As we all know - your all waiting for dot.BIZ to take off. Today there was a congressional hearing which is arechived at: http://www.house.gov/commerce/hearings/telecom02082001.htm and a message from Ellen Rony on her observations of the hearing. regards joe ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 10:38:58 -0800 From: Ellen Rony <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Congressional hearings The Congressional hearings on the topic, "Is ICANN's New Generation of Internet Domain Name Selection Process Thwarting Competition?" ICANN's lasted two hours. An audio archive will be available from the subcommittee. Check with: http://www.house.gov/commerce/hearings/telecom02082001.htm Kudos to Leah Gallegos, who gave an informative, articulate and well-honed presentation. Congress can no longer pretend that the alternative root servers do not exist. Even Chair Billy Tauzin commented: "There is more than one root server system", which is a huge step forward in acknowledging the non-ICANN TLDs. She explained why Atlantic Root did not pay $50K to petition ICANN to operate .BIZ, which it is already operating, and brought up the basis inconsistency of ICANN ignoring Atlantic's .BIZ all the while Cerf arguing against allowing Affilias to have .WEB because of IOD's operational use of that TLD. Kudos also to Michael Froomkin, who presented a big picture policy view. He told the subcommittee the real issue that it needs to address--what kind of entity is ICANN. Is it to be limited to standards-making body or is it a governmental regulatory body? One of the subcommittee members noted that the purpose of ICANN was to avoid the APA. That ought to provide interesting grist for the Congressional and media mill. The hearings touched on whois privacy issues, on restrictive TLDs, on the arbitrary and capricious way the proposals were reviewed, on the basis and use of the $50K non refundable fee, on ICANN's non-accountability, on IP rights and more. Pickering inquired how that 50K fee was determined, and Cerf said that the "fee structure was almost entirely based on the evaluation process." Later Cerf said, "We have consumed about half of the funds and are not yet done with the negotiations." Thus, the fee structure was based on both evaluation AND implementation. It seems quite unfair to require that rejected applicants pay the costs of consummating contractual arrangements of the 7 chosen proposals. Favorite sound bytes - >From the subcommittee: "ICANN appears to be accountable to no one, except God Almighty" "I believe we have a digital economy and an analog government." - California subcommittee member >From Cerf: "I am a strong proponent of limiting ICANN to technical standards " -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- Ellen Rony // http://www.domainhandbook.com Co-author *=" ____ / [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Domain Name Handbook \ ) +1 415.435.5010 // \\ Carpe canine
