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Moving-truckIf you are reading this, you’ll probably want to know that I’ve moved this subcategory to its own blog.

The web site is available at http://code.byte.org and the RSS 2.0 feed is available at http://code.byte.org/blog/index.xml

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Registrar Constituency: “…your statements have created some confusion within the community. We are now hearing further reports from third parties that the registrar community is generally on board with moving forward with this proposed settlement arrangement…To help us resolve this confusion, we would like to request that these statements be substantiated…”

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TheStreet.com: “"$12 to me is absolutely insane," says Tom McDonald, founder of domainwatch.com, a service that tracks the domain name registrations of all registrars. "Who knows? They'll probably get it. They've got quite a bit of pull and they've been around a while." McDonald says a fair price would be less than $1 a year.”

Truer words have never been spoken. I’m surprised that we are still having this same conversation 7 years later. This article was written in 1999.

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VeriSign PR: “VeriSign, Inc., the world's leading provider of domain name registration services, announced today that it has begun offering SnapNames.com, Inc.'s SnapBack service”

Is a bigger deal  right around the corner?

Stupid news alerts. Apparently Google can't tell the difference between news from 2001 and news from today. Relevancy *AND* timeliness would be nice :) C  |  T (59)  |  #
  Verisign-easter-egg-huntThe Wikipedia defines an Easter Egg as being “…a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, or computer program.”

I think they should add “settlement agreements” to the list of places where Easter Eggs are hidden.

In preparing my overview of the puts and takes of the proposed Verisign/ICANN settlement agreements, I eventually made my way to Appendix 5 of the new Registry Operator Agreement that Verisign and the ICANN Staff want to implement as part of the settlement. This far into the agreement, I was expecting a fairly routine run down of Verisign’s obligations to provide Whois service and the standards it would employ in executing these functions.

What I got was distinctly different – there is an entire new set of obligations tacked onto the old 2001 language!Icann-pdp-us-legal-system These new clauses specify that Verisign will turn over the COM Whois file, in bulk, to a third party for the purpose of creating a centralized Whois that includes all TLD data.

excerpted from the Verisign/ICANN Settlement Agreement, Appendix 5; “Registry Operator shall provide bulk access to up-to-date data concerning domain name and nameserver registrations maintained by Registry Operator in connection with the Registry TLD on a daily schedule, only for purposes of providing free public query-based access to up-to-date data concerning domain name and nameserver registrations in multiple TLDs, to a party designated from time to time in writing by ICANN.”

The thing is, this is being implemented despite a clear and contrary mandate from the community that is backed up by the original ICANN/NSI Registry contract which explicitly states that such a centralized system would only be implemented “…if [the distributed Whois system] implemented by registrars on a distributed basis does not within a reasonable time provide reasonably robust, reliable and convenient access to accurate and up-to-date registration data”. It also goes on to say that the deployment of the centralized system would be undertaken pursuant to the establishment of Consensus Policy.

Will the ICANN GNSO Policy Development Process be replaced by a contractual negotiation process, or more simply become a process of appealing to the U.S. legal system? Or are we there already? 

Now playing: Blues Traveler - Psycho Joe
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Paul Twomey:…[registrars] almost universally don't care for the fees clause, they are generally happy with the agreement…”

In the same article, Paul mentions that he’s been trying to call registrars. He hasn’t called Tucows.

Paul – the Tucows main phone number is (416) 535–0123. I’m at extension 1335.

Theatre1Further, we’ve made it pretty clear that we’re not “generally happy with the agreement” - this isn’t just about price. And we’re not alone in this regard.

If Paul had been on the private briefing held on Monday, or read this blog like you do, he’d know different.

“…the registrars present were not impressed at the prospect of $12 .com registrations, not impressed that Verisign’s commercial interests were being placed ahead of those of the community and not impressed that the settlement negotiations were happening as a backdrop to the recent .net negotiations.”

Although cynical of me, I’d bet that he was on the call and has read this blog. Is Paul being disingenous, or coy? Or is the registrar community just being stage-managed?

A couple of things…

This issue isn’t about price. Its about Verisign’s failure to manage a public trust and ICANN the Entity’s apparent failure to manage a key supplier in the interest of the community they serve.

Registrars aren’t happy with the contract in general. There’s more at stake than price. In fact, if you can point me to a registrar that’s willing to go on the public record and state that they are “generally happy with the agreement” as written I will personally donate $1000 USD to the Tour For Kids charity.

 

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More mud in the water…

Verisign filed this lawsuit because they mistakenly believe that they have the right to derive additional economic value from their management contract. i.e. Layer in additional services that only they can offer because ICANN delegated management of this key resource to them. Verisign believes, for instance, that they have the right offer services like Sitefinder and WLS without needing ICANN’s approval. The settlement agreement clears the way for this.

Back_rightcolumn_waitlistAs I mentioned earlier, there is a curious reference to Snapnames in the settlement agreement. Snapnames, as it turns out, holds a patent that would prevent Verisign from offering the WLS.

United States Patent Application: 0020091703 “A preferred embodiment of the present invention integrates a domain name monitoring and acquisition service with a registry system. The monitoring and acquisition service can receive a request from a registrar to acquire a domain name. The monitoring and acquisition service also can receive a pending delete notification from the registry for a domain name having a registration that is about to be deleted. The pending delete notification can be received before the registry issues a public delete notification or purges the domain name, at which point the domain name is registrable by the first-responding registrar. If the domain name that is the subject of the pending delete notification has a corresponding acquisition request received by the monitoring and acquisition service, the monitoring and acquisition service can request acquisition of the domain name for the requesting registrar.”

