Trevi Fountain, Rome, Italy. Taken during the ICANN meeting in 2004. Posted for no other reason than I’ve been going through my old photo’s and liked this one. Click the image for a larger version.

(I'm cleaning off an old computer today and came across this. I wrote this over a year ago - didn't bother to finish it for some reason. There are a bunch more of these. I'll post the more finished ones over the next few days...)

To borrow a phrase from the software industry, ICANN's GNSO has a big ole' hairy bug in the design of its constituency structure. The problem lies with its recognition of the Intellectual Property Constituency as a legitimate constituency of the GNSO.

Here's why this is a problem. Here's a list of the current constituencies that make up ICANN's GNSO;

a. gTLD Registries (representing all gTLD registries under contract to ICANN);
b. Registrars (representing all registrars accredited by and under contract to ICANN); \
c. Internet Service and Connectivity Providers (representing all entities providing Internet service and connectivity to Internet users);
d. Commercial and Business Users (representing both large and small commercial entity users of the Internet);
e. Non-Commercial Users (representing the full range of non-commercial entity users of the Internet); and
f. Intellectual Property Interests (representing the full range of trademark and other intellectual property interests relating to the DNS).

- ICANN Bylaws, Article X, Section 5

The Registry and Registrar constituencies are a special class of business - these are the only "providers" of registration services in the GNSO tent. The rest of the constituencies, loosely, are the "user" constituencies. The Internet Service and Connectivity Providers constituency (ISPC) represents the interests of telco's, the Commercial and Business Users constituency (BC) represents the interests of commercial users of all stripes (small and large businesses) and the Non-commercial users constituency (NCUC) represents non-profits, NGOs and other similar non-commercial interests. The Intellectual Property Interests constituency sticks out like a sore-thumb in this structure; even its title, reflects the problem.

The IPIC is an issue driven constituency. Each of the other constituencies has organized around a very different dimension - what they use the DNS for. The IPIC on the other hand, takes a different tack and has been organized around the very narrow concern of "intellectual property interests relating to the DNS".

(Added to summarize the rest that didn't get written: So why is this a problem? The IPIC is issues based - their entire reason for being is to look out for intellectual property interests. Lots of different players have intellectual property issues - Tucows has patents, copyrights and trademarks for instance - but because we're not a part of the IPIC, our views on these subjects are marginalized. Having an intellectual property issues constituency makes about as much sense as having a religious issues constituencies.)

Now playing: "Devil Baby" from the album "The Ragpicker's Dream" by Mark Knopfler.

Does anyone know off the top of their head whether or not I can get rid of my Rogers Cable subscription but keep my Rogers Internet service intact?

I’ve been thinking of migrating from cable TV to iTunes TV – the television portion of my cable bill is over $80 per month. In AppleLand, that same cake will get me 40 or so television shows. Suffice to say that the cost/benefit picture doesn’t look great for the cable operators in this new world order.

I’d consider moving to Bell DSL, were it not for the fact that I’m using Vonage and have no Bell service to the house (also on cost grounds). If I could get Bell DSL w/o having to use Bell dialtone, that might be an option to. Neither the Rogers nor the Bell website have any information on this – why would they want me to make an informed decision.

If you have any thoughts, please leave me a note in the comments. Many thanks in advance.

Dave tackles the issue of who invented RSS head-on.

In the dustup over Microsoft's RSS patents, some of the mainstream press brought up, once again, the issue of Who Invented RSS. But RSS doesn't have an inventor. It wasn't invented. Something else happened, something harder than invention, imho -- an activity that we don't have a word for in the English language.

- via Scripting News

Reading this, it occurred to me that he's right. RSS wasn't invented. RSS was collaborated.

Anyone with an english major will cringe at my use of an intransitive verb in this way, but I suspect that they will be outnumbered by the rest of the folks that see the beauty of abusing our dear evolving language. ;-)

Here's from us to you, hoping that the coming year is even better than the last.