US Gov't Extends Oversight of ICANN
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In an opening statement of testimony delivered today to the Senate Commerce Committee, Dr. John Twomey, the president and CEO of the ICANN stated it has entered into a five-year extension of its current agreement to let the U.S. Dept. of Commerce oversee its operations.
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Blog: Some federal government Web sites, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are trying to remain hidden online by blocking search engines from indexing them. Not only is this lame, but it's a good reason to ignore their robots.txt fi
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Prized by journalists, researchers and law enforcement officials as a reliable resource for tracking down website owners, it is criticized by privacy advocates for the same reason. A proposal in front of ICANN would essentially scuttle the ship.
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Speakers at a two-day "network neutrality" workshop press the government to expand its regulatory role when it comes to internet access and content. By the Associated Press.
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New breed raised in intellectual cages and fed raw meat ICANN San Juan 2007 The Tuesday ICANN extravaganza continued with the ritualized slaughter of individual privacy rights in the holiest of holies for American trademark attorneys: ICANN's Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) triannual meeting, wherein they flog their misrepresentations of American trademark law on an unsuspecting, powerless and almost entirely ignorant internet community.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened a week-long meeting on Monday where it will address critical issues like new generic top level domains, internationalized domain names and the organization's efforts to become more accountable and transparent. The international public meeting, the second of three of its kind ICANN has planned for this year, will also include discussions about a major expansion of available Internet Protocol addresses, as well as about the process for accrediting registrars. Taking advantage of the meeting's venue in San Juan, Puerto Rico , the agenda also includes the first General Assembly of the Latin American and Caribbean Regional At Large Organization, formed in March. "We're very pleased to be in Puerto Rico," said Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and CEO, during a press conference at the Caribe Hilton hotel, adding that the meeting's agenda is full of significant issues and efforts. ICANN oversees the Internet's address system and as such carries the critical responsibility of ensuring the overall security and stability of the Internet. A key effort ICANN is involved with is improving the transparency of its operations and the accountability of its decisions, areas critics regularly complain about. "We must ensure we're in the leading edge of transparency and accountability," Twomey said. ICANN commissioned an independent study about its transparency and accountability in December from London's One World Trust, which reported its findings in March. It concluded that ICANN is a very transparent organization but that it can improve certain areas, including explaining better how it uses input from stakeholders when making decisions. ICANN has been taking steps to address these issues and, earlier this month, issued a response to the report. On Saturday, ICANN released for discussion at the San Juan meeting online a set of draft principles and frameworks for accountability . ICANN wants to improve making it easier for people to find the vast amount of information on its Web site, Twomey said. ICANN also wants to be faster in posting information online about its meetings and initiatives, he said. However, the transparency and accountability issue will likely remain on the table until ICANN removes its special ties to the U.S. government. Since its creation in 1998 to progressively absorb Internet management functions until then handled fully by the U.S. government, ICANN has been criticized for lacking transparency in its decision-making process and for responding disproportionately to U.S. interests. In September, the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. Commerce Department and ICANN was renewed for three additional years, a disappointment for those who had hoped for ICANN's full autonomy. Also in this week's agenda is the Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) initiative, which aims to revamp the DNS (domain name system) so that it can support domain names in a broad range of languages and alphabets that can't be represented via the ASCII character set. "You'd think this would be simple. It has turned out to be really hard, technically," said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman. Another initiative on deck for discussion is the drafting of a policy to introduce new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to add to the well-known ones like .com and .net. Like the IDN effort, this gTLD project has run into technical challenges. The meeting will also feature a tutorial on the IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) effort to expand significantly the amount of IP addresses, because of the expected shortage under the current IPv4, Cerf said. The San Juan meeting, ICANN's 29th International Public Meeting, ends Friday and will feature more than 30 sessions and workshops.