How do you describe an uneventful congressional hearing?
Yesterday the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing about the introduction of new top level domains. The session, lightly attended by senators, was a bit bland. But here are 8 possible headlines I could think of after watching yesterday.
Cybersquatters: they’re like pedophiles
Disney sues Congress over use of Mickey Mouse image in congressional hearing
New TLD hearing confused with whois policy discussion
ICANN speaks in threes
ICANN conveniently passes board resolutions in anticipation of congressional hearing
Senators have more important things to do than discuss new top level domains
ICANN really pissed at Peter Dengate-Thrush for making it answer questions about conflicts of interest
Congress appeases lobbyists by holding farce of a hearing
Any others?
Andrew Douglas says
Yeah, it seemed like there was some sort of connection everyone had made in their minds about how new TLDs were somehow making life easier for pedophiles and making it harder to catch them. Maybe if a bunch of pedo’s went in together to get .candy?? I was totally confused.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Andrew Douglas – maybe they caught word of a new .pedo domain
Kevin Murphy says
I think your last one is probably most accurate.
The “convenient resolutions” one is probably unfair. The board meeting has been scheduled since January and the referenced resolutions were basically put on the agenda in October.
Nice to have an ace up the sleeve though, I guess.
John Berryhill says
Senator Rockefeller’s comments, IMHO, suggested a fairly good grasp of reality, considering how far removed these folks are from the nuts and bolts of this stuff.
The “cybersquatters and pedophiles” thing was in the general context of observing that these things go on, new TLD’s or not, and that it was not clear to him why or how new TLD’s make those problems any worse. He seems used to the notion that every new thing will inevitably generate a reaction along the lines of “it’s the end of the world” from someone.
It’s easy to poke fun at Congresscritters for not knowing everything, so perhaps its just a matter of low expectations on my part but, again, they struck me as relatively well informed and engaged, despite missing some details (such as Sen. Ayotte’s apparent impression that the new TLD’s would launch in January 2012).
page howe says
– ICANN tells congress to stuff it, you might control the root, but you can’t tell us what to do with our process for getting 185k X 400, we’ll leave it up to the applicants to fight you later
– our original board was appointed and our staff worked for free, now our board has aspirers, people planning on getting payback for going to third world countries for 8 years and they want post ICANN bigtime jobs, weve got 100m in the bank go please dont bother us
– our acting intermim CEO is an affiliate marketer for tld consulting companies, can you please click our link
– if ICANN is so important how come the big three (APPLE, GOOGLE, FACEBOOK) dont even interact with them
– hey can we get in on some of that TLD booty to help fund the deficit..