We had a really wonderful moment in the Board meeting just now. Susan Crawford tabled a thoughtful resolution providing the community with advance notice of a new gTLD process (look for applications on or about January 1, 2007), and the Board approved it unanimously by a wave. They stood up, in serial fashion, to show their agreement with the resolution. Nice to know they haven't lost their sense of humor after a long week of meetings.

This is from the transcript of the Public Forum. It's an interesting exchange between me and Vint Cerf:

BRET FAUSETT: LET ME WRAP THIS UP WITH SOME FEEL-GOOD HEAD SPRINKLING.

WHETHER YOU ARE RIGHT OR I AM RIGHT ABOUT THE MERITS OF .COM, I THINK WE OUGHT TO USE WHAT I AM HEARING IN THE HALLWAYS TO MAKE [ICANN] BETTER. BECAUSE FRANKLY, IF WE CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO REPRESENT THE PUBLIC INTEREST BETTER, THERE ARE OTHER ORGANIZATIONS THAT START TO LOOK LIKE THEY MIGHT BE ABLE TO DO THAT.

VINT CERF: JUST KEEP IN MIND THAT MULTISTAKEHOLDER ORGANIZATIONS HAVE MORE THAN JUST PUBLIC INTEREST TO REPRESENT. IS THAT A FAIR OBSERVATION, BRET?

BRET FAUSETT: I THINK IN AN ORGANIZATION LIKE ICANN, PUBLIC INTEREST IS THE OVERRIDING INTEREST THAT SHOULD BE REPRESENTED.

VINT CERF: WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT THAT BECAUSE I HAVE A DIFFERENT MODEL.

The Board has approved a resolution authorizing ICANN Staff to continue negotiations with ICM Registry in accord with the advice received from the public (aka the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Government Advisory Committee). By the time these negotiations conclude, it will be about a year since the Board first authorized negotiations to begin. While the Board says that this does not mean that it will approve .XXX when a final agreement it presented, I find it hard to believe that they would expend such serious staff resources on a project that ultimately was going nowhere. My understanding is that .XXX already has the votes on the Board necessary to approve it. The end game is satisfying the critics that their concerns are being addressed.

Before they started bowling, the GAC prepared this Communique. You'll want to read it.

Add: I noticed that the text spoken in the room varied from what is in the published text. You'll also want to read the transcript, whenever it's published. I heard some phrases in the Public Forum that were even more strongly worded than those in the Communique.

Not to be able to read news about ICANN. Here's a post in an IDN script (via Technorati). I can read ".xxx", "icmregistry", and "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers".

http://www.flickr.com/groups/icann-wlg/

We're on day two of the Royal Reading of the Reports. Paul Twomey just announced his "Kitchen Cabinet," in the form of the President's Strategic Advisory Committee, that will advise him on important strategy issues. It's already heavily weighted toward business leaders, with two additional "senior business figures" (Paul's words, not mine) still to be appointed. As with yesterday, the public forum is poorly attended.

No one's here.

It's been in the Bylaws since the reform process. Kieren Baker held the title, but not the function, when he was ICANN's PR person. The fact that he performed press relations, and not public participation, speaks volumes about ICANN's priorities. (If ICANN will address the public interest, the bad press will go away.) The position is not mentioned in the Strategic Plan. It is not mentioned in the Operational Plan. It is not one of the 14 jobs advertised on the ICANN web site.

I make this point in the Public Forum, and Paul Twomey says he agrees.

The ICANN "Public" Forum begins, as usual, with the Royal Reading of the Reports and the announcement, as usual, that today's public forum must end early and tomorrow's public forum will begin late.

As you scroll through the list below, note the place of high importance that the Board has placed "open microphone." Here is this afternoon's agenda: President's Report; Supporting Organization & Advisory Committee Reports; ccNSO Report; GNSO Council Report; ALAC (At-Large Advisory Committee) Report; Public Comment on President's Report & Supporting Organization & Advisory Committee Report; Nominating Committee Report; Ombudsman Report; Public Comments on Nominating Committee & Ombudsman Reports; Break; Morocco 2006 Meeting Hosts; Brazil 2006 Meeting Hosts; Presentation on President's Strategy Committee; Public Comments on President's Strategy Committee & Open Microphone. 

Here's a video snippet from tonight's welcoming ceremony by the host country. It's big....about 20 megabytes....and only a minute in length. It's the video capture from my digital still camera. Worth watching though.

