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Three cheers for the future of our technology policy. The clearest thinker I know of on these matters is headed to Pennsylvania Ave. Nothing official announced AFAIK but it’s widely speculated that she will hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy.

She understands the complex world of technology policy like few do. Most experts understand only a very narrow swath of the tech-policy landscape, which includes managing spectrum allocation, setting national broadband policy, regulating telephone and cable companies’ oligarchy, furthering the discussions around nanotechnology policy & biotech policy, and my fave - Internet policy!

DNSSEC needs to happen ASAP, a coherent national Internet defense policy needs to be articulated ASAP, the barriers protecting the telcos that have accumulated in recent years need to be torn down ASAP, and more. I’m so tired of the complete lack of leadership from the executive branch in recent years. Let the market work has been the mantra, and the results have been:
1. we see degraded service and predatory activity from the big players (I’ll pick on Comcast slowing down Internet access for certain applications as my example)
2. we see the regulatory framework constructed by Congress (just recall those terrific “Internet is a series of tubes” videos from Ted Stevens if you think Congress is capable of doing a good job with this)

So in my view we obviously need policy leadership from the top of the house, otherwise it’s relegated to Congress, and we all know where that leads. Ms. Crawford can draw upon her experience at ICANN and her knowledge of regulatory issues from her teaching experience at Yale and Michigan law school courses about communications policy issues. Go Susan go!

Russia gets ICANN approval for .РФ Zone - this is real progress!

http://www.kommersant.com/p1052592/r_529/Domain_registration_.РФ/

Russia will become the first nation with the non-Latin domain. ICANN Corp that manages domain distribution in the Internet accepted yesterday the registration application for Cyrillic domain. The registration of web-sites in Russia will begin in early July and roughly 350,000 sites will probably emerge in two years.

Let me take up the position that nobody wants to hear - Verisign deserves this increase and fought hard to win it as a consolation prize. They implemented a scheme whereby non-registered .com and .net domains typed in inadvertantly would resolve to what amounted to a basic parking page. Monetizing typo traffic by taking advantage of their position as registry for .com and .net.

People became insensed with jealous rage and ICANN stepped in and forbade it. Most people feel that it’s unfair for Verisign to have a permanent monopoly in the lucrative .com market, even though they are unaware of how we got to this situation. In the early days Verisign stepped up and did what it took to make the DNS system happen. No it’s not enough to have BIND, and to have ISPs setting up nameservers - it required some infrastructure that someone had to provide.

Here is my letter sent to my local congressmen and senators earlier today, in reaction to ICANN moving up their next meeting date when this issue will presumably be discussed. Not that I think the US congress should seek legislative solutions to force saneness on the part of ICANN, but the mere threat of action to pressure the commerce Dept. should help to compel ICANN to include language that people are more comfortable with. The main goal should be to find reasonable ways to allow registries to profit without putting the users if the system at such a high level of risk.

Read on to see the text of the letters. More to the point, if you agree please write to your congresspersons. You can do so at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/alert/?alertid=9002726&content_dir=ua_congressorg

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Say what you will about the shortcomings of ICANN, and the United States’ continued oversight function, but let me be the first to say that there is not a viable alternative. The United Nations is demonstrably incompetent when it comes to any sort of governance, technical or not. I think that’s the main obstacle to a transition to another governance model - the distinct lack of any credible choices.

ICANN has launched its new Registry Request Service stocked with industry insiders who seem poised to deal with new and sometimes innovative requests from all comers. Registries in particular will find exciting ways to drive increased registration, so one easy prediction influenced by a recent Verisign report: the number of registered domains will never again be reported to be less than 100 million!

Kevin Murphy has this awesome expose quantifying the domain kiting phenomenon first publicly sounded by GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons.
http://texturbation.com/blog/2006/07/31/domain-kiting-hall-of-shame/

Can it really be true that the Miami company he named controls, without paying for, some 16 million domains? We all want to see the market continue to appreciate, but this artificial scarcity created by certain registrars is not a healthy subsitute for actual demand from end users.

Correction 8/5 - due to the fact that controlled domains must be deleted then grabbed again within 5 days it would seem my number too high by a factor of six. I stand by the basic point, but an accurate number is probably closer to 2 million domains. Thanks Kevin for pointing it out (see comments for details)

Wouldn’t it be nice to have some ratings system from a not-for-profit group in order to provide some guidance for would-be investors in country code TLDs. Of course it’s important to study the aftermarket sales for that extension to set your expectations for ROI. But remember that assessment also involves judging the stability and competence of the national government and the individual registry associated with a given ccTLD.

AAA ratings could be awarded to the gold-standards, like .de .uk .us .ca etc. But for those registries with troubling incidents that could be documented, lower ratings could be published. Communist or totalitarian governments could also qualify as a criterion for awarding a lower rating.

Ratings criteria, appeal process and the ratings assignment process itself should all be documented of course. This would provide a basis for more standardized financing of domain portfolio investing. It should also increase the levels of investment in domains from, and development of sites in high-rated ccTLDs. Anyone interested in providing this service to the global ccTLD investment community?

The good folks at ICANN met this week in Marrakech, Morocco. They wanted a less comfortable location than the Wellington, NZ site where they met last time, or the Sao Paulo, Brazil location for their next meeting. One thing that happened there was that the “Domain Tasting” practise was attacked, as it has become a vehicle for abuse via controlling names without buying them and for trademark typo-squatting and the like. Who is controllng these names without paying for them? No, not the domainers who usually get blamed for things - certain registrars who are acting like unpaying registrants. Registrars try out names they suspect may have type-in traffic, or residual traffic from previous websites, and test their value with PPC ads. If they turn out to be lucative they will (eventually) renew them, meaning they never get back their $6 deposit from Verisign.

Bob Parsons, from GoDaddy is the most vocal opponent of this, saying that there’s been 32 million names used but not paid for as resut. Nice going Bob, now how about changing the industry’s most abusive specific behavior, GoDaddy’s hostile policy of not allowing transfers for 60 days after a change is made to the WHOIS record.

The largest registrars are in dire need of reformation. They control expired domains for ever longer periods of time, extorting huge fees from legitimate registrants whose names have lapsed, and continue to find new ways to monetize names without adding any value for registrants. Some proposed schemes are so mind-numbing it’s hard to believe anyone could think they were even viable, let alone a good idea. Unfortunately I think increasing regulation is what the future holds for registrars, who will begrudgingly pass along the increasing costs to registrants.

What a well deserved outcry Doug Isenberg’s commentary on CNet elicited from domain speculators. Mr. Isenberg is a lawyer with GigaLaw.com, and more importantly a WIPO UDRP panelist. This means that he is sometimes the person arbitrating domain name disputes.

One problem with his opinion piece is that he equates domainers with cybersquatters. Even if all cybersquatters consider themselves to be domainers, it is certainly NOT fair to brand all legitimate domain name investors as somehow squatting on trademarked names. No one condones the registration of trademarks and service marks. Domainers have known for a long time that this is a poor investment strategy; they are businessmen first and foremost.

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