I went so you don't have to -- ICANN Bruxelles pour les nuls

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw () abenaki wabanaki net>]

There are a few people who have some passing interest in ICANN so I 
will inflict upon the list my few paragraph summary of things that matter.

All the past large dragons appear to have been killed or reduced to 
largish lizards. The Four Over Arching Issues, of which only one was 
real, protection of trademark holders, are sufficiently solved. On the 
other hand, biting off fingers as usual, are two new shiny objects for 
the jays and daws to chase: vertical integration of registries and 
registrars (VI, like, you know, the visual mode of ex, not the evil 
EMACS cult) and morality and decency (MoDo).

How big a thrill MoDo is going to be is still TBD. Content regulation 
via names. Whoopie! VI is going to be put to bed one way or another by 
Labor Day.

About VI, which has consumed my every waking hour since ... the 
Nairobi meeting.

Prior to Nairobi the rules reflected the NetSol/VGRS breakup, and 
allowed registries to own approximately 15% of a registrar, and 
registrars to own registries. Afilias (.info) and NeuLevel (.biz) were 
formed under these equity restrictions.

At Nairobi the Board voted that there be no cross ownership in new 
gTLD registries, and just prior to the Brussels meeting last week, 
ICANN released the 4th version of the Draft Applicant Guide, which put 
the cross-ownership limit at 2%.

The VI activity is an attempt to articulate an alternate to the 0%, 
now 2%, and still fluid rule the Board may adopt prior to starting the 
next application round. The broad choices (and venomous camps) are:

	1. things pretty much stay the same, the 15% rule with some change 
continues, for .com-like and .coop-like registries, insiders rule,

	2. things pretty much change, with 100% cross-ownership allowed, with 
various proposals for the prevention of abuse by the integrated 
entity, for .com-like and .coop-like registries, hurray for the 
revolution, and

	3. who cares about 1 and 2? corporations and TLD consultants want 
lots (like hundreds) of brands in the root, now.

The VI Working Group is about as fun as USENET, though the 
face-to-face meetings in Brussels were surprisingly civil. Of interest 
to some here is covert wiggling of a subscriber-type TLD through the 
semi-mythical loophole for "brand" TLDs. There are walled garden 
serpents working the issue towards ".my-walled-garden".

The ISPSG (that's the ISP -- Internet.Service.Providers Stakeholders 
Group) continued to drift into senility and decay with ISPs still 
staffing ICANN issue advocacy out of their IP (Intellectual Property) 
in-house counsels rather than their IP (4&6&BGP&tone&stuff) 
operational sides, so wakeful behavior remains confined to the ASO 
input to ICANN, and limited to the last v4 /8s known to LGBT and other 
persons.

Those are the big ticket items. The Board approved adding the Han 
Script labels requested by .cn (China), .tw (Taiwan) and .hk (Hong 
Kong), which made a lot of people, me included, feel good. This is the 
continuation of the approvals (and awkward delegations) of Arabic 
Script labels and Cyrillic Script labels made earlier.

The security weenies continue to whine that all the new registries 
should be armored up to prevent abuses that overwhelmingly occur in 
.com, and surprise steer well clear of treading on Verisign's toes, so 
in vast areas of policy life in the playpen is quite surreal.

The next meeting is in December, so I finally get a Halloween at home, 
in Cartagena, Columbia. The usual self-and-corporate-promotion-as-news 
is going on over CircleID, which everyone is free to read or avoid, 
and if you read today's CIDR and BGP reports with more than a passing 
interest, and this "pour les nuls", remember the first is reality 
based and the second is not.

And no, there still is no firm date for ICANN to start the public 
announcement and four months later, start accepting applications and 
$185,000 checks. This sentence appears to age well, I've used it 
without sending it out for cleaning since the Paris meeting, six 
meetings in a row.

This exchange:

> On 2 Jul 2010, at 13:34, Bret Clark wrote:
>
> > 28.8k Modem users...
>
> AT&T iPhone users... the new 14.4 modem of the internet.

Had me laughing!

Have a nice weekend everyone!
Eric