On her weblog, ICANN Board member Susan Crawford observes: "Although it was hard to see over all the heads of the people in front of me, I believe that Vint Cerf participated this evening in some kind of warrior ritual involving (not by him) shouting, stamping, and waving spears.  Gentlemanly as always, he was very game."

From what I understand, video capture of public events like this is illegal in Bulgaria.

Several people have asked me this trip how many people read my weblog and listen to my podcasts. Short answer: I don't know. I have a guess that the weblog is read regularly by about 500 people and that the podcast is downloaded (I can't measure listens, only downloads) by less than half of that. Here are the stats from Blogware for the month so far, which would make it seem like the actual readership is substantially higher than my guess.

General Summary
Stat	March 27, 2006	March
Distinct hosts served	2,711	66,973
Bytes transferred	729.2MB	17450.5MB
HTML requests	6,584	164,312
XML requests	4,563	126,353
Total page views	11,147	290,665

Open the Draft of the ICANN Operational Plan, turn to page 15, and then look at the column titled "Resources Required." This is the cost of a new gTLD application. At the public forum on the Operational Plan, I said that this looked like about $250,000. The answer was that $250,000 was about right, but the actual number will depend on the outcome of the GNSO policy process. This is five times higher than the application fee required from Afilias and Neustar and Global Name Registry and the other new registries accepted in November, 2000. If you're interested in this, you ought to participate in the new gTLD policy processes (and perhaps comment on the ICANN Operational Plan). The cost of a new gTLD application will be directly proportional to the complexity of the new gTLD evaluation process.

Here's the podcast of the Users Forum on IDNs. Very good stuff. (2 hours | 48 megabytes). You'll also want to read the agenda and the meeting notes.

He's here to help. Dave writes: "I'd like to do an unconference for people who do conferences. The topic? How to improve conferences, to make them more valuable to the people who participate, to actually enable problem solving, moving the discussion from the hallways into the conference room."

ICANN needs this. We have the smartest audience in the world, and we need to find better ways to involve them in the discussion with the Board. I'm dreading the next few days when the formal ICANN meetings begin with the royal "reading of the reports." Reading to people who can read -- and have fifteen hour plan flights to reach the conference in which to do so -- is a waste of valuable time.

I lightly moderated an unconference in the ALAC on Sunday on new gTLDs. It was fantastic. Meeting notes are here. We need more of this. The ICANN meeting planners should attend Dave Winer's unconference on the unconference for people who hold conferences.

irc://irc.freenode.net#ICANN

MarkMonitor White Paper on the .EU Landrush: "With more than a million new .eu domains expected by the end of this year, .eu is expected to be the most important new domain extension since .com....During the Sunrise phases, the demand for .eu exceeded that of all previous TLD releases at launch, and it is now expected to become the second largest domain extension behind .com. In fact, some experts are projecting that ultimately 60% of .com domains will be registered in the .eu space."

That's what Vint Cerf announced during the joint GAC-ICANN Board meeting.

I'm sitting in the Open Meeting between the GAC and the Board, and we just received an explanation from Vint Cerf and Hualin Qian on the rumors that China had adopted new TLDs. The report is that, no, China most certainly did not create a new TLD. They used a plug-in to map second- and third-level domain names onto .CN. Everyone, breathe a sigh of relief: China is a good player in the DNS.

And so is New.Net.

I suppose this document now has been repealed.

Last night the members of the GNSO Council and members of the ICANN Board gathered for a working dinner in the main conference facility here in Wellington. The 8:00 p.m. dinner came at the end of a very long day, for everyone, that had begun 12 hours earlier and proceeded apace through a host of different meetings without interruption. Nevertheless, as long as these meetings have become, the GNSO believes that time with the Board is precious, so we insisted that the Board set this time aside. Predictably, given jet lag and the rigors of the day's meeting schedule, Board members and GNSO Councilors were falling asleep at the table. The topic for the working dinner was IDN TLDs. It was certainly nice to hear the preliminary thoughts of members of the Board on this subject, but I couldn't help but notice that the time demands on everyone made the meeting less productive that it otherwise might have been.

Which leads me to transparency.

The key here is that the GNSO views time with the Board as "precious." The GNSO isn't alone in that view. The GAC wants time with the Board. The ALAC wants time with the Board. Each of the GNSO constituencies wants separate time with the Board. Time with the Board is precious because it's the only window we have into the Board's thinking. The only time we're really sure that they're listening to us is when they are actually sitting at the table with us. Podcast the Board's monthly teleconferences, open the Board's private mailing lists, put Board and Council interactions onto a Wiki, and the demands on the Board's time actually will diminish.

