The rumors of Joe Sims' retirement from ICANN were premature. He's back, defending the Verisign deal: "[T]here are multiple protections built into the agreement against exploitation of registrants—not perfect, because the market for domain name registrations is not perfectly competitive, but in our judgment sufficient under the circumstances." I had heard rumblings from ICANN staffers that Mr. Sims was the principal architect, on the ICANN side, of the revised Verisign agreements, but I hadn't believed it was true....