The ICANN board today Approved a resolution that would push off a vote on the approval of the the new gTLD program today in its meeting in Colombia to the San Fransisco ICANN Meeting in March.
Under the resolution The ICANN board will hold an meeting sometime in February 2011 with the Government Advisory Council (the GAC) to hear their final thoughts on the Guidebook.
Moreover under the resolution ICANN is directing its staff to put together a report and a summary of all the comments that were submitted to ICANN under the comment period.
ICANN agreed to provide details regarding its rational for making some of the decisions they have made, regarding the economic interest study and the registrar/registry decision it made last month.
It seems like this will be an ongoing process and as mostly everyone predicted that no final decision would be made at this meeting.
There were certainly many issues with the latest Guidebook so I think it was a proper decision.
We filed out comments on the Guidebook last night
Using the .ORG Registry is a Non.Starter – GAC will never approve that
here’s what i’d like to see produced in a “study”:
what would be the effect on icann, registry and registrar revenues if all “cybersquatting” was eliminated?
would there be any motivation for new gtlds if the namespace was carefully limited in such a way that made everyone happy? no strings even remotely similar to tm’s. no misspellings. in any language. no “non-words”. just “the perfect namespace”.
do you see the hypocrisy? cybersquatting is the justification for many people’s salaries and bonuses. i’m not referring to registrars or domainers. i’m referring to their licensors. as others have said “follow the money”.
if we could put an end to “cybersquatting”, a lot of people lose a lot of money. registrars and their domainer customers would not be not the big losers. icann and their closely associated registries would be the biggest losers.
as soon as the problem of “cybersquatting” goes away, so too do the generous profits.
it’s not a “conspiracy”. but it’s a very simple situation that people just intentionally ignore, because the revenue stream is what really matters, not some PC notion of “proper” domain names.
the names are irrelevant. the meanings are irrelevant. the internet is not a radio, a billboard, a print publication or a tv. it requires input from the consumer. accurate input. its use requires care.
an enormous number of people using it can’t type and they can’t spell. and an even greater number are careless.
show me a study that says that eliminating “cybersquatting” will solve these issues.
show me a study that says eliminating “cybersquatting” will not negatively affect icann, registry and registrar profits.
and the most amusing thing about the whole problem is that names have always been optional. should people ever figure this out, and the focus shifts to numbers, i can’t wait to see how people will argue they are entitled to “exclusive ownership” of a number someone else’s autonomous network.
solutions to these problems are not going to come from policy groups, they will come from technical ones. the policy groups, like icann, derive their raison d’etre from the ongoing existence of problems. finding permanent solutions is not what they do.
punt!
://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/iana.htm
“Modification 6 ICANN Contract Term Extended: NTIA exercised the option to extend the term of the IANA Functions contract with ICANN for Option Year Four covering the 1-year period of October 1, 2010 through September 30, 2011.
September 15, 2010”
TEAM Schilling Prepares for San Francisco?
://forum.icann.org/lists/bc-gnso/msg01632.html