Board members increasingly bemoan the time commitment required by Board service. And they're right: no Board service, profit or non-profit, should require the sort of time commitment that is required of the ICANN Board. As the demands on the Board have increased over time, they've responded by extending the number of days in each meeting, extending the working hours of each day, and increasing the number of Board meetings. That's one way of solving the problem.

The better solution to the problem has been in the bylaws all along: "ICANN and its constituent bodies shall operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner...." I promise you, Board Members, it will change your lives for the better.

The folks behind the ICANNWiki have put together a Wiki version of the Wellington Meeting Schedule, with a linked space to allow anyone to take notes during the meetings. For example, scroll down the schedule to Sunday at 14:00-16:30 and look at the meeting notes for the Internet Users Forum (on the subject of new gTLDs). ICANN should have done something like this years ago. It really shows the power of "bottom-up" contributions when people are given the tools and the opportunity to contribute.

That's the policy question. Here's a message that MuseDoma's Cary Carp sent to the GNSO this morning detailing the many complex policy issues involved in both IDNs generally and IDNs at the TLD level.

Here's my response, adding another layer of complexity: "One possible path for IDNs would allow the incumbent registries to leverage their existing contractual relationships as administrators of ascii character TLDs to become the sole providers of IDN versions of the existing gTLDs. On this path, the incumbents would gain the right to operate IDN gTLDs without a bidding and award process. Take all of the competition issues we've been debating with the award of .COM and multiply them across the language space of the entire world...." There's more.

ICANN gets letters. It gets lots and lots of letters. Not all of them actually show up on the ICANN web site or rise to the top of anyone's watch list. Here are some recent ones you should read.....

Letter from Paul Twomey to CIRA, dated 21 March 2006 (it's a response to CIRA's open letter to the Board of 17 March 2006).

Letter from Peter Zangl, Deputy Director of the European Commission's Directorate on the Information Society, to Vint Cerf, Chair of the ICANN Board, dated 17 March 2006. The letter responds to Vint Cerf's letter of 17 January 2006.

Letter from John Kneuer, of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to Sharil Tarmizi, Chair of ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, dated 20 March 2006, on the subject of whether ICANN's proposed contract for .XXX requires ICM Registry to deliver what it has promised. 

Letter from Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry, to Sharil Tarmizi, GAC Chair, dated 25 March 2006, on why Mr. Kneuer is wrong.

I thought the answer to this was "Of course we will." But then the GNSO started to debate a proposed principle raised by one of the constituencies which read: "No [gTLD] applicant should be allowed to propose a TLD that is either a transliteration (e.g. using different character sets -- such as Chinese and English for the same verbal word) of an existing TLD or a lexical (e.g. same meaning in different languages) or semantic (e.g. job and employment) equivalent of an existing TLD."

I was trying to figure out what this meant, so I said that I thought we did want to see IDN versions of existing TLDs. We do want a Chinese equivalent of .COM, .NET, and .ORG, don't we? The answer was, yes we do, but they won't be considered "new gTLDs."

Then it clicks: this principle was proposed by the registries constituency. The incumbent registries' view of IDN TLDs is that Verisign gets all IDN versions of .COM and .NET, Afilias gets all IDN versions of .INFO, MuseDoma gets all IDN versions .MUSEUM, etc.

So I asked the question, "Is it the registries' position that we will have IDN versions of the existing gTLDs but that they will be operated by the incumbents who have the equivalent English-language strings?" Unanimous answer from the registries: "Yes."

That's the question of the moment in the GNSO Council meeting. The question we're particularly stuck on is whether ICANN should require applicants to demonstrate a viable business plan in support of their proposal. On the surface, the idea that an applicant should have funding and strategy sufficient to get it off the ground makes sense. The idea starts to fall apart a little bit, however, when we ask how one evaluates whether a business plan has merit. The original business plan for Fedex received a "C" when submitted in a business class at Yale. How, exactly, is a team of independent evaluators going to decide whether a business plan to serve a new community of registrants is viable? What is the standard against which the business plans will be judged? You could reject only applications that were "patently unreasonable in any context," for example, or require that applicants demonstrate a "substantial likelihood of operational success," another example. Those are very different.