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is seeking ideas and opinions on ways to modify the agreement terms it enters into with Internet registrars to protect individuals and organizations that do business with them. The effort stems from theÂ recent debacle involving registrar RegisterFly, which ICANN had to strip of its accreditation due to poor quality of service, which prompted massive and loud complaints from many of its tens of thousands of customers. At its 29th International Public Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, ICANN on Monday hosted a workshop to discuss possible changes to its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and steps it is taking to make sure registrars provide good service to their customers. Participants in the workshop, titled "Protection of Registrants," generally agreed that the RAA is due for a makeover to prevent another RegisterFly-like situation and because much has changed since the RAA was last amended about seven years ago. "We need to deal with registrar accreditation and the procedures by which we accommodate registrants," said Susan Crawford, an ICANN board member who moderated the discussion. Among the issues panelists and audience members debated was the need for Internet registrars -- companies ICANN accredits to sell Internet domain names to individuals and organizations -- to escrow their customers' data with ICANN or another third party. That way, in the event of a registrar meltdown, ICANN, which manages and oversees the Internet's domain name system, could access the customer data and help customers switch to another registrar. "This is important to registrants. We want to be able to reconstitute a registrar if it fails so that registrants can continue to have access to their domains and be able to work with them," Crawford said. Ironically, in its current form, the RAA has a data escrow provision but it hasn't been implemented for several reasons. "It put a burden on ICANN to receive data, so the cost was all on ICANN. And until recently, there wasn't a budget item for the registered data escrow program," Crawford said. Details on how this escrow will work need to be established, such as what will constitute a valid trigger for the data release and what data will be stored. Jon Nevett, policy and ethics vice president of Internet registrar Network Solutions, said that ICANN's Registrar Constituency, which he chairs, has worked in recent months on the data escrow program with ICANN, which recently requested proposals to provide escrow services. A key point for registrars is how ICANN will protect their customers' data if it needs to be transferred, Nevett said. "There is a lot of private information in this data," he said. One of the issues ICANN is trying to work through is what data would be put in escrow. Under the current RAA provisions that data includes: registrant, administrative contact, technical contact, billing contact, name servers and expiration dates. "When the provision was drafted, these were the elements that were believed to be critically necessary to restore the functionality of a registrar," said Mike Zupke, ICANN's Registrar Liaison Manager. Changing the data requirements would require amending the RAA, he said. This issue is an interesting one, considering individuals' privacy concerns when registering a domain name, concerns that have prompted the appearance of "proxy" services that let registrants "hide" from the public some of the information they submit to a registrar, Crawford said. Nevett argued that providing data to an escrow party that the registrant wants to keep from public view doesn't compromise privacy, because the escrow data wouldn't be publicly available. Meanwhile, Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports Webwatch, suggested that ICANN provide more information about registrars, including ratings, so that consumers can make better informed decisions when choosing one. There are about 900 registrars currently, according to ICANN. "Measures that increase compliance are good," Brendler said, adding that ICANN might consider setting up a system to rate registrars and hold registrars to best practices guidelines. Stacy Burnette, ICANN's director of contractual compliance, said that starting next month her team will publish a report twice a year with results from their registrar audits. Citing preliminary results, Burnette said that in March her team found that of 881 audited registrars, 19 had non-working Web sites, and that in April, 192 registrars had invoices that were overdue by 30 days or more. Based on these findings, her group is seeking compliance from the offending registrars. Her group is also currently doing a "code of conduct audit" to ensure that registrars are not engaging in conduct that would give "the appearance of impropriety," she said. Meanwhile, a future audit will focus on registrars' back-end systems performance, checking on issues like availability, downtime and outages, to see if they are meeting standards set in their agreements with ICANN. Moreover, an ongoing audit is focusing on registrar data retention requirements, while a future audit will verify whether registrars are maintaining the required commercial liability insurance levels, she said. "We want to encourage compliance to enhance ICANN's ability to preserve and enhance the operational stability, reliability, security and global interoperability of the Internet," Burnette said.
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Despite complaints, the United States will retain oversight of the Net's domain name system, renewing its memorandum of understanding with ICANN for another three years.
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U.S. will oversee ICANN for another three years, moving domain manager toward breaking ties.
