ICANN Board briefing materials: more cover pages than information

by kierenmccarthy on August 17, 2010

At its recent meeting in Brussels, the ICANN Board resolved that it would publish the briefing materials that are supplied to it in order to make decisions.

This decision was widely seen by those familiar with ICANN as an effort by the Board to pre-empt what would be a recommendation from the independent review team that is looking at the organization’s accountability and transparency (the ATRT). The failure of ICANN to publish any of the material supplied to it by staff has been a bone of contention for a number of years and a large number of people had highlighted the issue to the ATRT in public sessions.

ICANN’s staff this week published, in two parts, 318 pages of Board briefing materials for its meeting in Brussels [Part one | Part two]. Two things immediately struck me when going through the material: one, large proportions of the material released was already publicly available; and two, huge chunks of the documents were redacted. How much exactly? Well, I endeavoured to find out:

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Postel Award goes to Dr Jianping Wu

by kierenmccarthy on August 2, 2010

Dr Wu - Postel Award winnerMissed this last week: the Internet Society (ISOC) has handed out its annual Postel Award, which honours those who have made outstanding contributions to, broadly, the Internet.

The winner this year – awarded at the IETF meeting in Maastricht on Wed 28 Jul – was Chinese technologist Dr Jianping Wu (left). Dr Wu received the award for “the pioneering role he has played in advancing Internet technology, deployment, and education in China and Asia Pacific over the last twenty years”.

Dr Wu developed the China Education and Research Network (CERNET), the first Internet backbone network in China. It has since become the world’s largest national academic network. He has also been building a large-scale native IPv6 backbone in China. IPv6 is a crucial but complex expansion of the current Internet system and it is large-scale rollouts that are making it possible to shift the Internet onto these new networks. [click to continue…]

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.UK is 25 years old

July 27, 2010

The United Kingdom’s dot-uk Internet domain is now 25 years old. Which in the Internet world is ancient.
The first dot-uk registrations were in 1985 – a decade before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet. As one of the oldest, dot-uk is also one of the biggest registries in the world. [...]

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Calendar for ICANN ATRT meetings

July 23, 2010

ICANN is currently being reviewed by an independent Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT). Their meetings are open, but I have only been stumbling on them by accident.
A closer look at the ATRT’s webpage reveals at the very bottom of the page a PDF that contains details of their future meetings. Not exactly the [...]

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Wordpress and Thesis: your upgrades are driving me mad

July 12, 2010

I love Wordpress – the software that this blog runs on. And I love Thesis – a clever piece of software that works with Wordpress to provide all sorts of clever customisations.
But the combination of them is driving me nuts at the moment. In particular, the fact that they keep bloody updating both too frequently, [...]

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Reflection on ICANN (Brussels)

June 26, 2010

So I have an unresolved sadness about ICANN at the end of this Brussels meeting, so I figured I would type it out to figure out why.
Like so many people in the “community”, I feel a strange sense of loyalty to the organization and yet spend about half my time being critical of it. I [...]

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ICANN’s two missing accountability clauses

June 25, 2010

Earlier this year, the organization that oversees the domain name system, ICANN, saw the first use of its Independent Review Process – its highest level of review for decisions that affect billions.
The IRP decided conclusively against ICANN. The issue was whether the organization had been right to deny the application for dot-xxx as a new [...]

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Dot-xxx approved by ICANN Board

June 25, 2010

As flagged up yesterday, the ICANN Board has approved the dot-xxx Internet extension at its Board meeting just now in Brussels.
It did so almost unanimously (two abstentions) but rather grumpily, however, with several members saying they were “uncomfortable” with the decision and appearing the blame the “process” for forcing them to make a decision. The [...]

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Dot-xxx to be approved tomorrow

June 24, 2010

The domain name system’s overseeing body, ICANN, will approve the controversial Internet extension dot-xxx, designed for online pornography, at its Board meeting tomorrow.
The pre-announcement came in an extraordinary statement read out at the start of the public forum at ICANN’s meeting in Brussels by the organization’s general counsel, John Jeffrey.
The statement said that the [...]

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ICANN Day 3: Good news all around

June 24, 2010

I’ll be honest: I didn’t go to many Wednesday sessions at ICANN Brussels. At least not physically. The remote participation tools mean that, unless you want to actually raise a point at the microphone, you can settle yourself down somewhere more comfortable and follow events on your laptop (and even your iPhone with the Adobe [...]

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