Matt Larson, VeriSign Information Services: "On March 30, VeriSign will upgrade its Whois service for .com and net, which will now reflect registration activity in the .com and net registry databases in near real-time. We are announcing this upgrade because the Whois output format will change slightly at the same time and we want to give notice to anyone who may have to update processes that parse this output. A sample of the revised output is included at the end of this message."

The loss of openness and transparency in ICANN has been a death by a thousand cuts. Everytime someone asks to speak off the record or close a committee meeting, we all lose an important part of the organization.

We're having a meeting of the GNSO Council here in Wellington to talk about new gTLDs, and ten minutes into the introduction Paul Twomey asks if he's being recorded and can talk off the record. Huh? I can understand the need for confidentiality when it comes to legal issues or personnel issues, but going off the record on the subject of new gTLDs in the middle of a policy discussion? No, you can't talk off the record. This subject is core to ICANN's mission. Everything has to be on the record. ICANN's culture of closed meetings flies in the face of its bylaws and the principles on which it was built. We all have to be aware of this. We have to make it in an issue at every juncture.

It may not seem like a big deal. After all, isn't it just one small comment in the middle of a larger discussion? But it is a big deal. The alternative is that ICANN becomes opaque by the addition of a thousand translucent scrims. 

Gadi Evron: "In this paper we address in detail how the recent DNS DDoS attacks work. How they abuse name servers, EDNS, the recursive feature and UDP packet spoofing, as well as how the amplification effect works. ....In the conclusions we also discuss some remediation suggestions." (Paper here as PDF)

Every once in a while, ICANN pushes so far past the limits of acceptable decision-making processes that the only suitable response becomes satire. Here are three recent examples:

• Texturbation -- which looks like a new weblog -- has two recent posts on the .COM deal: "VeriSign's .com Win Guarantees Internet Stability" and "VeriSign to Outsource .com Registry to Go Daddy";
  
  
• Karl Auerbach has simplified the creation of an ICANN Strategic Plan by automating the generation of important-sounding but nonsensical ICANN-speak; and,
  
  
• Richard Sexton takes on Vint Cerf and the ICANN Board Chair's views on new gTLDs.
  

I can't wait to see what April Fool's Day has in store.

A group of registrars filed a new Request for Reconsideration this week (PDF here). It addresses ICANN's many failures in openness, transparency, legitimacy, and sound decision-making. It's well worth reading. Registrars, it's also probably time you all got out of your work rooms during the ICANN meetings and met some important people in the community.

Allow me to make a few introductions.

Registrars, I'd first like to introduce you to the editors of ICANNWatch.... Michael Froomkin, Jonathan Weinberg, Dave Farber, Ted Byfield, and Milton Mueller. They started writing about the very issues raised in your Reconsideration Request way back in 1999. Imagine that.

You also should take a few minutes and get to know Karl Auerbach and Andy Müller-Maguhn. They used to be on the Board. They were even elected.

Take some time to talk about ICANN accountability with the many members of the NAIS Project and the At Large Study Committee: Clement Dzidonu, Alan Levin, Izumi Aizu, Adam Peake, Myungkoo Kang, Christian Ahlert, Stefaan Verhulst, Jeanette Hofmann, Jerry Berman, Alan Davidson, Rob Courtney, Scott Harshbarger, Don Simon, Raúl Echeberria, Carlos Afonso, Carl Bildt, Charles Costello, Pierre Dandjinou, Esther Dyson, Olivier Iteanu, Ching-Yi Liu, Oscar Robles, and Pindar Wong. Do you remember this statement in Ghana? Some of us will never forget it. We knew then what it would mean for this ICANN.

Take a virtual walk through the former DNSO's General Assembly, where disenfranchised individual domain name registrants still worry about an unaccountable, opaque ICANN.

Spend some time in Wellington getting to know the At Large Advisory Committee. They're the last vestiges of a once robust At Large Membership.

And last but not least, let me introduce you to Ed Hasbrouck. In spite of being bullied by ICANN's counsel and ignored by ICANN's Board, Mr. Hasbrouck has filed timely and important requests for reconsideration and independent review. In them, he makes allegations about ICANN's closed, non-transparent processes that are strikingly similar to the ones you made. You two have a lot of common interests.

You need to know all of these people, Registrars.

See, here's how this works: we're all connected.

You can draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign a perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

After you meet all these people, Registrars, you'll find that you like their company a great deal. It's these people -- the users -- who share your interests in an open, competitive marketplace. They too believe in a transparent, accountable ICANN. It's time you got to know these people, maybe even helped them organize into voting GNSO constituencies or funded their travel to ICANN's farflung meetings. And when you meet them in some hotel bar in Wellington or Marrakech or Sao Paulo, buy them a drink and raise a toast to the crazy ones.

