I've made some updates to the style and content of my icann blog. You'll see them at the category link of icann.blog.us. I'll leave this main page fairly clean. You can see all my posts on this page, but use the icann.blog page if you just want the icann related posts.

We've finished our work here in Amsterdam. It was one of the better GNSO Council working sessions that I can remember. We made surprising progress. I think we're on track to finish the new gTLD policy process and send recommendations to the Board for consideration and approval by the end of the year. The mp3 files should be up soon.


From the 30-Minutes-Ought-To-Be-Enough-For-Anyone Department: the only downside of the meeting was the metered Internet access at the Schiphol Sheraton Hotel at the Amsterdam Airport. In order to access the Internet, you had to purchase access for 20 Euros a day. After you had made the purchase, you were given a unique code to type into your web browser that allowed access to the Internet....in 30 minute chunks. That's right, each session expired after 30 minutes, even though you had paid for 24 hours. So if you wanted to use the Internet throughout the day, you had to reload the authorization page and re-enter your unique code every 30 minutes.

On Wednesday, the hotel's metering software stopped working entirely. The hotel reported that "the Internet was down," but as it turns out, the Internet was reaching the hotel just fine. Only the metering software was down. The hotel could have made access available without metering but chose to keep us off the 'net entirely for a day. By Thursday morning we had had enough and, fortunately, were able to hack together a workaround.

For all I know, the hotel probably still thinks "the Internet is down."

A group of domainers will be gathering in Marina del Rey from Wednesday, September 20th through Friday, September 29th for "DomainFest LA." Details and reservation information here.

If you've been following the issue of new "registry services", like Sitefinder for example, you'll be interested in this new announcement from ICANN. Read it yourself, but the announcement says that ICANN has now launched its Registry Request Service and filled the positions on its Registry Services Technical Evaluation Panel. What this means is that ICANN is now ready and able to accept proposals from gTLD registries for new registry services. Will we see Sitefinder return? Who knows, but looking into my crystal ball, I think we'll see new proposals for new registry services very, very soon. My sense is that the incumbent gTLD registries have been waiting for this announcement for a long time. They probably have a number of proposals ready to go. This will be important to watch as it plays out.

The other issue that occupied much of Wednesday's GNSO meeting was thinking about how to handle the situation in which more than one gTLD applicant proposes the same string. We generally agreed on a process for addressing such conflicts. These are my personal notes. More detailed -- and accurate -- draft minutes and discussion papers will be published by the GNSO's Chair and ICANN Staff in the coming days.

Start with "first-come, first-served." If you didn't submit an application by the end of the RFP process, you can't jump in later and complain that someone's proposal conflicts with one of your own...that you perhaps intended to submit at some time in the future. Assuming that two or more applications for the same string were submitted at the same time, however, you'd alert the applicants and give them an opportunity to work out the conflict among themselves. They might agree to merge their applications, buy other applicants out, switch their string choice, etc. If they can't resolve the conflict, then the applicants would move to a light-handed mediation process, steered by ICANN Staff, to see if amicable resolution of the conflict is possible.

If the applicants insist that ICANN designate a winner and a loser, then the applicants next will submit verifiable evidence of support from the Internet community for their proposals. The evaluators will look at the evidence of support and make a determination as to which application would best serve the public interest. To the greatest extent possible, we're going to attempt to define objective evaluation criteria, which will be published well in advance, for this "service to the community"-style evaluation.

Finally, if a clear winner does not emerge from the "service to the community" evaluation, ICANN should pick the winner at random select a winner based on ICANN's core values. (A minority, including me, favored random selection at this point, but others preferred the 'beauty contest' approach. We'll have a minority report on this point.)

These are just my draft notes.... and the issues are still under discussion... but this is the general direction in which we're headed.


Bonus links: my Flickr Stream from Amsterdam and my updated icann.blog page (icann.blog.us) with syndicated links in the left margin.


Netcraft is reporting that .ES was offline for a period of time yesterday. NANOG has a thread.

Here at the Amsterdam meetings of the GNSO, the key issue for the first hours has been how to evaluate proposed strings. Everyone agrees that the acceptability of the applicant's proposed string should be performed up front. You wouldn't want to get all the way to the end of a costly and time-consuming process only to find that the string you proposed wasn't acceptable for some reason (can you say ".iii"?). The harder question is against what criteria you judge the proposed strings. You have social issues, such as .GOD or .XXX. You have trademark issues, such as .ATT or .APPLE. You have geopolitical issues, such as .ASIA or .TIBET. You have technical issues, such as .EXE. And you have issues of potential user confusion, such as .COMM or .INFORM. We're having a difficult time formulating any rules that would take into account all of these potential challenges...and that's before we've added the complexities of IDNs at the TLD level.

Some formulations of a rule are so broad that they would make every possible string subject to challenge. Others are so narrow that they leave legitimate complaints on the sidelines. We're trying to find a balance, and it's not easy.

From a process point of view, we've agreed that the requested strings in new TLD applications should be published as soon as the applications are received for public comment. Now, on what issues should we ask for comment?


Meanwhile, DSL Reports is reporting that Earthlink is running its own version of Sitefinder for those broadband users that use Earthlink's DNS. NANOG has a thread, and the DSL Reports comment board has some conflicting reports on what is actually going on.

I'm at the special GNSO meeting in Amsterdam. The meetings are being recorded and will be distributed later as mp3 files, so I won't be blogging too much in real time. I'll try to provide some summary notes over the next few days though.

I don't know how I missed this last week, but listening to the Life Online podcast this morning, I learned that GoDaddy was dropping its IPO. You can listen to the podcast here (which includes Bob Parsons discussing his first in person meeting with Dr. Paul Twomey.) Additional details are in CEO Bob Parsons' weblog.

Personally, I'm disappointed. I had pegged some investment funds for the IPO. This is a good company in a strong, growing industry.

ICANN has been awarded the IANA contract again. Did anyone else bid?

This is the last week to submit comments on the GNSO's Initial Report on New gTLDs. Comments should be submitted by 18 August 2006. The comments received will be  reviewed and discussed at the GNSO's special in-person meeting in Amsterdam the last week of this month.

To save on storage space and bandwidth, I'll be taking down the NTIA mp3s next week. Get 'em now, if you want to listen to them.