ICANNWatch reports on three new TLDs: .公司, .网络 and .中国. I definitely want to know more about this. Post links or comments if you have them.

ICANN .NET Update: “The anticipated response from Telcordia to the applicant's written comments as noted in ICANN’s Update dated 20 April 2005 has been delayed. To date, we have not received the response from Telcordia but expect this response later this week. Accordingly, we are not yet certain about the timing of the posting but will continue to post updates as the information becomes available.” That means tomorrow.

.NET is on the agenda for the Board’s next meeting, which will be held by closed teleconference on Tuesday, 3 May 2005. The formal agenda includes:

The ICANN Meetings page now includes the proposed dates for all of the Board’s teleconferences this year: May 3rd, June 7th, August 16th, September 13th, October 18th, and November 8th.  

Stephane Van Gelder: “The German Registry DENIC claims to be ‘baffled’ over the outcome of the evaluation process for the new .NET registry which ranked it fourth out of five applicants.”

ICANNWatch has a post on Verisign’s new registry-level auction service. Verisign made a presentation on this at the GNSO meeting in Mar del Plata (see transcript here). It’s not WLS. It takes place after the deletion grace period ends — which means after the registrar-level deleting name services have had a chance to do their thing — so it strikes me as fairly non-controversial. This is an auction for names that didn't sell during an earlier auction.

Steven Lang, writing on AllAfrica.com: “AfriNIC, the internet numbers registry for Africa , has slashed the minimum cost of joining the organisation from $400 to $100 per year.”