You'll already have seen the recent stories about the .net contract going back to VeriSign. The decision was made on the technical capabilities report, with the report being accepted without discussion, without input from the stakeholder public, and more disturbingly, only consultation with DNS experts, no input. (See ICANNWatch.)
Addendum: from the report, Eric claims it was a tie and Verisign was chosen arbitrarily from the two leaders.
It seems that ICANN does not consider overall governance issues as important in its decisions on domain renewals, as mooted in comments by ICANNWatch's Michael Froomkin.
Further, one of the "losers", Denic, was apparently knocked out on a false claim that it has an in-house built database! That's a sad bad decision if true, and I speak as someone who builds in-house, own built databases for the most sensitive of tasks - because they are the most sensitive of tasks!
Back over on ICANNWatch, they announced that the ITU is merging with ICANN and that WIPO lost its domain to a baby wipe company. That's about par for the course...
In other news, two new TLDs have been launched as .travel and .jobs, and ICANN does consider itself in a position to
charge a tax of $2 per domain. The .net contract is being re-negotiated with a 75 cents tax.
I'd consider today's date in deciding how much credence to lend to those ICANNWatch reports :^)
DENIC clearly states in their proposal (which is available online at the ICANN site, to my surprise) that they use Sybase. Certainly this isn't an in-house development. 8-) The application on top of it, sure, but this wasn't Telcordia's point.
Posted by: Florian Weimer at April 1, 2005 03:17 PM*chuckle* Good ones! (Especially the WIPO thingy)
Posted by: Axel at April 4, 2005 04:56 AM