Broken deadlines, broken bylaws, broken ICANN?

February 23, 2011

Where is ICANN’s 2010 Annual Report? It is typically produced at the end of the calendar year. The 2009 Report was published on 24 December 2009, and the 2008 Report on 31 December 2008. It is currently 23 February 2011 and so far no 2010 Annual Report. Two months late is sloppy by any measure, [...]

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USG Submission to the GAC Scorecard re New gTLDs

January 31, 2011

Background: At a meeting in December, the ICANN Board and GAC agreed to a special session to be held in February that would be dedicated to trying to find a way to deal with GAC concerns over the new gTLD process and the dot-xxx application. The GAC has been preparing documents for the meeting – [...]

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So what does that weird GAC wording actually mean?

January 27, 2011

UPDATE: The ICANN Board just published the minutes from its meeting on Tuesday and intriguingly it has formally “triggered” the GAC-Board consultation that is explained in greater depth below. That means the Board is prepared to say it disagrees with the GAC on 17 March and then, presumably, will approve the Applicant Guidebook at its [...]

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A damaged process and a damaged community

January 25, 2011

I haven’t written for a while. There’s usually two reasons for that: either I have been horribly over-worked, or I need a break from the strange, incestuous and often bitter world of Internet policy and governance. In this case, unusually, it is both. Here’s the big news from the world of Internet governance: some vague [...]

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ICANN Day 1: Sane Board, crazy community. What happened here?

December 7, 2010

According to chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, the ICANN Cartagena meeting is “not that much different” to others. I’d beg to differ. Not only are there a number of very big topics coming to fruition here in Cartagena but there is a bigger change afoot in this organisation that oversees the Internet’s domain name system. First [...]

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Election race heats up for Internet users’ ICANN Board seat

November 26, 2010

The first round of voting has taken place for what is an important and historic election: a voting seat on the board of ICANN for a representative of ordinary Internet users. In the lead after the first round is Sebastien Bachollet (with 43.75 percent of the vote); followed by Alan Greenberg (31.25 percent) and in [...]

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ICANN begins to find its feet with published Board materials

October 29, 2010

Credit where credit’s due, the disclosure of Board materials of the organisation that oversees the domain name system, ICANN, has greatly improved since its first and woeful effort. The materials for a special Board meeting held in September over the “new gTLD” process are clear, organised and understandable. They also help to publicly demonstrate the [...]

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ITU Plenipot: Happy talking, talking, happy talk

October 20, 2010

In the 1990s, on Channel 4 in the UK, the Pakistani team game Kabbadi was shown Sunday mornings for several hours. The only explanation can be that the broadcasting rights were cheap. Kabbadi is a silly but oddly fascinating game. A bunch of middle-aged, overweight men stand at opposite ends of what looks like a [...]

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Sex.com sold (again) for $13m

October 20, 2010

A set of three documents filed in California Bankruptcy Court earlier this week reveal that the world’s most valuable domain name – Sex.com – has been sold for $13m, just one million dollars more than it was sold for back in January 2006. The tale of Sex.com is a fascinating and complex one (I wrote [...]

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ITU Plenipot: Old men and young women

October 19, 2010

The International Telecommunication Union is a walking contradiction. There are many things wrong with the organisation: its closed nature; its budgeting; its out-of-date and out-of-control procedures – and yet not only is the ITU aware of this, but there are formal proposals here in Guadalajara to make changes to fix many of them. The ITU [...]

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