The small working group created at the Paris meeting has come to an agreement about the voting distribution in ICANN’s policy making Council for domain names (the GNSO Council). It remains to the ICANN Board and staff to accept and implement this proposal, but the Board is expected to follow the consensus of the working group. (If it does not, you will hear about it here!)

The proposed solution is a victory for civil society representation. The new structure is bicameral and involves two distinct voting “houses,” one for the domain name industry that holds ICANN contracts (registries and registrars) and one for users or non-contracting parties (commercial and noncommercial users). In the user house there is an even number of votes for commercial and noncommercial stakeholders. IGP’s Milton Mueller participated in the working group as the representative of the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC).   more »

ICANN has made major strides towards increasing its transparency, but the point about openness and transparency is that you do it all the time, not just when its convenient or when the results won't challenge you. In that regard we find it interesting that ICM Registry's precedent-setting call for an Independent Review Panel has not seen the light anywhere on ICANN's website. ICM Registry, you will recall, was the applicant for the .xxx TLD, and due to interference by governments and some spinelessness by ICANN management ICANN's approval was reversed. ICM has chosen to become the first entity in history to attempt to use ICANN's Independent Review Process, something that ICANN touts as being a safeguard of its accountability but which some independent experts see as somewhat biased against the challenger. Sure, we don't expect ICANN to make a big deal about the challenge but we do think that its correspondence section, which contains virtually everyting sent to ICANN now, should post the notice of the IRP from the ICM Registry and that its ongoing front page news section should mention it.

Abstract: We are running out of Internet addresses. A newly released paper by the IGP evaluates address transfer policies that Internet governance agencies are considering as a response to the depletion of the IPv4 address space. The paper focuses on proposals to allow organizations holding IPv4 addresses to sell address blocks to other organizations willing to buy them. This paper analyzes the economics of the proposed transfer policies, and conducts a systematic comparison of the policies proposed in the three main world Internet regions.   more »

Some critics argue that a transfer market would slow down or harm the transition to IPv6. A transfer market, they say, might encourage organizations to consider purchasing more IPv4 addresses instead of firmly committing themselves to an IPv6 migration strategy. Note that this argument implicitly concedes that a transfer market would work. In this fourth installment we consider the effect of transfer markets on incentives to migrate to IPv6.    more »

At its Paris Board meeting two weeks ago, as ICANN passed its policy authorizing the creation of new generic top level domains, GAC spokesperson Janis Karklins expressed the governments’ concerns that not enough attention had been paid to promoting competition in the formulation of the policy. A reasonable and good sentiment, that. But wait: hasn’t the GAC also been insisting that existing country code top level domain monopolies be given new TLDs in any language scripts of their choosing? And didn’t GAC members also advocate that these new “internationalized” top level domains be handed to the incumbent ccTLD monopolies without being attached to any ICANN contract? Isn't this the same Janis Karklins who said in the same meeting that ccTLDs should get new multilingual TLDs “without any compulsory financial arrangements?” What kind of a competition policy is that?   more »

To the credit of the RIRs and their associated communities, the problem of IPv4 address depletion has led to some innovative policy proposals. Each of the three largest RIRs is considering proposals to permit market-based address transfers. In this third installment we conduct a systematic analysis of the proposals according to five key dimensions: 1) Trigger Date; 2) Territorial restrictions; 3) Eligibility restrictions/speculation controls; 4) Fees; and 5) Route Aggregation.   more »