Great stuff from the folks at RIPE NCC. Must reading....and watching!

Here's a copy of a new proposed piece of legislation that will be getting some press the next few days. It's called the "Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008," or the  APCPA. It's ostensibly aimed at stopping Phishing -- a laudable goal -- but in some places the cure is as bad as the disease.

Take, for example, Section (c)(2), at pages 10-11 of the PDF, which says that a registrar must takedown any whois proxy information if it receives a letter or facsimile or email from anyone in the world claiming that the Act has been violated. The Act imposes no obligations that the written notice be made in good faith, and places no penalties on people who send proxy-takedown letters in bad faith.

The irony is that the proxy-takedown letter itself could be false --  false identity, pseudonym, or made anonymously -- and the registrar would have a duty to takedown the proxy information.

If passed in this form, this provision could have incredible anonymous speech ramifications, as all you'd have to do to unmask someone is submit a proxy takedown letter.

Here's a copy of the Complaint, as it was circulated earlier today on one of the ICANN-related mailing lists.

Comes this press release about a new lawsuit filed here in Los Angeles against Network Solutions:


Imagine? Isn't that exactly what happens when you go into a car dealership and ask to buy one of their cars? You have to buy that car on their lot from them.

Network Solutions is doing exactly what car dealerships do every day, taking inventory from the manufacturer (the registry) and putting the car on its own NetSol car lot.

You may find fault with the NetSol practice, but the fault isn't because it's not working the way a car dealership works. It's working exactly the way a car dealership works.

The more I think about .TRAVEL, the more I think it would make a very interesting business case study...probably for what not to do at launch. This is a domain that really could have benefited by the domainer community. Had they allowed entrepreneurial registrants to come in and build aggregation/portal businesses on various .travel names, they could have built out the TLD quickly. There's a fair amount of money to be made on travel-related affiliate marketing, and the PPC value of travel is reasonably high also. Domainers would have had a powerful incentive to build travel-related businesses around generic .travel names. Certified, authenticated travel businesses were never going to be the first-movers in this TLD (a fact clear only in hindsight, perhaps), yet the typical first-movers with the knowledge and capital to build it out were excluded from participation.

If I were Tralliance, I'd call the last few years the longest sunrise period for a new TLD launch in history, and I'd petition ICANN to allow me to open up TRAVEL to anyone who wants to operate a travel Internet-based service.

From the ever vigilant Edward Hasbrouck comes news that Tralliance parent company TheGlobe.com is planning to sell Tralliance and its .TRAVEL top-level domain registry. I don't think this poses any overarching ICANN policy issues -- you can sell a company and keep its current bundle of contractual relationships intact -- but I do wonder about the business decision.

This is interesting to me because I don't understand why TheGlobe thinks this is not a good business. As of the October 2007 Registry Report to ICANN, .TRAVEL has 28,529 names under management, with 26 different registrars. They resell for about $99. (I can't find the registry level fee anywhere. Anyone else?) I suppose I don't understand why you can't turn a fair profit on that number of names * the registry fee. Granted, this is not .COM, or even .INFO, so it may not have met expectations, but businesses with annual revenue of a few million dollars a year are the backbone of the U.S. economy. It seems to me that you could easily net $500K/year on your current business with upside for future growth, and I don't know that TheGlobe's other business lines, whatever they are, are turning much of a profit at all.

In response to my post yesterday, ICANN's Manager of Public Participation asks if I've gone mad. No, not all. The problem is that ICANN's postings from Dehli are coming too late to be meaningful to those half a world away. When I wrote yesterday's post, no transcripts from Monday's sessions had been posted. The Real Video and Audio files aren't archived, so if you don't catch a session live -- in the middle of my night, here in Los Angeles -- the files aren't available later.

Today, Tuesday, I can finally read the transcript for Monday's sessions. But the live Tuesday meeting is now complete (as I write this, it's 11:00 pm in Dehli), and none of Tuesday's transcripts are posted. And the Real feeds produce error messages.

So the message I take from this is that remote observers -- "participants" is too charitable a term -- always must work 36 hours behind the live meeting. For me, this is frustrating.

