music: "143" by Stingray (courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network).

A new group has popped up to lobby against the .COM Registry Agreement: the "Coalition for ICANN Transparency," or CFIT (pronounced "See Fit"). Calling itself "a group of individuals, organizations and companies concerned about the lack of visibility into the activities and operations of the internet governing body," CFIT will surely inspire a CFIT-CFIT, or, the "Coalition for Increased Transparency on the Coalition for ICANN Transparency." Nowhere on the site does CFIT disclose who formed it, who is funding it, or who has joined the "coalition."

Whois reflects that cfit.info, the organization's primary site, is registered to Jason Eberstein, of the DC lobbying firm of Trammell and Company. The address for CFIT and Trammell and Company are the same.

I can understand why an organization or a group would want to lobby against the .COM Registry Agreement -- it's not a good deal. What I can't understand is why they would choose to make the lobbying effort about "transparency" while failing to disclose their own names. C'mon folks, it's warm out here in the sun.

John Berryhill, writing on the Registrars' Mailing List: "The notion that performing a data processing task in 2005 substantially identical to the same data processing task on a per unit basis performed in 1998 would be more costly is a proposition that could only be believed by an idiot."

ICANN has published another set of comments and responses on the ICANN-Verisign agreement. The answers are helpful. Even if you don't necessarily agree with the statements ICANN makes (and I don't), at least we now have some sense of the ICANN Staff's view on all of this.

Taken together, ICANN's responses point to something bigger and more fundamental than the terms of the .COM Registry Agreement: ICANN's current management has a fundamentally different view than that of its predecessors about how ICANN should work, how big it should be, and how it should be funded.

The problem, however, is that these new policy pronouncements are a tangle of contradictions. For example, while saying that ICANN should make "a transition to allowing market forces to determine prices" by lifting the price caps, ICANN immunizes Verisign from those same market forces through the perpetual renewal provision. (It might have been stuck with the favored renewal provision, but the lifting of the caps is ICANN's own decision.) While lightening some of ICANN's enforcement responsibilities by greater reliance on market forces, ICANN doesn't propose to lighten its own budget at the same time. In fact, it does the opposite. I'll try to tease out more of these issues in the coming days, but for now, these Qs and As are worth reading.

It's not easy to find the comment page or submission address from a quick review of  the ICANN web site. Give it a try. Start here, at the ICANN home page, and see how long it takes you to find the link to the submission address. Nevertheless, people have found it and seem to be interested enough in the subject to comment, sometimes in very colorful terms. Ross Rader's op-ed piece in yesterday's CNet, which linked to the comment board, really got things going. Here's another thing you can do. Copy the jpg above or inline link the image (src="http://blog.lextext.com/commentnow.jpg") and put a link to the comment address on your own site. I'll have this banner in the top left of my web page until the comment period closes. 

New ICANN Press Release: "The decision by the WSIS to recognize ICANN’s existing multi-stakeholder model ensures that the stability and integrity of the Internet’s naming and addressing system will be preserved."

From the Proposed ICANN-Verisign Root Server Management Transition Agreement: "ICANN and VeriSign agree that they shall:... (c) Work together to establish a timetable for the completion of the transition to ICANN of the coordination and management of the ARPA TLD...in particular to enable ICANN to edit, sign and publish the...ARPA zone[] commencing in 2005 and completing by 2006."

Bill Manning, former head of the IANA and (see comment below) one of the operators of the B Root, posting to the ICANN Comment Forum: "A final point is the hijacking of the .ARPA domain from the IAB. It is notclear to me which party incalculated this component into the agreements (I have my ideas) but theft of the management of this domain without the approval of the IAB and the US DoC is ... theft."

The lead editorial in today's Washington Post discusses WSIS and Internet Governance. It ends with this important, and often forgotten, point: "The sovereign nations of the world have no need to wrest control of the Internet from the United States, because they already have it." Thanks to the reader who forwarded this link!

I first saw Trumba when the company made a presentation at Esther's conference earlier this year. It's a web-based calendar and appointment application, accommodating single or multiple users, private or public calendars, e-mail and cell phone-dialed reminders, and a host of other cool features. The conference session hadn't ended before I had signed up as a beta user. My Trumba calendar, now out of beta and in full feature production mode, is now the home page in my browser.

So far, I've created calendars for my work, my personal appointments and social engagements, my kids' appointments and lessons, the local Little League, and ICANN's At Large Advisory Committee. On my personal calendar, they all merge together, color coded to show the category. I've published the ALAC's Calendar to the web (another Trumba feature), and it includes our schedule for Vancouver. Trumba calendars published to the web include RSS feeds. If you have Trumba, you can subscribe to my Trumba calendar, and if you don't, you can still click on events and download the data files necessary to upload the events in Outlook, Evolution or Mozilla.

Vint Cerf: "Governments frequently don't believe anything can work if nobody's in charge. As you look around the landscape, you discover that the only entity that has specific high-level responsibility, or unique responsibility for the Internet, is ICANN. And so the immediate and incorrect conclusion is that if ICANN has this unique responsibility, it must be in charge of the Internet. That's, frankly, not true."

The folks in the U.S. Congress are proving that they can be just as scary as the folks at the U.N. Take a look at this article by Gregg Keizer in Techweb news. Here's a sample: "Even though negotiations in Tunisia left the U.S. in charge of the Internet's naming system, Congress Wednesday passed a resolution that called for the United States to make plain its intention to permanently control the Internet's day-to-day operations." Thanks to the reader who sent in the link.

As I catch up on WSIS, I'm finding a lot of good information and throughtful commentary on the ISOC@WSIS weblog. If you're not reading it, add it to your RSS aggregator (RSS feed here).

Expectation (based on publicly available documents): Verisign would submit a proposal for the renewal of the .COM registry agreement no earlier than November 10, 2005 and no later than May 10, 2006. The ICANN Board would have up to six months to review the renewal proposal.

What Actually Happened: Verisign and/or ICANN proposed a renewal of the .COM Registry Agreement at least as early as February, 2005. A tentatively agreed renewal contract, negotiated between Verisign and ICANN Staff, was posted for public comment on October 24, 2005 -- two weeks before Verisign was even allowed to submit an initial renewal proposal -- accompanied by a twenty day comment period (subsequently extended).