A spectacular day in Mar del Plata. We're inside again. Here's today's agenda.

Tuesday's ALAC mp3s below.

Today is Opening Day, the official start of spring in the United States.

Jordyn Buchanan: "I've put together a brief paper that I'll be presenting in today's workshop on expiring names. I'm attaching it here for your reference."

ccTLD agendas and presentations. 

Ram Mohan reports that the recent changes in ICANN's transfers policy did not play a role in the Panix incident. Good to know.

Sentan comments on the evaluation of .NET bids.

No comments yet on Version 7.0 of the Strategic Plan.

How about this? Since each of the .NET bidders was judged technically competent to run the .NET registry, why not give them each a consolation prize? Each .NET bidder, other than the winner, immediately gets to select a new gTLD to launch this summer.

ICANN: "In conjunction with its meetings in Mar del Plata this week, ICANN has published its latest newsletter."

CENTR: "In the spirit of developing a structure that can include all of the ccTLD managers, CENTR members would like to express some concerns to ICANN...."

Bruce Tonkin posts some thoughts on changes to the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. Here's one additional change that I've written about in this space before: make registrants third-party beneficiaries of the RAA. This would get ICANN out of the business of policing registrars and put the authority in the hands of the registrants.

I've heard from people associated with both .TRAVEL and .JOBS that what is happening in .PRO will not happen in their TLDs. I'm sure they're right. But would you have guessed two months ago that .PRO would be converted into an unrestricted and open TLD in just a matter of weeks?

Bible.pro just sold on eBay.

The last session of the day yesterday was a public forum on ICANN's Operational Plan (real-time captioning here). In other words, two hours was devoted to hearing from ICANN staff about its priorities for the coming year, and ICANN staff heard (an earful) about what we thought its priorities ought to be. I don't recall having such a session in the past, and yesterday's meeting was terrific.