The 9th Circuit issued its ruling in Coalition for ICANN Transparency v. VeriSign. It begins,

This appeal is about whether the plaintiff, Coalition for ICANN Transparency, Inc., using antitrust statutes drafted in the late 19th century, has successfully stated claims in connection with the administration of the Internet domain name system, so essential to the operation of our sophisticated 21st century communications network. The district court ruled that the plaintiff failed. With the benefit of extensive briefing, collegial discussions and amicus participation on appeal from other players in the domain name system, we hold that the plaintiff has stated claims under both Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C.

Congratulations to Bret Fausett who wrote a brief that deserved to win.

I'm also pleased to note that the court relied in a small but key part on an article I co-wrote with Mark Lemley:

CFIT has essentially alleged that ICANN is a private standards-setting body akin to the NFPA. ICANN administers the DNS and is responsible for entering into agreements with registry operators like VeriSign. According to the complaint, ICANN’s mission includes a commitment to promoting competition for the contracts. CFIT’s allegations further state that ICANN, like the NFPA, is a private body with no public accountability. These allegations are consistent with the view held by commentators on the subject, who have, indeed, identified Allied Tube as providing the strongest argument in favor of imposing antitrust liability on those who seek to coerce ICANN. See Michael Froomkin & Mark A. Lemley, ICANN and Antitrust, 1 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1, 72-73 (2003) (noting that "given ICANN’s private status, VeriSign will face antitrust liability for persuading a private company in a position of power to grant it control over a market," and naming Allied Tube as the "closest analogue"). We hold, therefore, that pursuant to The Supreme Court’s holding in Allied Tube, CFIT has adequately alleged that VeriSign’s improper coercion of ICANN and attempts to control ICANN’s operations in its own favor violated Section 2.

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I suspect this means that ICANN has finally noticed from my recent comments on the abolition of the reconsideration Committee that they have never appointed an Ombudsman, and have thus been in violation of their Bylaws. I don't know why they have finally noticed or decided to act.

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ICANN ignores Ed Hasbrouck because he's not very clubby. But I've yet to see a decent written debunking of his claims about the back-door way in which ICANN allocated .aero, or of his complaints about the failure to deal with his upset-the-apple-cart request for an independent review.

ICANN deals with him by ignoring him. Same old, same old.

I predict Ed's complaints about the renewal of .aero will receive the same treatment.

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See below for synopsis of the policy, which is intended to stop "domain tasting" (using the 5-day grace period to see if domain receives enough traffic to be profitable).

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ICANN has announced the new NomCom

Tricia Drakes - Chair
Alan Levin - Associate Chair
Hagen Hultzsch - Advisor to Chair (as previous Chair of the Nom Com)
Klaus Birkenbihl - TLG Group, W3C
Margarita Valdes Cortes - ccNSO Representative
Ute Decker - GNSO, Intellectual Property Constituency
Matias Altamira Gigena - ALAC, Latin American and Caribbean
Hartmut Glaser - Address Supporting Organization
Caroline Greer - GNSO, Registry Constituency
Jan Gruntorad - Higher Education Representative
Rob Hall - GNSO, Registrars Constituency
Ole Jacobsen - Internet Engineering Task Force
Rodney Joffe - Security and Stability Advisory Committee (non-voting liaison)
Norbert Klein - GNSO, Non-Commercial Users Constituency
Khaled Koubaa - ALAC, Africa
Phil Lodico - GNSO, Business Constituency (Large)
Bill Manning - Root Server System Advisory Committee (non-voting liaison)
Desiree Miloshevic - ALAC, Europe
Ross Rader - ALAC, North America
Greg Ruth - GNSO, Internet Service Providers Constituency
Liz Williams - GNSO, Business Constituency (Small)
Hong Zue - ALAC, Asia/Australia/Pacific Representative

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Dreamhost is a major US-based ISP with a somewhat irreverant blogging style. The latest blog entry, Crazy Domain Insane, discusses ICANN, new TLDs, domain name auctions, and more. Interesting to see it from another perspective.

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Milton Mueller at IGP in Does ICANN Still Keep Some Things Hidden?:

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.

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As far as I can remember, this is a first, and a very welcome one: Call for Expressions of Interest for 2009 Nominating Committee Chair.

In the past, the selection of the Chair has not only been opaque, but in at least one case -- the most recent one -- subject to serious chicanary from the staff which failed to inform the Board of a critical fact relating to the Chair's suitability for the post.

In the past, the Chair has always been an ICANN and/or IETF insider (and often a former Board member). That's not all that likely to change soon, but this is a good first step in that direction.

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for Russia to be assigned an Internet domain name in the Cyrillic script on Wednesday as part of a Kremlin drive to promote Russian as a global language. [...] "We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name—it is a pretty serious thing," Medvedev told the International Congress of Russian Press in Moscow. "It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic and it is not a bad sphere of cooperation. And I think we have a rather high chance of achieving such a decision in the Internet world." [...] Industry experts say Russia wants its domain name to be .rf—for Russian Federation—but written in the Cyrillic script.

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A Missouri college's decision to sub-let space on its .edu domain is drawing fire:

an online college in Missouri has started renting out blog space on its .edu domain to just about anyone willing to pay $50 a month. And the practice has quickly raised objections from college officials worried that such rentals undermine the .edu designation.

The college, the Pickering Institute, calls its service the "first public EDU blog community," and it touts the marketing value of having an Internet address that appears to be part of a college. "Our blogs allow you to reach an education-minded audience that is difficult to reach with mass-market blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot," says an announcement on the institute's Web site. So far, the blogs with the new .edu addresses include such noneducational offerings as "Handbags in Our Life," "Jewelry in Our Life," and "Get the Scoop." The institute is working with an Internet company called LinkAdage to offer the service.

Educase, the folks who run the .edu domain, say that this doesn't actually violate any rules, but they clearly don't like it and say they are investigating after receiving a complaint.

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[S]tarting in August 2006, Earthlink instead intercepts that Non-Existent Domain (NXDOMAIN) response and sends the IP address of ad-partner Barefruit's server as the answer. When the browser visits that page, the user sees a list of suggestions for what site the user might have actually wanted, along with a search box and Yahoo ads. The rub comes when a user is asking for a nonexistent subdomain of a real website, such as http://webmale.google.com, where the subdomain webmale doesn't exist.... In this case, the Earthlink/Barefruit ads appear in the browser....

[S]ubdomains are only as secure as Barefruit's servers, which turned out to be not very secure at all. Barefruit neglected basic web programming techniques, making its servers vulnerable to a malicious JavaScript attack. That meant hackers could have crafted special links to unused subdomains of legitimate websites that, when visited, would serve any content the attacker wanted. The hacker could, for example, send spam e-mails to Earthlink subscribers with a link to a webpage on money.paypal.com. Visiting that link would take the victim to the hacker's site, and it would look as though they were on a real PayPal page.

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