It turns out that Snapnames has more of a say in whether or not Verisign can offer this registry service than ICANN does. If Verisign is a licensee of the Snapnames technology, then they have a vested interest in making sure that the Snapnames suit succeeds. 

Is Verisign simply trading in one lawsuit for a billion dollars with the intention of funding another one via an arms length relationship with Snapnames?

 

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ICANN/Verisign Settlement Agreement: “…the releases provided for in this Agreement shall not apply to the claims made by SnapNames, Inc. against ICANN in the Los Angeles Superior Court, Case No. BC 324782, or any other litigation that SnapNames might file related to the claims that SnapNames asserts in that lawsuit.”

What the hell is this doing in there? What does the Snapnames lawsuit have to do with the Verisign lawsuit?

I’m not a lawyer, nor do I have any legal training, but even I know that one of the first rules of putting agreements like this together is “don’t include details that have no bearing on either party”

So presuming legal competence on both sides, what’s the relationship to this deal that made it necessary to include this clause?

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Scripting News:  “Amyloo is impressed with VeriSign.”

Apparently Amyloo isn’t familiar with Verisign’s habit of playing brinkmanship ICANN over our internet. Apparently neither is Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or eBay for that matter.

Yay. They can run a ping server. They’re also abusing the public trust that we placed in them by virtue of their status as the manager for .com and .net. They are continually threatening the stability of the internet, and therefore the billions of dollars in commerce that run over it, by virtue of their tactics.

You see, Verisign decided to play the “sue ICANN out of existence” game a while back. Problem is, ICANN the Entity seems to have fallen for it and despite having a sizeable chunk of the lawsuit dismissed by the courts, decided to try and play nice by negotiating a proposed settlement with Verisign (in the fiduciary interests of ICANN the Entity of course). Problem is, the interests of ICANN the Community and the Internet Community are a little different than ICANN the Entities short term economic and political concerns and Verisign’s short-term commercial concerns.

And now, despite Verisign doing a remarkable capable job of running Weblogs.com, we are being presented with a largely one-sided settlement to a lawsuit that will see domain registration prices double over the next few years, put a billion dollars in Verisign’s pockets and double the size of ICANN’s budget.

I’m undertaking a complete review of the proposed settlement and will post a comprehensive overview of what my concerns are in the next few days. Stay tuned folks, the story definitely ain’t finished yet…

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SellOut-bgInternet Pro Radio:Verisign has not alleged anything more than injury to its own business and therefore, does not have antitrust standing.”

So why is ICANN staff in such a rush to settle out? The fear has always been that a succesful anti-trust lawsuit would tear apart the fabric of ICANN. I would expect that if there’s no threat from anti-trust, then the big pressures go away Is the settlement being proposed simply to deal with the Sitefinder issue?

Is this the real issue that’s at stake? What are the real risks in the event that ICANN loses the case? I’m willing to bet that the community is willing to sign a blank check to help ICANN take this issue all the way to the end if it means that we don’t end up selling out everything that we’ve worked for in the last seven years.

Seriously, if all we need to do is create a litigation fund specific to this lawsuit, then lets do what we need to do to weigh the cost against the risk. The alternatives are far darker based on the discussions I’ve been privy to.

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Cheerleader2ICANNWatch: “What does it mean about internet governance when ICANN (whether viewed as a 'bottom up consensus driven' body, or a proxy for the US government) contractually binds a key member of one of the constituencies that are supposed to govern it so that this party has a duty to become ICANN's cheerleaders, and pays them off for this by allowing them to charge more in a what amounts to an ICANN-granted monopoly?”

Long time readers will know that I rarely, if ever, agree with much of what gets published over at ICANNWatch. This time though, all I can say is “What they said”.

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Contemporaneous with the ICANN Staff announcement to Associated Press on Monday, ICANN Staff held an invitation only briefing for registrars. The extent of the invitation is unknown, but it appears that only the top registrars were notified. I received a voicemail from Kurt Pritz followed up by a later email urging me to join the call on behalf of Tucows. I knew it was important – to the best of my recollection, staff have never extended a personal invitation like this in the past.

The subject of the call is now well known – a review of the proposed Verisign lawsuit settlement terms. The terms of the settlement, a basic affront to most of what I value about ICANN.

CuomoThings got rather heated on the call – the registrars present were not impressed at the prospect of $12 .com registrations, not impressed that Verisign’s commercial interests were being placed ahead of those of the community and not impressed that the settlement negotiations were happening as a backdrop to the recent .net negotiations.

ICANN Staff invited us to a followup call that was originally scheduled to happen later today. Those present have decided that we’d prefer to use the time to talk to one another instead and have declined their invitation.

Interestingly, it was only after staff were notified of the cancellation that they invited the broader registrar community to a briefing on the settlement. This process point is really the least of my concerns right now – but it is bothersome nonetheless.

To review, staff held a private briefing with a few registrars and made their announcement to the community via Associated Press. Despite representations made at the private briefing that the proposed terms would be available for review on the ICANN website within “20 minutes or so” from the end of the call, it was hours before they were actually posted (I grew tired of waiting for them and went to bed. When I awoke the next day, they had been posted to the website). To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been sent to the ICANN General Announcements mailing list and no notice of the posting has been made to ICANN’s GNSO Council – the elected committee of representatives from the gTLD community. And most recently, the staff have decided to hold an official briefing for the Registrar Constituency, one of the groups most affected by the proposed terms, only after they were rebuffed by their handpicked group.

Frankly, I’m feeling very stage-managed through this public comment process. We should update the mission statement in ICANN’s bylaws to include something about “Coordinate public perception on key issues to ensure an orderly close to a pre-determined conclusion.”

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"Random Bytes" is a produced for and by Ross Rader.

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