Jon Newton, writing on Agoravox: "ICANN may be trying to become the Net’s ’word police,’ believes the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC)."

Anick Jesdanun, writing for The Associated Press, has an article today on domain name tasting, titled "Entrepreneurs profit from free Web names." She gets one fact wrong when she writes "Experts believe spammers and scam artists are also starting to use the grace period as a source of free, disposable Web addresses." We held a panel on domain name tasting at the last ICANN meeting in Sao Paulo and the experts -- from registries and registrars to business and IP concerns -- seemed to agree that tasted domains were not a significant source of spam, phishing, or other forms of fraud. As we heard at the ICANN seminar, fraudsters typically forge their email addresses, use IP addresses and complex forwarding for host addressing, or just register a name with false contact information.

The GNSO Council has approved a new task force that will look at "Protecting the Rights of Others." Specifically, as new gTLDs are approved over the next year, will new registries be required to implement rules to protect trademark owners? What rules should new registries follow? More information on the scope of the task force is here.

From the GNSO Secretariat: "The call for nominations by members of the GNSO Council for candidates to stand for for ICANN Board Seat 13 has formally opened today, Monday 19 February 2007 at 00:00 UTC and will run until Monday 12 March 2007 at 17:00 UTC."

This is the Board seat currently held by Alejandro Pisanty, who cannot stand for election again because of term limits. Because the other of the two GNSO seats is held by Rita Rodin, from North America, the successor to Mr. Pisanty's seat must come from an ICANN Region other than North America.

I could be wrong, but I believe that the ICANN Ombudsman has published his first ever public report about a specific incident brought to the attention of his office. Previous reports have been shrouded in secrecy, with only general descriptions included in year-end summaries. This report, about the At Large Structure approval process, has a footer stamped "STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL AND BUSINESS PROPRIETARY" on each of its 26 pages, but it's now linked from the home page of the ICANN website.

I don't know whether the publication of this report signals a change in policy from the ICANN Ombusdman or is just a one-time thing. Regardless, the report provides some insight into how the Office of the Ombudsman works and the sort of information conveyed to the Board in its reports.

I'm going to point to two letters that highlight the ICANN community's long, internal debate about whether ICANN should be a regulator or not: (1) David Maher letter to Paul Twomey (7 February 2007); and (2) Tim Ruiz letter to Paul Twomey (9 February 2007). Worth reading.

If you're willing to move to Reston, this looks like a really cool job.

And it has absolutely nothing at all to do with ICANN, the Internet, or the law. It's called "Pray for Rain" and you can find it at prayforrain.us. If you have an extra post to spare somewhere on your own blog or website, I wouldn't mind a link or two as I get this off the ground. Thanks in advance for any flow you can send my way.

From PC World: "'Two of the root servers suffered badly, although they did not completely crash; some of the others also saw heavy traffic,' said John Crain, chief technical officer with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in an e-mail interview."

Google news search on "root server" results here. Lots of articles.