From Register.com's Annual Report:  "[I]n February 2004, we sold our RegistryPro business, which had been given ICANN approval to operate the .pro registry. We sold this business because we believe that operating a registry would have distracted us and taken time, energy and resources from our core business of operating a registrar and selling related value-added products and services."

And: " In addition, losses at our RCOM Europe and RegistryPro subsidiaries have contributed to a decline in our profitability."  Hmmm. Let's see now, why would RegistryPro have caused losses to RCOM? Could it be because the registry never opened for business, never sold a single dadgum registration? I'm a lawyer, not a business person, so I suppose it's more complicated than that...but probably not by much....  

Sometimes, you just have to laugh. TechWeb is reporting that the current round of sponsored TLD proposals is taking place now, in March 2004, because ICANN decided "to expedite the process."

Looks like I picked a bad week to spend every day in Court. Last week saw the WSIS meeting in Geneva, a new lawsuit by Verisign against ICANN, and a new lawsuit against Verisign by registrars -- not to mention warm-up for this week's meetings in Rome. I have a lot of catching up to do. We're back in Court tomorrow -- so I'm not headed to Rome -- but I hope to participate in the public forum remotely.

Bob Tedeschi in the New York Times: "Dot-com domain names are fetching respectable prices again, after more than three years of attracting scant interest. Names like Truck.com, Beef.com and others have recently sold for more than $100,000, according to Domain Name Journal, a trade publication, while Web sites like Men.com, which offers a dating service, and sites selling pornography like Whitehouse.com are crossing the million-dollar threshold."

A Letter from Verisign to Registrars: "Dear VeriSign Registrar, On January 26, 2004, we concluded negotiations with ICANN staff concerning certain conditions for the launch of the Wait Listing Service...."   more »

From the Preliminary Report of the February 18th Board Meeting: "On 26 January 2004, ICANN's General Counsel wrote to VeriSign to document the conclusion of negotiations concerning the conditions on VeriSign's proposed offering of WLS. During this Board Meeting, the Board authorized the public posting of the 26 January 2004 letter (PDF) setting forth the results of the negotiations and asked that this matter be placed on the Board's agenda for the publicly-held Board Meeting for 6 March 2004 in Rome, Italy."

Network Solutions in a new press release: "70 percent of[survey] respondents said they have provided false data about their identity because of concerns about their personal information becoming public."

Jewish World Review has an interesting interview this month with Vint Cerf. I was surprised by his answer to the question "what else do you want to do?"

Yahoo! has rolled out its own search technology. Very cool. A single search definitively establishes that Yahoo! is now superior to Google.

Five new staff appointments at ICANN, including a well-deserved promotion for Dan Halloran. I'm troubled though that the duties for the Director of Communications (formerly Mary Hewett) and the new position of Manager of Public Participation have been lumped together under one person. Manager of Public Participation is a vital position, and Mr. Baker's impressive credentials suggest that his experience is solely on the press side of his new job. Fortunately, this appears to be a temporary appointment, and I hope that the Public Participation position gets a full-time employee soon.

Add: From the Evolution and Reform Process: "There should be a Manager of Public Participation. This would be a staff position, under the management of the CEO, whose sole responsibility would be to take the actions necessary to enable effective public input into the ICANN policy-development process."

Fresh off the wires: an "ad hoc group of registrars" has sent a demand letter to ICANN asking that it withdraw or delay implementation of Verisign's Waiting List Service. The WLS is on the agenda for the ICANN Board meeting tomorrow.

Add: An interesting thread on the registrars' mailing list also addresses the WLS issue before the Board tomorrow. One of the messages also includes a copy of an earlier letter sent to ICANN in December, 2003 by a group of 25 registrars.

February 12 e-mail from Jordyn Buchanan: "Dear Registrars, We are writing with exciting news about the .pro registry...."   more »

The ICANN Board will meet by teleconference on Wednesday, 18 February 2004. The proposed agenda includes:

• Re-delegation of .ng (Nigeria)
• Establishment of a Regional Office in Brussels
• IDN Transfer Migration Process
• .pro Registry Agreement Assignment
• Board Governance Committee Membership
• WLS Negotiations with VeriSign
• Updates on Various ICANN Activities
• Other business

.NG and WLS ought to be interesting discussions. Too bad the Board isn't webcasting this one.

A couple of years ago, I registered a new domain name and, for the contact address, created a new e-mail address that I had never used before and have never used again. The e-mail address didn't attract much immediate spam (cf, CDT's spam study which covered a six month period), but now, almost two years after I registered the domain name and months after I allowed its registration to lapse, spam is starting to come in on the unique e-mail address I created for my test.

The spam that I received over the weekend asked me to link to a third-level address (composed from my e-mail address) under TRUSTRNKTRNG.COM.

Registrant:

zhang jun
zhang jun (spring2004@126.com)
P.O. BOX 38 Dan dong
null,118000
CN
Tel. +86.4156169599
Creation Date: 08-Feb-2004

How do you say "Arrrgh" in Chinese?

Jennifer Trosper, Spirit mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory quoted in a new NASA Press Release: "We have an international interplanetary communications network established at Mars."

REGISTER COM INC (Form: 8-K, Received: 02/12/2004 16:21:15): "During the fourth quarter of 2003, Register.com entered into an agreement (with Hostway Corporation, a global leader in Web hosting and managed Internet services) to sell the core assets of its subsidiary, RegistryPro. Subject to approval by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Hostway will become the registry operator for the .pro top-level domain for professionals. Financial terms of the deal will not be disclosed."

The latest news from Dave Farber's list strikes me as a big deal. The FCC press release is here in PDF Format. The rulemaking process should be interesting, to say the least.