Order the shirt now. It will be in your mailbox by the time you return from Carthage.

According to this story in Journalism.co.uk, the Ukrainian government is attempting to obtain control over the .ua ccTLD and, if the story is correct, use that control to monitor Internet traffic.

Here's the text of the remote comment I submitted to the Public Forum this morning (with bonus links included).   more »

Real-time captioning posted in almost real-time: ICANN | GNSO Council Meeting Captioning | 29 October 2003. This is a nice development.

Steve Loughran, writing on O'Reilly's XML.com, discusses The Impact of Site Finder on Web Services.

The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Regulatory Effectiveness has lifted the wraps on a new website and a new regulatory focus for CRE: ICANNfocus.org. The new website has a placeholder page that should raise a few eyebrows in MdR.

No, that's not sunset. Not even smog. That's a picture overlooking Flower Street in Downtown Los Angeles taken today at lunch. Smoke from the wildfires has covered the entire city. The skies turned an eerie orange-gold on what should have been a cloudless day of blue skies.

From Amadeu's new blog: "The GNSO Constituencies meetings is always my worst day."

Step right up, get yer generic terms in .name now!

The Policy Answer. Is .Pro in the Testbed? That's the question I would ask when trying to decide whether to grant RegistryPro's request for permission to market second-level domains. If .pro is part of the testbed, then it should proceed with the plan it proposed to ICANN in 2000. As soon as the testbed is complete, however, it should be allowed to do whatever it wants. (Chris Ambler suggested a similar solution first yesterday.) As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I think the testbed is dead. Let's just abandon the charade that we're trying to evaluate some set of data against some set of hypotheses. (Karl makes similar points well here). If we acknowledge that reality, RegistryPro's request should be granted.

The Personal Answer. Beginning in April of this year, .pro-accredited registrars began marketing various pre-registrations and sunrise registrations for .pro. I've submitted applications with a couple of registrars, at least one of which required me to pre-pay for the domain name. So I'm already out several hundred dollars for a possible registration of the style *.law.pro. I'll be disappointed, and more than a little frustrated, if my order is cancelled, my place in the queue is changed, or I'm asked to pay an additional amount for the new second-level domain name. I thought *.law.pro was a good idea when I registered, and I still think so. I wouldn't mind seeing how it works out. But I've waited this long, so what's another six months?

I'll admit that fausett.pro is a better domain name than fausett.law.pro. As I understand the RegistryPro proposal, however, I wouldn't qualify for fausett.pro unless I had licenses in both law and another discipline. If I were licensed in a single area, the best I could get would be a redirect from fausett.pro to fausett.law.pro. That seems plainly silly. I suspect that the only reason RegistryPro proposed this redirect service was because it thought it needed to retain some core of its original naming proposal if it hoped to get ICANN's approval. That's silly too. RegistryPro's trying to meet ICANN's need for control rather the market's desire for a simple product. If RegistryPro and ICANN are going to change the naming convention, don't go halfway. Just abandon the professional subdomains and let all licensed professionals operate under .pro together. RegistryPro, and its whois database, can provide a directory service if it needs to distinguish lawyers from doctors and accountants.

Let's face it, the new TLD "testbed" is dead, if it ever existed at all. Three years after the ICANN Board used an astonishingly ad hoc process to go "shopping" for .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro, we're no closer to selecting new ones than we were then. Although the community of Internet users was promised that these initial seven selections were simply selections for a "testbed," we now have little data to make any evaluation about them and no clear ideas about how to test their success or failure. Had this been a real "test," the experiment would have been designed before the selections were made, and the Board's decisions would have been guided by the variables necessary to conduct the test.

Trying to get community agreement about how to evaluate the testbed now, however, is an impossible task. Everyone involved has their own agenda and wants to spin the experiences of the last three years their own way. Trademark owners, insistent on owning "their names" in every conceivable TLD, have been ruthlessly bled by the registries through sunrise periods. Even TLDs like .pro that plainly pose little threat to create consumer confusion have sought to make easy and early profits off the trademark bar. Is it any wonder that the intellectual property and business constituencies aren't eager for new TLDs?

The new registries aren't eager to move the process along either. When asked in 2002 whether ICANN ought to create additional TLDs, Afilias' Roland LaPlante cautioned for restraint. The reason? LaPlante said: "[W]e must allow adequate time... [so] that their introduction does not negatively crowd or disrupt the current registration marketplace by offsetting the existing supply versus demand structure." If you need a translation, Mr. LaPlante was worried about losing market share to new competitors.

