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Home :: ICANN 16 Feb 2010 Looking for Jefferson's Moose, but not finding it ICANN Law and policy professor David Post's book In Search of Jefferson's Moose looks at the growth of the Internet, using some aspects of the early history of the American republic as a metaphor. It received a lot of positive reviews when it came out last year. I read it, and was surprised to find that the reviews all missed a critical detail: most of what he says about the Internet is just plain factually wrong, which discredits all his conclusions. You can read my full review here with the dismaying details. posted at: 19:26 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/moose.trackback 01 Jan 2010 Google Loses Another Domain Name Dispute ICANN For the benefit of trademark owners, ICANN has something called the UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Process) that allows the owner to file a complaint against an allegedly infringing domain name, to be resolved by one of a small set of arbitrators. About 90% of UDRP cases that proceeed to a decision are decided in favor of the complainant; opnions differ as to whether that's because of the merit of the complaints or the institutional bias of the arbitrators. Google files lots of UDRP complaints. One arbitrator is the World International Property Organization in Geneva. In 2009 they decided all of their Google cases in Google's favor: googlemapsargentina.com, googleinstores.com, adsgoogle.net, google4people.net, googblog.com, mygooglemoney.com, and googlehrd.com. See more ... posted at: 22:51 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/groovle.trackback 19 Nov 2009 A thought about not-quite-ASCII Top Level Domains ICANN ICANN has opened their new fast track process for "countries and territories that use languages based on scripts other than Latin" to get domain names that identify the country or territory in its own language. It's not clear to me what the policy is supposed to be for countries whose languages use extended Latin with accents and other marks that aren't in the ASCII set. Any country that uses an extended Latin character set can use extended characters in 2LDs right now, and I can't offhand think of any whose current unaccented two-letter ccTLD isn't an adequate mnemonic for their name. But let's say that Serbia feels that .RS is kind of lame, so they apply for and get .Србија which is perfectly reasonable, since that's the Cyrillic character set. Then Romania decides that .RO is too generic, so they ask for .România with the circumflex over the â, as it is properly spelled in Romanian. That's an IDN, so how can they say no? Hey, say the Hungarians, they got their country names, we want .Magyar. Oh, no, that's ASCII, that will be $185,000 and a highly uncertain multi-year process. Really? posted at: 01:16 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/nonlatin.trackback 09 Nov 2009 The Tempest in the TLD Teapot ICANN At its recent meeting in Seoul ICANN announced with great fanfare that it's getting ever closer to adding lots of new Top Level Domains (TLDs). Despite all the hype, as I have argued before, new TLDs will make little difference. There are two mostly separate kinds of new TLDs. One is TLDs for countries in non-ASCII character sets, known as IDNs. They're much less controversial, and ICANN will soon issue at least a few politically expedient ones like .中国 with the name in Chinese which would be equivalent to .CN. This is the only real TLD problem, it was waiting for technical specs and implementation (not from ICANN), but that is now largely done. The controversial issue is domains with random new names, gTLDs. I agree with my old friend Lauren Weinstein that this is a tempest in a very expensive teapot, because all of the purported reasons that people want new TLDs have been proven false, and the one actual reason that a new TLD would be valuable has no public benefit. See more ... posted at: 00:31 :: permanent link to this entry :: 4 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/teapot.trackback 11 Jul 2009 How unconscionable is the profit that Verisign makes from its registry? ICANN Verisign makes a great deal of money from the .COM and .NET registries. Can we tell how much they make, and how much that might change if the CFIT lawsuit succeeds? It's not hard to make some estimates from public information. See more ... posted at: 19:48 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/vrsncom.trackback

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