About ten days ago the US Commerce Department sent ICANN a letter slapping it upside the head for suggesting in its President's Strategy Committee report that the US might actually keep its 1998 promise to turn over root zone file to ICANN/IANA. On August 1, Commerce sent ICANN another letter, warning ICANN that it had better continue to allow unrestricted public access to personal information in the Whois database. Specifically, it made its opposition known to ICANN's proposed legalization of services that offer domain name registrants some shield against the indiscriminate display of their personal data to anyone in the world who wants it. This letter, too, was part of a public comment period on proposed changes in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. These letter speak to a shift in relations between the USG and ICANN, one that is in some ways encouraging, but also potentially very dangerous as well.   more »

The FBI is soliciting vendor proposals to provide one-stop, turn-key access to Internet Zone files, domain WHOIS and DNS records. Posted July 22, with responses due yesterday, the solicitation details a system that would aggregate the data and provide it to the FBI for up to the next 5 years. On one hand, the open nature of the DNS makes this request mostly just a large data collection exercise, but it has some interesting wrinkles with respect to its scope and selection process, as well as implications for civil liberties.   more »

Alexa Raad, CEO of Public Interest Registry, and Dr. Milton Mueller, Professor and Chair of the Noncommercial Users Constituency, released a joint statement on Internationalized domain names (IDNs) today. In a letter to ICANN's CEO Paul Twomey, Raad and Mueller expressed concerns about the potential for governments to link non-ASCII script domain names to policies that restrict or control Internet access. "The deployment of Internationalized Domain Names (“IDN”) should be seen as a technical measure to allow for multi-lingual use of the internet, and not used as a tool by governments to control access, impose censorship or limit freedom of expression online," the statement read. Click "read more" to see the full statement.   more »

Does who signs the IGF invitation mean a change in priority? That the invitation to IGF 2008 was signed by the USG-DESA does not reflect more than a change in protocol and may reflect a greater institutional commitment by the UN to Internet governance issues.   more »