This year's NomCom has received 89 submissions.

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Bob Parsons, CEO of ICANN registrar GoDaddy, first pointed out this practice in his blog last April. This EURID action is in start contrast to the ICANN .info and .biz gTLD rollout fiascos, in which ICANN accredited registrars and faux registrars such as BondiLLC (see my 2002 DNSO-GA post here on that farce), similarily gamed the system with apparent impunity, despite myself and others such as Richard Henderson first pointing this out to Vint Cerf et al over four years ago, with, so far as I know, no ICANN action to date. -g"

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kathrynkl@aol.com writes "Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on Whois titled “ICANN and the Whois Database: Providing Access to Protect Consumers from Phishing." NTIA, FTC, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Financial Services Roundtable and the Software and Information Industry Assoc. (SIIA) all testified. I am very happy to say that the privacy issues got a great airing – and not just from EPIC.

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If you're an ICANNWatch reader, you may be the sort of person who knows about the issues ICANN faces and who might be able to contribuite to the ICANN Board, The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council, the Interim At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), or the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) Council. And it turns out that you haven't quite missed the deadline to apply:

ICANN Nominating Committee Extends Deadline for Submissions to 1 August 2006

7 July 06

ICANN's Nominating Committee (NomCom) announced today that it has extended its deadline for Statements of Interest to 1 August 2006 (23:59 GMT).

The 2006 Nominating Committee began its work in March of this year and is actively seeking qualified candidates for the following key positions within ICANN:

The ICANN Board of Directors
The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council
The Interim At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)
The Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) Council

Those individuals selected by the Nominating Committee will have a unique opportunity to work with accomplished colleagues from around the globe, address intriguing technical coordination problems and related policy development challenges with diverse functional, cultural, and geographic dimensions, and gain valuable insights and experience from working across these boundaries of knowledge, responsibility and perspective.

Selection criteria, eligibility factors, roles of each position, application procedure, and contacts are posted at: http://www.icann.org/committees/nom-comm/formal-call-2006.html.

Statements of Interest may be sent to nomcom.submissions@icann.org. Submissions will be handled confidentially and should be received by 23:59 GMT on 1 August 2006 for full consideration. Statements of interest should be submitted as e-mail messages and NOT as attached files. Selections will be made in October, with service beginning in December 2006.

It seems that the previous nomcom also extended its deadline, so this is becoming something of a tradition...

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It's official: The ICANN Board has made George Sadowsky the replacement Chair of the NomCom.

You will of course see no sign of this fact on the ICANN Web site, and especially not on the NomCom page. The official NomCom page currently states that it was last updated on May 18 -- which explains why it shows Eugenio Triana as Chair, despite his having resigned in late May.

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Response to the email campaign has not been that big, certainly nothing of .xxx proportions. Nevertheless, it currently accounts for almost all of the responses in the NTIA proceeding. In other words, so far most of the people who care to comment at all about the seemingly obscure topic of DNS management want to tell the U.S. to work cooperatively for a more global solution. That's not what the NTIA wanted to hear.

So now a counter-campaign to discredit the message begins. First shot is an article at the web site "Email Battles," (EB) which purports to be a source of expert news and opinion on "spam, security, phishing" and the like.

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ICANN Blog reports Rita Rodin Elected to ICANN Board.

Although many contributed, Rita Rodin has at least as good a claim as anyone to being the primary drafter of the UDRP we have today. At a critical point in the process, her draft replaced the one produced through the public process, although proponents tried hard to distract from the slight of hand afterwards. As Mark Lemley and I wrote in our article on ICANN's antitrust issues,

Even before the first ICANN working group on domain name arbitration reported in late July 1999, a group of registrars quietly employed a Skadden Arps lawyer, Rita Rodin, to craft a dispute policy for them. On August 20, 1999, the registrars unveiled their proposed policy document. Four days later, the ICANN staff issued a report with its own detailed suggestions about what the dispute policy should look like, many of which followed the registrars’ lead. Two days after that, amidst much controversy, the ICANN Board resolved to use the registrars’ draft, rather than anything drafted through the ICANN consensus policymaking procedure “as a starting point” for the drafting of ICANN’s own policy. In practice this meant that the Registrars’ draft was accepted almost in toto, save that a few of the most controversial issues were referred to a ‘small drafting committee’ made up of representatives of the warring factions.

Ms. Rodin is clearly a very effective lawyer.

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Afilias (.INFO), NeuLevel (.BIZ) and PIR (.ORG) have formally requested that proposed renewal registry agreements be posted for public review and comment. Their letters are posted at the following links: <Afilias letter to Paul Twomey>; <NeuLevel letter to Vint Cerf>; <NeuLevel letter to Paul Twomey>; <PIR letter to Paul Twomey>.

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The Register reports ICANN has extended Dr. Paul Twomey's contract for two years with a third year option (unclear if it is Twomey or ICANN that gets the option, or if there's a meaningful difference).

As Vint Cerf's term as ICANN Chair draws to its close, this decision to lock in the current CEO means that Cerf's successor will find it that much harder to be effective -- which would require bringing the runaway ICANN staff headed by Twomey to heel.

Anyone know what the salary will be next year?

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ICM's Registry's FOIA request is based on the hypothesis that the Commerce Department may have used its power over the award of the IANA contract to shift the key ICANN Board votes (Twomey and Cerf in particular, who pull several others with them) against the .xxx contract. The request asserts, "Shortly before the [May 9 2006] ICANN Board meeting and the vote on the .xxx domain, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communication and Information John Kneuer and certain staff members reportedly met with Paul Twomey of ICANN and others to discuss, among other things, the interrelationship of " the IANA sole source contract, the .xxx vote, and the NTIA's Notice of Inquiry on the future of the Memorandum of Understanding between ICANN and the U.S. Commerce Department.

A threat to shift the IANA contract to someone else, or to open it up to competitive bidding, would certainly light a fire under ICANN. But at this time, the hypothesis that DoC did this is just that -- a theory that remains to be tested. It will be interesting to see the evidence.

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We had some technical difficulties this morning and were down for a short time. Depending on your settings and their interaction with our cache, you may see a blank story on this page for a while. You can find the full text, at least of the re-created version, at its permanent location: ICANN Announcement on Strategic Plan and Budget.

There would be ways to try to fix this, but pending a fix of the underlying (known) cause -- we've filled our disk -- it seems better not to try...

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