With all of the prospective TLD registries kept firmly outside the formal ICANN processes -- remember prospective registries were denied membership in the registry constituency -- who inside of ICANN has any incentive to move this process forward? That's why we're where we are three full years after MdR 2000. Perhaps only the shame of having done virtually nothing on this front for three years will finally move ICANN forward.

Let's put the testbed to bed and start anew. Rather than trying to evaluate the effects of new TLDs in a vacuum, let's just do it. Announce a formal call for applications. See what comes in. Pick the best 10 or 20 and queue them up for launch 2 per quarter for the next two years. If an application is selected, then access a fee. Just do it.

No, it's not an April Fool's joke. Thomas Roessler notes that ICANN's Vice President for Supporting Organizations will operate out of a new Brussels office. With Paul Twomey in Australia and offices in Marina del Rey and Brussels, can we now say that the sun never sets on ICANN?

Another way of looking at it is that ICANN can now be sued in three continents.

.Pro asks yet again to change its naming convention.

Travel Partnership chairman Jean-Claude Baumgarten: Delays over dot-travel domain name insufferable.

The latest press release from GNR is interesting in several respects. It announces a "new" product. It encourages trademark owners to hurry up and get their defensive registrations in. And it touts that .name is now "Powered by VeriSign." Woohoo! This is what masquerades as competition in the ICANN world -- stale TLDs, powered by the incumbents, rolling out new name spaces in the hopes of capturing more trademark dollars. Meanwhile, the incumbents have ICANN so tied up in processes for new services -- Sitefinder, IDNs, WLS -- that staff can't focus on creating real competition. Real competition would be the introduction of new TLDs powered by new market participants. When will we see that?

In late 2000, I wrote in my weblog that we wouldn't see another round of new TLDs until 2004 at the earliest. Readers wrote to say I was nuts -- including readers in Marina del Rey. This is one time I hate being right.

Susan Crawford is dismayed by my update on yesterday's WLS hearing.

"...that Mr. Kraaijenbrink is appointed under Article VII, Section 2(1) of the Bylaws as Chair of the 2004 Nominating Committee, to serve until the conclusion of the ICANN annual meeting in 2004 or until his earlier resignation, removal, or other disqualification from service."

New press release: "We are pleased to announce the merger of MarkMonitor and Alldomains in Domain Registration and Brand Protection. This business combination represents the coming together of the two most advanced and rapidly growing players in the category....   more »

After about an hour and a half of oral argument, the Court decided that the most expeditious way to handle the Dotster-eNom WLS case against ICANN was to set it for trial. A tentative trial date was set for Tuesday, December 16, 2003. Judge Walter took the motion for preliminary injunction under advisement. He asked ICANN's counsel whether implementation of WLS was imminent. The answer was that ICANN and Verisign continued to have significant issues separating them in the WLS negotiations. In light of those ongoing discussions, Judge Walter asked ICANN to consider putting off the implementation of WLS until after the December trial date. ICANN is expected to provide a response to that request soon. If ICANN agrees, the preliminary injunction won't be necessary and today's issues will be decided instead at trial in December. If ICANN disagrees, Judge Walter likely will issue his opinion on the preliminary injunction motion in the coming week. I couldn't tell from his questions which way he was leaning. More comments soon.

Dave Farber's IP list has had a number of threads recently on Verisign's Sitefinder service. A post from Henry Minsky didn't make it to the archives though, so I'll copy it below. His point is that you have to evaluate standards compliance by looking at the content of the packets, not at whether the packets are well-formed. That's an interesting way to look at it. Thoughts?   more »

U.S. District Court Judge John Walter will hear Dotster's preliminary injunction motion on the Waiting List Service today at 1:30 PM. I have a client meeting at my office scheduled for the same time, but I plan to head on down to court as soon as it's over. Several other matters are also on the Court's calendar for 1:30 pm, so I may have a chance of catching the whole thing. If Judge Walter rules from the bench, as often happens on preliminary injunction motions, I'll post the ruling live from the courtroom (via my Blackberry). Check back later today. In the meantime, you can read the Dotster, eNom and ICANN papers here.

Verisign Press Release: VeriSign to Sell Network Solutions Business to Pivotal Private Equity.

J. Jahm Najafi, the Chief Executive Officer of the buyer, had my favorite quote from the press release: "We will continue to provide stellar service...."