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A VeriSign Inc. official defended its contract to operate the .com domain Monday, after Network Solutions accused the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of not requiring adequate security safeguards in its registry agreements.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Congress shouldn't permanently extend a moratorium on taxes unique to the Internet because the temporary ban keeps Internet providers from abusing the system, a representative of the National Governors Association said Thursday. If Congress makes the ban permanent, which many lawmakers want to do, nothing would stop Internet providers from trying to expand the number of banned services, said David Quam, director of federal relations for the National Governors Association. "The temporary provision keeps everyone honest," said Quam, speaking at a Congressional Internet Caucus debate on how long the moratorium should last. But there's no evidence that Internet providers have abused the ban by trying to include voice or video services as part of Internet access included in the current moratorium, said Broderick Johnson, a spokesman for the Don't Tax Our Web Coalition. Johnson and Brian Bieron, senior director of federal affairs at eBay, both called for Congress to approve a permanent ban on taxes for Internet access and other taxes unique to the Internet. The current ban, which expires in November, prohibits states and local governments from levying "discriminatory" taxes on the Internet, such as taxing the download of a song more than they tax the sale of music on CDs. Many U.S. policy makers see broadband adoption as a major way to move the economy forward, and a permanent ban on Internet taxes would help broadband grow, Johnson argued. "To me, it's common sense," he said. "If you make something more expensive by putting more taxes on it, you're going to depress the ability of people to access it." But there's little evidence to suggest Internet access taxes hurt broadband adoption, Quam countered. When Congress first passed the Internet tax ban in 1998, it grandfathered in nine states that had already adopted Internet access taxes, and the broadband adoption in those states isn't significantly different than in states with no access taxes, he said. The debate over the tax moratorium has changed since Congress last extended the ban in 2004. Then, a group of senators, most of them former state governors, questioned whether the ban should be extended at all, saying the ban limits states' ability to raise money. This year, two senators who opposed extending the ban, Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, and Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, have introduced a bill that would narrow the definition of Internet access and extend the ban for four years. Quam and Jeffrey Arnold, deputy legislative director for the National Association of Counties, both said they support a four-year extension of the ban. When Congress first passed the ban in 1998, it was trying to protect the fledgling commercial Internet, but such protections are no longer needed, Arnold said. While "no one" wants to tax Internet access, Congress shouldn't permanently interfere in state and local tax decisions, he said. Part of the objection to a permanent ban is the definition of Internet access that's carried over from the 1998 legislation. That bill banned taxes from access and "other services as part of a package services offered to consumers," and that language may allow Internet providers to include voice, video, or music services in the ban, Quam said. "We haven't been able to change that troublesome definition, which frankly, is too broad," Quam said. Bieron from eBay said backers of a permanent ban are willing to change the language, but the other side isn't willing to support a permanent ban. The moratorium doesn't prohibit states and local governments from collecting sales tax on products sold through the Internet. After a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, states cannot collect sales tax from remote sales through catalogs and the Internet until they put in place a streamlined sales tax system. So far, not enough states have agreed to adopt a common sales tax system, which is unlikely to happen soon.
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Living in the zombie domain, keeping the net safe for the free world The Internet Corporation for the Assignment of Names and Numbers - that's ICANN to you, Boris - has had enough, and decided to stick it to those godless pinko commie automotons once and for all, nukes be damned.â¦
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In the short term, the tax could add US$4 million annually to ICANN&#39;s coffers, an amount that could skyrocket to more than $30 million if it is extended to additional domains.
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A CLAIM that a Government agency has banned staff from accessing the Internet at work has confounded the State Services Commission, which is still smarting from publicity concerning the amount of time public servants spend surfing sites such as Trade Me during working hours.
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Web-surfers outside the US have been blocked from visiting the official George W. Bush campaign website. UK-based internet monitoring firm Netcraft first noticed the blockage Monday morning.
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VeriSign Inc. lost another round in its battle against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday when a US federal judge dismissed the
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.xxx blocked by US Gov, Lawley claims The British man behind the proposed .xxx internet domain believes the US Government has intervened to thwart his plans. Stuart Lawley is fighting a court battle to retrieve the documents he says would prove his case.â¦