Dreamhost is a major US-based ISP with a somewhat irreverant blogging style. The latest blog entry, Crazy Domain Insane, discusses ICANN, new TLDs, domain name auctions, and more. Interesting to see it from another perspective.

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Milton Mueller at IGP in Does ICANN Still Keep Some Things Hidden?:

ICANN has made major strides towards increasing its transparency, but the point about openness and transparency is that you do it all the time, not just when its convenient or when the results won't challenge you. In that regard we find it interesting that ICM Registry's precedent-setting call for an Independent Review Panel has not seen the light anywhere on ICANN's website. ICM Registry, you will recall, was the applicant for the .xxx TLD, and due to interference by governments and some spinelessness by ICANN management ICANN's approval was reversed. ICM has chosen to become the first entity in history to attempt to use ICANN's Independent Review Process, something that ICANN touts as being a safeguard of its accountability but which some independent experts see as somewhat biased against the challenger. Sure, we don't expect ICANN to make a big deal about the challenge but we do think that its correspondence section, which contains virtually everyting sent to ICANN now, should post the notice of the IRP from the ICM Registry and that its ongoing front page news section should mention it.

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As far as I can remember, this is a first, and a very welcome one: Call for Expressions of Interest for 2009 Nominating Committee Chair.

In the past, the selection of the Chair has not only been opaque, but in at least one case -- the most recent one -- subject to serious chicanary from the staff which failed to inform the Board of a critical fact relating to the Chair's suitability for the post.

In the past, the Chair has always been an ICANN and/or IETF insider (and often a former Board member). That's not all that likely to change soon, but this is a good first step in that direction.

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for Russia to be assigned an Internet domain name in the Cyrillic script on Wednesday as part of a Kremlin drive to promote Russian as a global language. [...] "We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name—it is a pretty serious thing," Medvedev told the International Congress of Russian Press in Moscow. "It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic and it is not a bad sphere of cooperation. And I think we have a rather high chance of achieving such a decision in the Internet world." [...] Industry experts say Russia wants its domain name to be .rf—for Russian Federation—but written in the Cyrillic script.

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A Missouri college's decision to sub-let space on its .edu domain is drawing fire:

an online college in Missouri has started renting out blog space on its .edu domain to just about anyone willing to pay $50 a month. And the practice has quickly raised objections from college officials worried that such rentals undermine the .edu designation.

The college, the Pickering Institute, calls its service the "first public EDU blog community," and it touts the marketing value of having an Internet address that appears to be part of a college. "Our blogs allow you to reach an education-minded audience that is difficult to reach with mass-market blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot," says an announcement on the institute's Web site. So far, the blogs with the new .edu addresses include such noneducational offerings as "Handbags in Our Life," "Jewelry in Our Life," and "Get the Scoop." The institute is working with an Internet company called LinkAdage to offer the service.

Educase, the folks who run the .edu domain, say that this doesn't actually violate any rules, but they clearly don't like it and say they are investigating after receiving a complaint.

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[S]tarting in August 2006, Earthlink instead intercepts that Non-Existent Domain (NXDOMAIN) response and sends the IP address of ad-partner Barefruit's server as the answer. When the browser visits that page, the user sees a list of suggestions for what site the user might have actually wanted, along with a search box and Yahoo ads. The rub comes when a user is asking for a nonexistent subdomain of a real website, such as http://webmale.google.com, where the subdomain webmale doesn't exist.... In this case, the Earthlink/Barefruit ads appear in the browser....

[S]ubdomains are only as secure as Barefruit's servers, which turned out to be not very secure at all. Barefruit neglected basic web programming techniques, making its servers vulnerable to a malicious JavaScript attack. That meant hackers could have crafted special links to unused subdomains of legitimate websites that, when visited, would serve any content the attacker wanted. The hacker could, for example, send spam e-mails to Earthlink subscribers with a link to a webpage on money.paypal.com. Visiting that link would take the victim to the hacker's site, and it would look as though they were on a real PayPal page.

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When civilization takes a step backward, as it did last week, it usually means a period in which the people with the guns make the decisions. Anyone watching the American President on tv in recent days knows that's where we're at. It may be a while before the luxury of debating what constitutes consensus in a terrorist-less society returns.

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Sorry for the downtime. Our volunteer nameserver went down; we've switched to zoneedit.com for the time being at least.

Contrary to at least one suggestion emailed in, our down time had nothing whatsoever to do with the wikileaks affair!

Note that for future reference if ICANNWatch.org is not working, you may have luck with ICANNWatch.net. Or not, depending on the nature of the problem...

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I have also contacted the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California non-profit which confers nominal "accreditation" of the NAF to conduct these types of internet dispute resolution services. ICANN has taken no action, as the responsible ICANN official is a former employee of the NAF in charge of the identical dispute resolution service advertised by the NAF.

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Domain tasting is tremendously unpopular in domain-name circles, and eliminating it seems uncontroversial. Someone new to this sandbox, though, someone who isn't used to ICANN and the current brand of domain-name politics, might have some questions to ask:

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Numerous reports today (e.g. Slashdot, NSI Registers Every Domain Checked), that NSI is "frontrunning" -- registering domains (for the domain tasting period of five days) whenever a customer goes to its site to check on the name's availability but doesn't actually buy it.

One consequence is that the customer is locked in--no other registrar can get the name even though no one has actually taken it. Which seems anti-competitive.

On the GA list, Jonathon Nevett from NSI explains what they think they are doing as follows:

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The "GNSO Initial Report on Domain Tasting" has been posted for comment [PDF, 293K].

The comment period will be from 8 January 2008 to 28 January 2008. Comments by email to domain-tasting-2008@icann.org and viewable at http://forum.icann.org/lists/domain-tasting-2008/.

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ICANN has published a notice of implementation of the revised ICANN Procedure for Handling WHOIS Conflicts with Privacy Law.

The procedure is due to be posted for 30 days, and implemented on 17 January 2008. The new draft reflects changes sought by the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

Good news: after all these many years, ICANN is revising its registry/registrar contracts to reflect the fact that the default rule violates privacy law of countries that have decent privacy law.

Bad news: ICANN's default remains the same privacy-busting low it has always been. It is long past due to revise all the contracts to comply with best practices for privacy.

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The Internet Governance Project has unearthed a consultancy report to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that makes it clear that the issue of root signing and DNSSEC key management has been recognized as a political issue for long time. The report stated clearly that mistrust of the U.S. government's intentions and the problem of who would own the DNSSEC keys could be barriers to DNSSEC deployment. It also offers some interesting insights into how DHS has approached the politics of DNSSEC and Internet security in its interactions with the US Congress.

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