ICANN received an “Independent Report” containing recommendations for changing the membership of the Board of Directors and and other matters. Personally I found the report completely toxic and so I told them what I thought.

ICANN has announced two public meeting to gather opinion about the split between registries and registrars. The short notice (two days) is occasioning howls from those with something better to do.

A report known as the CRAI Report, which recommends keeping most of the registry-registrar split now required of all gTLDs, doesn’t address the legitimate need of many potential registries for a business model that registrars are unlikely to implement — leaving these registries in the cold.

Recently released figures show that, with a few happy exceptions, most ICANN directors can’t even pad their expense reports properly. How can the public put their trust in a group that can’t even demonstrate basic life skills such as squeezing every last penny in expenses out of a not-for-profit set up for public benefit?

Certain domainers are suddenly finding common ground with trademark owners over ICANN’s introduction of new gTLDs. For someone with no dog in the hunt, it promises to be entertaining.

AFNIC, the French registration authority, has seven ccTLDs from their colonies that they keep dark and non-functional. At least three of these seven functioned at one point before being shut down under pressure from France. Whether they were turned off, or never turned on, their absence from the active Internet effectively denies their inhabitants any separate identity. In September of last year, the ISO-3166-1 list was shuffled around, adding two new items to the list, .BL (St. Bartholomew) and .MF (St. Martin - French side). These two are also dark, bringing the total to nine.

Now, in an apparent about-face, they are considering starting them up and adding two more. I can only speculate on their intentions. Are they finding it useful to have more votes in the CCNSO?

How many applications will ICANN receive for new top-level domains? An informal poll from people who are supposed to know about domain names…

ICANN constituencies were always a bad idea. It’s high time we got rid of them. Constituencies flout the fine pronouncements by ICANN about transparency and representation, they are highly inefficient, and they serve to ensure that consensus is rarely achieved. The net effect is to concentrate power in the ICANN Board. Bottom-up decision-making? Not even close.

So you’ve decided to start a new top-level domain! Congratulations! Have investors? Are they asking how long it’s going to be before they see a return? Careful now…. Having spoken with ICANN staff and others who keep an eye on these things, here’s my best (current) guess for the timeline for new TLDs.

VeriSign raised the wholesale price for .com domain names? Everywhere else, prices for technology items fall, especially when they are produced in volume. Why is this not true for domain names?