Happy New Year 2004, quicktime style.

According to CNN.com, domain names are bouncing back: "Last week, a Florida man sold men.com for $1.3 million, a healthy profit over the $15,000 he paid for it in 1997."

Larry Lessig reminds us of the good work EFF has done this year and that it's the season for giving. If you haven't given to EFF this year, now's a good time.

Bruce Tonkin's Protocol for participation in Names Council calls. He missed the rule near the end that requires everyone to vote along provider-user lines.

No one seems to know. As a reader pointed out, start with Public Interest Registry, which is the authoritative source for .org whois lookups. If you search for "icann.org," you'll see the list of nameservers associated with the domain name, but for the contact information, you'll see this: "SEE SPONSORING REGISTRAR." The sponsoring registrar for "icann.org" is Register.com. A lookup of "icann.org" on Register.com's whois server provides: "Domain not found."

I'm going to circle back to this in a future blog post, but here's some interesting background reading: Life in Mugabe-ville. It's an interview with Samantha Power, who wrote a very powerful piece in this month's Atlantic called "How to Kill a Country." Mugabe was in Geneva last week, as part of WSIS, hoping to do for the DNS what he's done for Zimbabwe.

Jamie Cowling reports on WSIS for openDemocracy: "The World Summit on the Information Society venue was bland, the rhetoric cloudy, the chocolates consoling � but ideas and energy flowed around the fringes."

Remember the December 7th "go live" date for .pro registrations? That was the "real" live date announced after the launch was delayed from April to August to September. You guessed it: delayed again. According to .pro-accredited registrar EnCirca: "12/10 Update:The launch of both third-level and second-level .Pro domains will occur at the same time. Go-live is anticipated in February." Yeah, right.

DomainPeople.com: ".PRO is unlike any other domain name extension to date." Supply your own punchline....

From an Editorial in the Baltimore Sun: "...Even more misguided is the international movement to take registration of Web addresses from a U.S. nonprofit - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - and put it and other coordination under the United Nations. At the 200-nation U.N. World Information Summit last week in Geneva, delegates opted to keep this bad idea afloat with a two-year study."

Ross Mayfield on why Verisign and Stratton Sclavos pose "a genuine threat to the very decentralized nature of the Internet."

He's right. More from Wendy Seltzer.

Crooked Timber on WSIS: "Anyway, I�ve been mulling over the world summit for days now, trying to decide for myself what, if anything it all meant...." [via Discourse.net]

Thomas Roessler doesn't seem to mind the new "Board Retreat." He prefers an ICANN that is honest about holding closed meetings to one that is falsely open and transparent. I suppose a reasonable person can have a preference between the two, but it's a beggar's choice. Would you prefer a warm blanket or a warm meal? Honesty and openness are each welcome but neither is enough by itself.