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Global Name Registry has debuted its public beta version of a new whois service.
It's well worth taking for a test drive. This seems to strike a balance
between privacy and law enforcement's need to know. Personally, I
wonder whether it will make a difference in the marketplace. Are
consumers more interested in registering a .NAME domain name knowing
that their whois has some semblance of privacy? My instinct says that
this is a marketable feature but the registry still has to promote
.NAME more widely to get registrants past their initial aversion to
something new. I picked up one of these cards
the other day. If you received a call from the IANA recently about an
"emergency redelegation," that was me. If you received a call from
+1-213-243-2465, that was the new JDRP lawyer. 
Spoofcard is about as much fun as you can possibly have for $10/hour.
Spoofcard is about as much fun as you can possibly have for $10/hour. - - - - -
If
you've wondered what became of ICANN's former and first General
Counsel, he's been wandering too...all over the Santa Monica mountains.
He may have the world's only hike-blog. The sparse style of touton.info
bears a striking resemblance to the old ICANN and IANA websites. You
only need to spend a few minutes on his site to realize that it was
probably Louis who kept ICANN moving during the most tenuous periods of
its early life. He brings the same care and meticulousness to recording
his hikes as he once devoted to registry contracts and ccTLD redelegations.
If
you've wondered what became of ICANN's former and first General
Counsel, he's been wandering too...all over the Santa Monica mountains.
He may have the world's only hike-blog. The sparse style of touton.info
bears a striking resemblance to the old ICANN and IANA websites. You
only need to spend a few minutes on his site to realize that it was
probably Louis who kept ICANN moving during the most tenuous periods of
its early life. He brings the same care and meticulousness to recording
his hikes as he once devoted to registry contracts and ccTLD redelegations. - - - - -
And if you've ever wondered what ICANN's
first and former General Counsel might think about the revised Verisign
.COM Agreement, Danny Younger points to this wonderful clue from the
past:
See, Section 5, "Pricing", in General Counsel's Second Analysis of VGRS's Request for Amendment to Registry Agreement, 22 August 2002. So, besides the identity of the personnel responsible for directing ICANN's negotiations, what changed between August, 2002 and October, 2005?
The registry agreements provide for price caps for domain-name registrations
and other registry services because the sole-source basis on which those
services necessarily must be provided creates the potential for abusive
charges. Where a registry operator is placed in a position of market
power (particularly customer lock-in) by virtue of its appointment by
ICANN, it has been viewed to be appropriate to guard against abuses
of this market power.
See, Section 5, "Pricing", in General Counsel's Second Analysis of VGRS's Request for Amendment to Registry Agreement, 22 August 2002. So, besides the identity of the personnel responsible for directing ICANN's negotiations, what changed between August, 2002 and October, 2005?
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Meanwhile, the GNSO's task force on Whois marches on. The Task Force started work in November, 2003, after coming into creation at ICANN's Carthage meetings.
(Which allows us to say, in both literal and metaphoric truth, that the
current process is "as old as Carthage.") After countless real-time
conference calls and months upon months of mailing list discussion, the
issues have moved only a little. It's like a siege. The last person
standing gets to make the policy. If you'd like to catapult something over the wall, the last day for comments on the "Purpose" of whois is Wednesday, February 8th.- - - - -
Whereis the Latin American meeting going to take place? The calendar says "October 30-Nov 3 2006," but I've heard rumblings about December. In Chile.... or in Brazil.... or in Panama.... or in Trinidad-Tobago. "No, you host the meeting." "No, you." I'm beginning to wonder whether the countries of the world are tiring of this vagabond act. Personally, I've always wanted to see ICANN hold a meeting in Mexico. I like my ICANN meetings on the rocks, with salt.
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A reader pointed me to recent Senate hearings on indecency and lo and behold there was an old friend: Mark Senator Pryor. Once upon a time...okay, once upon a very long time ago...the
good Senator and I sat across the aisle from each other in 9th grade
English, among other subjects. He was the Governor's son, and doing
things together wasn't like meeting the other kids. You didn't knock on
the door -- you buzzed the State Police officers. Still, we dropped by
the Governor's Mansion for more than a few pick-up games of basketball.
One of my first introductions to politics was through distributing leaflets and bumper stickers for Mark's dad, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1978. Mark and I and a circle of mutual friends would meet on the weekends in the parking lots of Little Rock shopping malls to talk to people about the election and offer them a bumber sticker or a flyer. Those were days when people didn't look past you when you approached them, as though politics and panhandling were indistinguishable. In 1978, people would actually stop to talk about the issues. As I look back, I often think that my political activism was shaped by that 15-year old kid who walked the parking lots with the governor's son.
Funny that twenty-five years later, the Senator and I are both thinking a lot about .XXX. I wonder if he'd be interested in a bumber sticker....
Coming Wednesday: "Content Labeling, from Hollywood to the Internet"
One of my first introductions to politics was through distributing leaflets and bumper stickers for Mark's dad, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1978. Mark and I and a circle of mutual friends would meet on the weekends in the parking lots of Little Rock shopping malls to talk to people about the election and offer them a bumber sticker or a flyer. Those were days when people didn't look past you when you approached them, as though politics and panhandling were indistinguishable. In 1978, people would actually stop to talk about the issues. As I look back, I often think that my political activism was shaped by that 15-year old kid who walked the parking lots with the governor's son.
Funny that twenty-five years later, the Senator and I are both thinking a lot about .XXX. I wonder if he'd be interested in a bumber sticker....
Coming Wednesday: "Content Labeling, from Hollywood to the Internet"
