Some of the pioneers of video podcasting have done an episode on "How to Register a Domain Name." This is a tremendous public service. Perhaps ICANN can link to the video directly from its website.

Let's celebrate, contemplate, rejoice, reflect, preserve. Details here.

The Marriott in Marina del Rey continues to haunt me. In 2001, it was the scene of my greatest professional disappointment, when the ICANN Board inexplicably removed ".III" from the selection basket of new TLDs. While there are numerous venues for conferences all over town, I've had to return to this one hotel numerous times since November 2000, just as some cosmic taunt from the domain gods above.

Domainfest LA was no exception, also scheduled this week for the dreaded Marina del Rey Marriott. Fortunately today we had a visit from "the Domain Pope" -- aka John Berryhill -- who gave a terrific presentation and promised to exercise exorcise my personal demons from years past. More pictures on my Flickr page.

(Note to self: please don't 'exercise' your demons. Yours are quite fit and capable on their own.)

Karl Auerbach, the only person ever elected to represent North America on the ICANN Board, has some comments worth reading on my exchange with Kieren McCarthy about the Nominating Committee. I completely agree with him that elections work well and are preferable to a Nominating Committee. My comments were made only on the context of an ICANN that has a Nominating Committee. In a better world, we'd have elections again.

Ronald N. Andruff, writing on CircleID: "Bret Fausett’s recent assessment of Tralliance’s '.museum-like' wild card is just dead wrong."

Declan McCullagh, writing on CNet's News.com: "A long-running dispute over the cost of domain names and VeriSign's lucrative .com monopoly returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, with U.S. senators criticizing the current arrangement as uncompetitive." Mp3s in the next article down.

I can't find an archive of today's U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing on ICANN, so I'll share my own copy here (1 Hour, 17 Minutes / 13.3 megabytes). When I turned the computer on this morning, I realized I didn't have Real Player installed, so it took me a few minutes to get the recorder going. This recording starts 8 minutes after the announced start time. Otherwise, I don't think I missed anything. You can get the prepared, written statements of the witnesses here by clicking on the person's name.

Kieren McCarthy has two excellent posts about the Nominating Committee and his own experience with the process (here and here).

In one of the posts, he writes:


Kieren's right that much of the Nominating Committee process, like other ICANN processes, could be made more open and transparent. This is especially true for the statistics. For example, if we had known back in June that the Nominating Committee was having difficulty gathering names from Africa and Latin America, we -- as in the entire Internet community "we" -- could have done something about that. After the fact, we're left feeling the frustration of knowing that ICANN only received 4 Statement of Interest from Africa and 5 from Latin America.

The place I assume that Kieren and I part company is on the release of the names of all candidates. Having gone through the process as a Committee member, I can share with you the fact that candidates are selected, or not selected, for a variety of reasons. It's really a question of fit at a particular time. In my Nominating Committee, we started with a needs analysis. As simply one example, we thought ICANN needed at least one or two Board candidates with strong financial or audit backgrounds. So that was one puzzle hole to fill. Find a few puzzle holes and then lay on top of that the geographical restrictions from ICANN's bylaws, and you have a selection process that doesn't necessarily mean that the most talented people in a particular field, or the best known people, are selected.

You do want the 'most talented in a particular field, best known' people to agree to stand for selection, however, and not all of them are comfortable going through a public application process. Keeping the names confidential ensures that some public figures -- and in my year we had quite a few -- are willing to go through the process. To the best of my knowledge, each Nominating Committee has kept the identity of its applicants sacrosanct.

Here's another benefit of confidentiality: it prevents the Nominating Committee from being lobbied by special interests, or even the incumbents on the ICANN Board, wanting to ensure that "their" candidate is selected -- or "the other camp's" candidate not selected.

Whatever you may have thought about Tralliance before, you can now add "bad business people" to the list of adjectives. According to the Washington Post, Tralliance's Ron Andruff says that the amount of money the company would make from ads served by its search.travel service would be "miniscule." If Tralliance can't make big bucks off wildcard PPC in a newbie TLD, it doesn't deserve the delegation.

Here's the disconnect: the CEO of Tralliance's parent, TheGlobe.com, says that .TRAVEL is receiving "millions" of errors each day. Tralliance's CEO says that the company would make only a "miniscule" amount of money off of these "millions" of potential wildcard hits. You only need to know a little bit about pay-per-click revenue to know that you don't make a "miniscule" amount of money from "millions" of page views each day.

Rather than dissemble to the point that they look like fools, why don't the bright folks behind Tralliance simply come clean and admit the truth? Millions of dollars in advertising revenue can be realized by implementing a wildcard service, and you believe that no technical reason exists to prevent it. That's the debate we should have, but first Tralliance has to stop the spinning.  There's nothing wrong with making money. The questions are whether the wildcard service presents technical issues or impairs the general user experience.

Congress has turned its attention to ICANN again, holding two hearings, on opposite sides of the Capitol Building, in one week. The Senate Commerce Committee starts things off on Wednesday, September 20th with a hearing titled Internet Governance: The Future of ICANN. The House Commerce Committee follows on Thusday, September 21st with ICANN Internet Goverance: Is It Working? ICANN CEO Paul Twomey and the Department of Commerce's John Kneuer will be testifying at both hearings.