I'll admit that across the entire world probably fewer than a dozen people are interested in following ICANN's Dehli meeting closely, so the allocation of resources to prompt posting is understandably not high on anyone's priority list. Still, I can't help but wonder whether improved remote participation mechanisms would make interest in ICANN's work increase.

Ok, so pretend you were someone in the United States (like me) who wanted to follow what ICANN was doing in Dehli (like me) and who wanted to read transcripts or watch videos or listen to audio of today's events (like me). Where would you go?

I'm a customer of Network Solutions, so I get their marketing emails from time to time. I received one this morning for an upcoming seminar on how to use blogs in business. "In less than 30 minutes, you’ll see how blogs can have a direct impact on your Search Engine Optimization efforts and how any business, including YOURS, can benefit from having a blog."

Now go to www.networksolutions.com and find the Network Solutions blog.

With the NTIA's mid-term review of ICANN's performance under the JPA underway, and ICANN writing to the United States to say "the JPA is no longer necessary and can be concluded," you might well ask yourself, "What is the JPA?" I did, and I'm as steeped in this as anyone. My guess is that I'm not the only one who is confused.

The confusion starts because not everyone uses the term "JPA" to refer to the same thing.

If we're talking about "concluding the JPA" (what ICANN wants) or "evaluating ICANN's performance under the JPA" (what the NTIA is now doing), it's very important to know if we're talking about the same things when we use the term "JPA.". You'll want to think about this too before you submit comments before next week's February 15th deadline.

Here's what I know. In September, 2006, about the same time that ICANN and the NTIA entered what should have been called "Amendment 7" to their November 25, 1998 Memorandum of Understanding, they stopped using the term "MOU" and began referring to their agreement, as modified over the years, as a "Joint Project Agreement." If you look at the text of their September 29, 2006 agreement, you can see that references to the "MOU" have been replaced with references to the "JPA."

This September 29, 2006 Agreement, however, is not a complete document. By its plain terms, it is an amendment to something else. That something else is the November 25, 1998 MOU.

Some people loosely refer to the "JPA" as the set of tasks listed in the September 29, 2006 amendment. Even ICANN's current Chair, Peter Dengate Thrush, uses the term "JPA" loosely in his letter to the NTIA. He talks about "The JPA – like the memorandums of understanding before it," as though the JPA somehow replaced the MOU. It didn't. It merely supplemented and amended the MOU.

In one sense, doing away with the list of tasks in the September 29, 2006 amendment is sound. ICANN is at a stage of its development where it ought to set its own agenda, for right or wrong, and it no longer needs the constant reporting to the USG required under Section V. of the MOU. If we're ever going to completely privatize the DNS, shouldn't we have the opportunity first to see what ICANN does when it is driving solo?

So if "conclude the JPA" means allow ICANN to set its own agenda and free ICANN from its reporting requirement to the USG, I can support that.

Properly understood, however, the "JPA" refers to the complete current contract between ICANN and the United States. It starts with the November 25, 1998 agreement and is modified seven times, most recently by the September 29, 2006 "JPA." Copies of all versions are here, on the NTIA website.

Just for my own education, I created a complete version of the Agreement, starting from the first MOU and incorporating all of the revisions over the years. The result is here, in a PDF document:


The text of the so-called "JPA" of September 29, 2006 is in blue typeface.

If we want to "conclude the JPA," are we saying that we want to terminate this entire document or just the part in the blue typeface?

The difference matters.

Add: Milton Mueller has been thinking about similar issues. His IGP blog post is here.

The new ICANN Budget for the next fiscal year has been posted. ICANN wants to collect $61,000,000 from your domain name registration fees to keep it going for the next year.

A couple of people now have asked why ICANN's astroturfing is a bad idea.  To my mind, the answer is simple: to do it is to invite it. On this one occasion, ICANN is doing the lobbying for its policy position. But 99% of the time, ICANN is on the receiving end of the lobbying. What signals is ICANN sending about the sort of comments it believes are worthwhile?

I've always been of the view that good ideas should rise to the top, and I worry about future processes in which the currency within ICANN becomes the volume of the comments, not their quality.

This has to be the low point of ICANN PR. Add your email address, check the box, and ICANN will send an email singing its praises to the NTIA on your behalf.