As you've now discovered, they weren't so crazy after all.

No sooner had we finished the PC Forum panel on security issues, which included a segment on the DNS, than I found this thread on NANOG on the same subject. Worth reading.

Biggest applause line of the day....Esther: "Search is boring."

Interfax China Article: ICANN to launch trial testing of IDNs for Top Level Domains in the third quarter of 2006.

A quote: "'The preparation for the testing is already underway, and it will be a testing on the top of the root,' said Twomey. 'We are presently moving to introduce the IDNs of TLD, and are much closer to the end for the answer.'"

Go ahead readers, dig around here in the ICANN IDN pages and see if you can point me to the place where ICANN talks about what it's doing....

The subject for this morning's session is "Security and Citizens: Peer-to-Peer Security" and the panelists are Stratton Sclavos, Veni Markovski, and Stewart Baker, moderated by Esther Dyson (pictured here). It's hard for me not to think of it as an ICANN panel....

Here are my notes, in real-time:

Stewart Baker: Post-Katrina, government thinking of ways to distribute and decentralize its response to events. Why can't we use mobile devices, like cell phones, to send text messages and ringing alerts to people in danger? For example, send a warning to people on a beach that a tsunami or storm is coming. (Me: how do you enable the beneficial uses of this technology without also enabling the government's ability to track us and spy on us?)

Veni Markovski: Talks about government evolution in Eastern Europe. Optimistic that evolution will continue.

Stratton Sclavos: Verisign's biggest worry: in the race against those who would work mischief on the network, can Verisign stay ahead? Verisign is a big target -- often a first target for persons experimenting with attacks. Attacks coming from Eastern Europe and Asia. Also governments are pushing on the Verisign network for data sifting and other purposes.

Veni: Government can work with and cooperate with business. For example, in Bulgaria, can take down a spoofing site in Bulgaria within 2 hours of notice.

Stratton: Loves the "trusted computing" model, but if we don't build software on the network that uses it, it's useless. Also need to educate users about how to be secure and responsible.

Esther: Talks about domain names. Very easy to get a domain name. People in the industry can compete only on price. Sleazy marketing practices. (Stratton agrees.) Very easy to get a domain name and immediately send out spam, phishing messages, etc. Is there a way to correct this?

Stratton: Yes, read the new regstrations and find patterns. But there are policy limitations, imposed both by ICANN and governments, on registry's ability to police. Also, Verisign will brief the ICANN Board in Wellington on the security challenges that Verisign faces.

Stratton: Also face challenges by the traffic monetization crowd. 7,000,000 registrations a week, but only .6% last for more than 5 days. How do you tell the domain names registered for fraudulent purposes from those registered for traffic aggregation?

Elliot Noss (from the audience): Question for Stratton: one solution is to use the telcos to control the bad things. But, for the telcos, it moves security from a service upsell to a cost center. On 7,000,000 registrations per week problem, Tucows has been looking to change the five-day window policy or have Verisign charge for it. Stratton: we're always happy to charge for something.

Stratton: Most of what we've done with ICANN over the last seven years is create competition and address trademark problems. Now need to move on to stability and security.

Esther: Two things we're saying about ICANN. First, U.S. control, such as it is, cannot really tell ICANN what to do; the moment the U.S. throws its weight around too much, it will get pounced on by the UN and other governments. The saving grace is that ICANN is widely viewed as illegitimate, so therefore it can't do too much. Second thing about ICANN, if it does indeed do its job now and put in place some sensible policies that people want, no one is going to worry that ICANN is illegitimate.

Question from audience: Why are registrars and registries selling flying lessons to terrorists? In other words, why are we allowing people to register citibanksecurity0001.com?

Stratton: Has reviewed new registrations in relation to this issue and, typically, a phishing domain name has no relationship to site that someone is spoofing.

As terrific as the presentations are, the highlights for me are always the personal interactions during lunches, dinners and breaks. I finally had the opportunity to catch up with Dave Winer; dinner with Dave fulfilled my high expectations. I also got a kick out of seeing the Edgeio demo by Mike Arrington and Keith Teare. I already have an Edgeio account. Last year I added Trumba to my tool set. This year the companies that offer the services I would actually use are Edgeio and Bitty Browser.

Next up on the same panel: Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos and ICANN Board Member (and .COM deal supporter)Veni Markovski....