Several things leap out at me. First, the themes for both hearings attempt to interweave some vague notion of "Internet governance" with ICANN. Having fought fierce battles in the UN, ITU, and IGF the last few years to say that ICANN had nothing to do with "governance," the two subjects selected by U.S. officials are, at best, ironic. Apparently, we must keep the subject of ICANN out of the Internet Governance Forum meetings in Greece because, the U.S. says, ICANN has nothing to do with "governance," but when we hold our own hearings in our own nation, we pair the subjects because, well, they're inextricably linked.

The other thing I noticed is that Verisign is represented on both panels. Ken Silva, Verisign's Chief Security Officer, will testify before the Senate panel, while Steve DelBianco, a paid Verisign flak from the thinly disguised "Association for Competitive Technology," is testifying before the House panel. The Department of Commerce has not approved Verisign's .COM agreement with ICANN, so expect the Verisign team of Silva and DelBianco to speak about how the billion dollar increase in .COM registration fees will help secure the Internet's tubes.

The two obvious topics for both hearings are (a) what should the next agreement between ICANN and the Department of Commerce look like? and (b) should the Department of Commerce approve the proposed .COM registry agreement between ICANN and Verisign? Expect lots of posturing on both subjects.

Webcast Information: Senate Hearing: details on Capitolhearings.org. House Hearing, details on Subcommittee page. No mention yet on whether either hearing will be broadcast by C-SPAN.

The House Commerce Committee also has a hearing on ICANN this week, titled "ICANN Internet Governance: Is it Working?"

ICANN has opened a 45-day public comment period on the Tralliance wildcard proposal.

Kevin Murphy, writing in Computer Business Review: "Tralliance Inc, which runs the .travel domain name, said that it will continue to pursue its request to introduce a "DNS wildcard" service, similar to VeriSign Inc's controversial 2003 service Site Finder, despite running up against early security-related hurdles...."

What surprised me was this quote from Ed Cespedes, the CEO of TheWorld.com, which owns Tralliance: "This is certainly not like Site Finder....This is not a money thing, it's about making sure people don't think .travel isn't there or is broken." As proposed, it certainly is "a money thing." Unlike MuseDoma, which only redirects to a museum directory site, Tralliance is running pay-per-click search results on its wildcard pages (see pages 16-17 of the Tralliance Application PDF). If approved, I have no doubt that Tralliance would make significantly more money in this, it's first year (and by an order of magnitude) from its so-called "search.travel service" than it will from its registrations. It is "a money thing." So either Mr. Cespedes is ignorant about the service his company is proposing....or he's lying. Neither should be much comfort for those in the travel community.

The report is linked from here. I've only reviewed the executive summary, but I really like what I see so far.

The ultra-secret ICANN Nominating Committee meets this weekend to select new members of the Board, GNSO Council, ccNSO Council, and At Large Advisory Committee.  I served on the first ICANN NomComm, and this is one of those rare occasions when I can support the secrecy. It's nice to know the timing of the meetings though, even if we won't be aware of the results for several more weeks.

In my year, the weekend retreat in Boston -- this year's Committee is meeting in Frankfurt -- was really where all of the important decisions were made. The weeks leading up to the in-person meeting were spent recruiting candidates, soliciting references, and reading the applications and referrals.  No one had been "cut," and no one had been "appointed," before we arrived. Each Nominating Committee sets its own procedural rules for candidate evaluation, but I'm assuming that this committee generally will follow the same sort of process.

My name in not among those up for consideration, so I'm free to say, without looking like I'm sucking up, good luck to everyone who will be locked in a conference room this weekend in a Frankfurt hotel. It's a really hard, time-consuming, and often painful job. The pain comes in having innumerable qualified candidates and a limited number of spaces. I'm sure this year's committee will face the same tough choices that mine did. I don't envy them.

Here in Los Angeles next week. You'll also get to see me and John Berryhill live on the same stage. That's entertainment.

Denise Michel, ICANN's Vice President for Policy Development, writing on the GNSO Council list: "I wanted to give you a heads-up that the London School of Economics will provide ICANN with a final copy of it GNSO review report today.  This report will be used to inform ICANN's effort to develop detailed proposals for improving the GNSO's structures and processes...."

From Network Solutions Press Release: "An expert report released today concluded that in proposals for the .com, .biz, .info and .org registries, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has failed to ensure adequate security safeguards...." The expert report -- DNS: A System in Crisis (PDF) -- was authored by Jeffrey Archer.

We knew it was coming. As soon as ICANN announced that the new registry services funnel was in place, we knew it was coming. We just didn't know it would happen immediately. A gTLD registry has applied to operate a wildcard service in the DNS. Predictably, the application does not come from one of the mega-registries, but a new one. In the legal world, it's called 'finding a sympathetic plaintiff' to file the action and set the precedent for the others. The application was filed by .TRAVEL's Tralliance Corporation, and you can read it here, along with the ICANN and SSAC responses. You'll want to read it all. It's important.

Joel Rothstein, writing for Reuters, reports: "A U.S. State Department official on Wednesday said that the United States should retain control of the Internet domain naming system and not relinquish it at the end of September when the current agreement ends. 'It won't happen on my watch,' said Ambassador David Gross of the State Department's Bureau of Economic Affairs."

Internet Governance: The Future of ICANN. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Trade, Tourism, and Economic Development has announced a hearing on Internet Governance: The Future of ICANN. Wednesday, September 20th at 10:00 a.m.

Network Solutions' Jonathon Nevett, writing on a GNSO Task Force mailing list: "There are Congressional hearings in the US related to ICANN scheduled for [September 20th] and likely the 21st."